Fig tree, how long it has been full meaning for me,

the way you almost entirely omit to flower

and into the seaonably-resolute fruit

uncelebratedly thrust your purest secret.

Like the tube of a fountain, your bent bough drives the sap

downwards and up: and it leaps from its sleep, scarce waking,

into the joy of its sweetest achievement. Look,

like Jupiter into the swan.

… But we, we linger,

alas, we glory in flowering; already betrayed

we reach the retarded core of our ultimate fruit.

In few the pressure of action rises so strongly

that already they’re stationed and glowing in fulness of heart,

when, seductive as evening air, the temptation to flower,

touching the youth of their mouths, touching their eyelids, appears:

only in heroes, perhaps, and those marked for early removal,

those in whom gardening Death has differently twisted the veins.

These go plunging ahead: preceding their own

victorious smile, as the team of horse in the mildly-

moulded reliefs of Karnak the conquering King.

Yes, the Hero is strangely akin to the youthfully-dead. Continuance

doesn’t concern him. His rising existence. Time and again

he takes himself off and enters the changed constellation

his changeless peril has assumed. There few could find him. But Fate,

who deals so darkly with us, enraptured all of a sudden,

sings him into the storm of her roaring world.

None do I hear like him. There suddenly rushing through me,

borne by the streaming air, his dull-thunderous tone.

And then how gladly I’d hide from the longing: oh would,

would that I were a boy and might come to it yet, and be sitting,

propped upon arms still to be, and reading of Samson,

how his mother at first bore nothing, and, afterwards, all.

Was he not hero already, within you, O mother, and did not

his lordly choice being there, already, within you?

Thousands were brewing in the womb and trying to be he,

but, look! he seized and discarded, chose and was able to do.

And if ever he shattered columns, that was the time, when he burst

out of the world of your body into the narrower world,

where he went on choosing and doing. O mothers of heroes!

Sources of ravaging rivers! Gorges wherein,

from high on the heart’s edge, weeping,

maids have already plunged, victims—to be for the son.

For whenever the Hero stormed through the halts of love,

each heart beating for him could only lift him beyond it:

turning away, he’d stand at the end of the smiles—another.