Not wooing, no longer shall wooing, voice that has outgrown it,
be now the form of your cry; though you cried as pure as the bird
when the surging season uplifts him, almost forgetting
he is merely a fretful creature and not just a single heart
she is tossing to brightness, to intimate azure. No less
than he, you, too, would be wooing some silent companion
to feel you, as yet unseen, some mate in whom a reply
was slowly awaking and warming itself as she listened,—
your own emboldened feeling’s glowing fellow-feeling.
Oh, and Spring would understand—not a nook would fail
to re-echo annunciation. Re-echoing first the tiny
questioning pipe a purely affirmative day
quietly invests all round with magnifying stillness.
Then the long flight of steps, the call-steps, up to the dreamt-of
temple of what is to come;—then the trill, that fountain
caught as it rises by falling, in promiseful play,
for another thrusting jet … And before it, the Summer!
Not only all the summer dawns, not only
the way they turn into day and shine before sunrise.
Not only the days, so gentle round flowers, and, above,
around the configured trees, so mighty and strong.
Not only the fervour of these unfolded forces,
not only the walks, not only the evening meadows,
not only, after late thunder, the breathing clearness,
not only, with evening, sleep coming, and something surmised …
No, but the nights as well! the lofty, the summer
nights,—but the stars as well, the stars of the earth!
Oh, to be dead at last and endlessly know them,
all the stars! For how, how, how to forget them!
Look, I’ve been calling the lover. But not only she
would come … Out of unwithholding graves
girls would come and gather … For how could I limit
the call I had called? The sunken are always seeking
earth again.—You children, I’d say, a single
thing comprehended here is as good as a thousand.
Don’t think Destiny is more than what is packed into childhood.
How often you’d overtake the beloved, panting,
panting for blissful career, without end, into freedom!
Life here is glorious! Even you knew it, you girls,
who went without, as it seemed, sank under,—you, in the vilest
streets of cities, festering, or open for refuse.
For to each was granted an hour,—perhaps not quite
so much as an hour—some span that could scarcely be measured
be measures of time, in between two whiles, when she really
possessed an existence. All. Veins full of existence.
But we so lightly forget what our laughing neighbour
neither confirms nor envies. We want to be visibly
able to show it, whereas the most visible joy
can only reveal itself to us when we’ve transformed it, within.
Nowhere, beloved, can world exist but within.
Life passes in transformation. And, ever diminishing,
vanishes what is outside. Where once was a lasting house,
up starts some invented structure across our vision, as fully
at home among concepts as though it still stood in a brain.
Spacious garners of power are transformed by the Time Spirit, formless
as that tense urge he is extracting from everything else.
Temples he knows no longer. We are now more secretly saving
such lavish expenses of heart. Nay, even where one survives,
one single thing once prayed or tended or knelt to,
it is reaching, just as it is, into the unseen world.
Many perceive it no more, but neglect the advantage
of building it grandlier now, with pillars and statues, within!
Each torpid turn of the world has such disinherited children,
to whom no longer what has been, and not yet what is coming, belongs.
For the nearest, next coming, is remote for mankind. Though this
shall not confuse us, shall rather confirm us in keeping
still recognisable form. This stood once among mankind,
in the midst of not-knowing-whither, as though it existed, and bowed
stars from established heavens towards it. Angel,
I’ll show it to you as well—there! In your gaze
it shall stand redeemed at last, in a final uprightness.
Pillars, pylons, the Sphinx, all the striving thrust,
grey, from fading or foreign town, of the spire!
Wasn’t all this a miracle? Angel, gaze, for it is we—
O mightiness, tell them that we were capable of it—my breath is
too short for this celebration. So, after all, we have not
failed to make use of the spaces, these generous spaces, these,
our spaces. (How terribly big they must be,
when, with thousands of years of our feeling, they’re not over-crowded.)
But a tower was great, was it not? Oh, Angel, it was, though,—
even compared with you? Chartres was great—and music
towered still higher and passed beyond us. Why, even
a girl in love, alone, at her window, at night …
did she not reach to your knee?
Don’t think that I’m wooing!
Angel, even if I were, you’d never come. For my call
is always full of ‘Away!’ Against such a powerful
current you cannot advance. Like an outstretched
arm is my call. And its clutching, upwardly
open hand is always before you
as open for warding and warning,
aloft there, Inapprehensible.