Rainer Maria Rilkes The Duino Elegies translated by Louis Hammer and Sharon Ann Jaeger Old Chatham:

Sachem Press. 1991. THE FIRST ELEGY If I did cry out, who would hear me through the Angel Orders? and suppose one of them suddenly pulled me to his heart: Id dissolve beside his stronger existence. For beautys nothing but the start of that terror we can just manage to bear, and were fascinated by it because it serenely scorns to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying. So I discipline myself and swallow the siren call of dark sobs. Then whom can we turn to? Not angels, not men, and the shrewd beasts have already noticed that were not very securely at home in our decoded world. Perhaps we have left a certain tree on a hillside that we can see day after day; we still have yesterdays road and the spoiled faithfulness of a habit that liked us and then settled in and never went away. O and the night, the night when the wind full of world space feeds on our facesis there anyone it wouldnt stay for, that one we longed for, the one who quietly disillusions, whose suffering waits for the lonely heart? Is the night easier on lovers? But all they do with one another is hide their fate from themselves. You mean you still dont know? Fling the emptiness from your arms into that space we breathe; then maybe the birds will feel the air grow open in more penetrating flight. Yes, each Spring really needed you. Many stars expected you to notice them. A wave rose up toward you from the past, or as you went by an open window a violin offered itself to you. All that was your task. But were you equal to it? Werent you always distracted by hope, as if all this heralded for you a lover? (Where do you intend to conceal her, as all those great strange thoughts go in and out of you and often stay overnight?) When longing comes over you, sing of lovers; their celebrated passion is far from immortal enough. Those you almost envied, the forsaken ones, whom you found so much more loving than those who were fulfilled. Each time anew begin the praise never to be achieved. Think: the hero sustains himself, even his destruction was only an excuse for being, his ultimate birth. But nature, exhausted, takes back lovers

into herself, as if she hadnt enough power to accomplish it twice: Have you considered Gaspara Stampa sufficiently, so that some girl abandoned by her lover may feel, from this intensified example: If only I could be like her! Shouldnt these oldest of sufferings be more fruitful for us by now? Isnt it time that we should lovingly free ourselves from the beloved and endure it with trembling: as the arrow endures the string, focused in its release to be more than itself? Because nowhere can remaining be. Voices, voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened, so that some gigantic cry lifted them off the ground; they just kept kneeling, these impossible creatures, and paid no attention. Thats how hard they were listening. Not that you could hear the voice of Godfar from it. But listen to what is carried on waves, to the incessant message that forms out of the stillness. A rustling comes toward you now from those who died young. Whenever you entered a church in Rome or in Naples didnt their fate always serenely speak to you? Or an inscription sublimely force itself upon you as did that tablet recently in Santa Maria Formosa? What do you want from me? Just that I gently remove the look of being wronged that sometimes hinders a little the pure motion of their spirits. Its certainly strange not to live on earth anymore, no longer to practice the customs one was just starting to learn, not to give the meaning of a human future to roses and other things that seemed to promise just that, no longer to be everything you used to be in infinitely anxious hands, and even to leave behind your own name like a broken toy. Its strange not to keep wishing your own wishes. Strange to see all that used to cohere so loosely fluttering in space. And being dead is troublesome; it is full of catching up until you gradually sense a few traces of eternity. Yes, but the living all make the same mistake: they draw distinctions too sharply. Its said that angels often cant tell whether theyre traveling among the living or the dead. The eternal current sweeps all ages along through both realms and drowns out their voices in both. In the end, those who went prematurely dont need us anymore. Were weaned from the earth just as gently as we tenderly outgrow our mothers breast. But we who require such great mysteries, for whom blessed progress so often springs from deep sorrow; could we exist without them?

Is that story to no purpose, that once in mourning for Linos, the daring first music broke the arid numbness, so that in the first frightened space which an almost godlike youth suddenly deserted forever, the emptiness began those vibrations that now charm us and comfort and help.

THE SECOND ELEGY Every angel is terrifying. But, alas, I sing to you, almost deadly birds of the soul, knowing all about you. Where are the days of Tobias when one of the most radiant of you stood at the simple front door a bit disguised for his trip and almost no longer frightening; (looking young to the young man as he peeked out curiously). If the Archangel, the dangerous one behind the stars, took one step now down towards us, our own hearts, leaping high upward, would kill us. Who are you? Among the first to be made perfect, creations spoiled darlings, mountain ranges, dawn-lit peaks of all creationpollen of the blossoming godhead, hinges of light, hallways, stairways, thrones, spaces of being, shields of rapture, storms raging with enchanted feeling and, suddenly separate, mirrors: each drawing its own streaming beauty back into its face. Whenever we really feel, we vanish; oh we exhale ourselves and disappear; from emberglow to emberglow our smell keeps getting fainter. Someone may say to us: Youve got into my blood, this room, the spring is filling up with you What good is it? He cant hold us. We vanish in him and around him. And those who are beautiful, oh, who can hold them back? Appearance unceasingly comes and goes on their faces. Like dew from the morning grass or like steam from a hot dish, what is most our own draws away from us. O smile, where are you going? O upturned glace: new, warm disappearing wave of the heart; O, alas, we are all that. Does that world space we dissolve in taste of us? Do the angels actually collect only their own outpouring or, maybe by mistake, is a little of our own being included, too? Are we mixed into their lineaments only as much as that vague look on a pregnant womans face? But thats something they dont notice in their whirling back into themselves. (How should they notice?) If they could be understood, lovers might say such strange things in the night air. Because it seems that everything conceals us. Look, the trees really are;

the houses where we live are still standing. But we pass by all of them like an exchange of air. And everything unites in keeping silent about us, half out of shame, perhaps, and half out of some ineffable hope. Lovers, satisfied with one another, I ask you about us. You hug each other. Wheres your proof? See, it happens to me that my hands become aware of one another or that my much-used face takes refuge in them. Then I feel a slight sensation. But who would venture to exist just because of that? You, though, who grow each in the others ecstasy until, overwhelmed, you beg: No more! you, who in each others hands grow richer, just like vintage years; you, who sometimes disappear, but only when the other has taken over completely; I ask you about us. I know why you touch with such bliss: because the caress keeps in check. That place that you cover with such tenderness doesnt vanish; because beneath it you can feel pure duration. You promise yourselves eternity almost from that embrace alone. And yet when youve survived the terror of that first look and the longing at the window and the first walk you took together, just one time through the garden: lovers, is that what you still are? When you lift yourselves to each others lips and begindrink for drink: O how strangely then the drinker sheds his act. Didnt the restraint of human gestures on Attic steles amaze you? Werent love and parting placed so lightly on shoulders that they seemed to be made of some other stuff than we are? Remember the hands, how they reset without pressure, though the torsos are powerful. The self-possessed knew this: we can go only so far. We can touch each other only like this. The gods can press down on us more forcefully. But thats the gods affair. If only we could find some pure, contained and narrow human strip of fruitful land that was really our own, between stream and rock. Because our own heart reaches past us just as those did. And we can no longer follow it in images that soothe it or in godlike bodies where it achieves an even greater restraint. THE THIRD ELEGY Its one thing to sing about someone you love. But another thing entirely to sing that hidden guilty river-god of the blood. That one she knows only from a distance, her lover, what can he say about the lord of passion who, often out of his solitude, before she could comfort him, often as though she didnt exist, oh, dripping with what unrecognizable substance, raised his godhead,

inciting the night to endless uproar? O the Neptune of the blood, O his terrible trident! O the dark wind of his breast from the twisted shell! Listen, the night hollows and deepens itself. You stars, doesnt the lover get his desire for the beloveds face from you? Doesnt his intimate insight into her pure face come from the pure stars? No, it wasnt you and it wasnt his mother who bent his brows into the bow of expectancy. Its not for you, girl, though you happen to feel him now, not for you that his lips bend into more fruitful expression. Do you really think your gently approach could convulse him like that, as you wander like the spring breeze? Its true, you frightened his heart; but more ancient terrors rushed into him through your touch brushing his skin. Call himyou cant quite call him away from that dark company. Yes, of course he wants to and does escape; unburdened, he makes himself at home in your secret heart, receives and begins himself. But did he ever begin himself? Mother, you made him small, it was you who began him; he was new to you, you arched the friendly world over his new eyes and kept out whatever was strange. Yes, where have the years gone when simply with your slender figure you held back the bubbling chaos? That way you concealed so much from him; you rendered harmless the room that became so suspicious at night, out of your heart full of refuge you mixed human space with his nightspace. No, you placed the nightlight not in the darkness but in your own nearer presence, and it shone as if out of friendship. There wasnt a creak you couldnt explain with a smile as if youd known for a long time exactly when the floor would act up And he listened and was soothed. Thats how much your tender act of rising could achieve. Behind the wardrobe stepped his towering destiny wrapped in a cloak, and his restive future, which shifted slightly, fit neatly into the folds of the curtain. And he himself, as he lay there relieved, mingling under his droopy lids the sweetness of your deft form with the foretaste of approaching sleep he seemed protectedBut inside: who would divert or restrain himself within him the flood of his origin? Oh, there was no caution in that sleeper; sleeping, dreaming, but feverish, what adventures he began! So new, so shy, how he got tangled in the death-spreading tendrils of inward events already entwined into patterns, into strangling growth, into preying animal-like forms. How he surrendered himself! Loved. Loved his inmost self, his most inward wilderness, that primeval forest in him, on whose mute dilapidation

his heart stood pale-green. Loved. Then left, going out from his own roots into that powerful beginning where his own little birth was already outlived. Loving, he climbed into the more ancient blood, into the abysses where the Terrifying lay still gorged with his ancestors. And each horrible thing knew him and winked as if in mutual understanding. Yes, the dreadful thing smiled at him. Rarely, mother, did you smile at him so tenderly. And how could he help loving something that smiled at him? He loved it before he loved you; when you carried him it was already dissolved in the fluid that keeps the embryo afloat. Look, we dont love like flowers, out of a single year; when we love, a sap earlier than memory climbs into our arms. Oh, girl, heres how it is: inside us weve loved not one person wholl be there in the future but innumerable fermenting: not a single child but fathers who rest in our depths like rubbled mountains and the dry riverbed of earlier mothers and all that soundless landscape under its cloudy or clear doom: Girl, all this came before you. And you yourself, what do you know? Youve stirred up prehistoric time in your lover. What feelings welling up from beings already departed! What women hated you! What sort of sinister men could you waken in his youthful veins? Dead children were trying to reach youOh gently, gently, do something dear for him, a reliable days work lead him toward the garden, give him the nights superabundance. Hold him back THE FOURTH ELEGY O trees of life, O whens winters sleep? Were not attuned. Were not instinctive like migratory birds. Outdistanced and late we suddenly impose ourselves on the wind and drop down onto an indifferent pond. Were conscious of blooming and withering alike. And somewhere lions still roam; and being majestic are ignorant of weakness. We, though, when were fully intent on one thing, can already feel the expending of the other. Hostilitys whats closest to us. Arent lovers always impinging on one anothers territory while promising each other freedom, hunt, and homeland? There for a moments sketch a contrasting background is carefully prepared

so well see it, for everythings made very clear for us. We cant tell the contour of our feeling, but only what forms it from outside. Who hasnt sat anxiously before the curtain of his heart? Up it went: the scenery said farewell. Easy to understand. The familiar garden, slightly swaying. Only then the dancer came. Not him. Enough! However graceful he pretends to be hes in disguise and turns into a plain bourgeois who enters his own house through the kitchen. Ill have nothing to do with those half-filled masks, Id prefer a doll. It has substance. Ill put up with its skins and its wire and its face made of appearance. Here I am, out in front. Even if the lights go out and even if Im told: Thats all there is,even if emptiness drifts from the stage in grey drafts, even if none of my silent ancestors will sit next to me any longer, not a single woman, not even the boy with the brown cross-eye: Ill stay anyhow. One can always watch. Dont you think Im right? You who found life around me tasted so bitter, sampling mine, Father, the first turbid infusion of my necessity, as I continued growing and kept on tasting, and who, fascinated by the aftertaste of such a strange future, tested out my clouded gaze, you, my father, who, so often since you died have been afraid within my own hope, and for the sake of my bit of destiny surrendered those kingdoms of serenity which the dead possess: And you, dont you think Im right all of you who loved me for that little beginning of love for you, from which I always strayed, because the space in your faces, even as I loved it, turned into world space in which you no longer existed, when Im in the mood to wait before the puppet stage, no, rather to stare at it so intently that at last an angel must come as an actor to offset my staring and lift high the stuffed skins. Angel and doll: at last a real play. Then what we always divide by our very being there gets put together. Only then the cycle of all change can spring from our seasons. Then the angel will perform over and above us. Look at the dying,. surely they suspect how full of pretense is all that we accomplish here. Nothing is itself. O the hours of childhood

when behind the figures there was more than just the past and the future didnt stand before us yet. We grew, of course, and we were eager sometimes to be grownup instantly, partly for the sake of those who had nothing else except being grownup. And yet in our solitary going the permanent satisfied us and we stood in the interval between world and toy on a place which from the outset had been prepared for a pure event. Who shows a child as he really is? Who places him in his constellation and puts the measure of distance in his hand? Who makes the death of a child out of grey bread that hardensor leaves it inside in the rounded mouth like the core of a lovely apply?....Murderers are easy to explain. But this: to contain death, all of death, so gently even before youve lived and not get angry, thats beyond all description. THE FIFTH ELEGY Dedicated to Frau Hertha Koenig But tell me, who are they, these itinerant acrobats, a little more transient even than we are, whove been pressed from early childhood by the wringing of an insatiable will for whose, oh for whose sake? Still it wrings them, bends them, slings them and swings them, flings them and catches them again; they fall as if through oiled and glossier air onto a carpet made threadbare by their perpetual tumbling, this carpet lost in the universe. Applied like a bandaid as if the surburban sky had injured the earth there. And barely there, upright, depicting the huge capital D of Dastehn (the being there of everything)the strongest men get rolled once more in fun by that everreturning grip, just as Augustus the Strong at the dinner table rolled up a pewter plate. Oh, around this center the rose of spectatorship blooms and sheds its petals. Around this pestle, the pistil, struck by its own blooming pollen, impregnated once more to yield the false fruit of aversion, that aversion theyre

not aware offlashing with the thinnest surface of a faint smirk. And still, blindly, the smile. Angel! O take it, pluck it, that tiny-flowered healing herb. Find a vase, preserve it. Put it among those joys still not open to us; in a lovely urn praise it with a flowery and lofty inscription: Subrisio Saltat. You then, dear girl, you whom the most exquisite pleasures silently leapt over. Perhaps the fringes of your costume are happy for you or over your young, taut breasts the green metallic silk feels that its pampered infinitely and in need of nothing. You, continually varying like the imperturbable fruit laid out for sale in the market on all the wavering scales of balance, open to view below the shoulders. Where, O where is the placeI carry it in my heart where they were still far from proficient and fell away from each other like mating animals badly paired where the weights are still heavy, where the plates still totter off of staves whirling futilely? And suddenly in this troublesome nowhere, suddenly the indescribable place, where the pure Too-Little mysteriously changesflips around into that empty Too-Much where the account loaded with figures balances out. Squares, O square in Paris, infinite showplace, where the milliner, Madame Lamort, twists and winds the restless roads of the earth, those endless ribbons, and invents from them new bows, ruffles, flowers, cockades, artificial fruits, all falsely colored for the cheap winter hats of fate. . Angel: could there be a place we know nothing about and there, on an indescribable carpet lovers could exhibit everything

they cant manage here: their daring high figures made of heart-swings, their towers of desire, their ladders, not placed on any ground, which lean for the longest time only on one another and trembleand what if they could carry it off before those rings of spectators, the countless silent dead: Would the dead then throw their coins of bliss those coins that were saved forever, hidden forever, unknown to us and eternally validto that pair whose smile finally became genuine out on the motionless carpet?

THE SIXTH ELEGY Fig tree, how long its had meaning for me, the way you almost entirely skip blossoming and then, without fanfare, press your purest secret into fruit that are determined at exactly the right moment. Like the pipe of a fountain your curved branches drive the sap downward and upward; and it jumps up from sleep, hardly awake, into the joy of its sweetest achievement. See, like the god into the swan. We linger, though. Were praised for blooming, and we enter, already betrayed, into the belated core of our final fruit. In a few the surge of action rises so strongly that theyre already lined up and glowing with full hearts, when the temptation to bloom, like the softened night air, touches the youth of their mouths, touches their eyelids: heroes perhaps, and those destined to die early, whose veins Death, the gardener, has twisted differently they plunge ahead, preceding their own smiles as the team of horses precedes the conquering king in the gentle, hollowed reliefs at Karnak. The hero is strangely close to those who die young. Survivals no concern of his. His ascent is being; steadily he continues onward and enters the changed constellation of his unending danger. Few could find him there. But fate, that hides us in darkness, suddenly enraptured, sings him into the tempest of its onrushing world. I dont hear anyone else like him. All of a sudden his darkened tone passes through me with the flowing breeze. Then how Id gladly hide from this longing. Oh, if only, if only I were a boy and might still come to be and sat propped on those arms yet to come and read of Samson, how his mother bore first nothing and then everything. O mother, wasnt he already hero inside you,

and didnt his imperious choice begin there inside you? Thousands hatched in the womb and wanted to be him, but see, he seized and let go, chose and prevailed. And if ever he crushed pillars, it was when he broke loose from the world of your body into the narrower world, where he continued to choose and prevail. O mothers of heroes, O source of ravaging rivers. Ravines into which wailing maidens, the sons future sacrificial victims, have already plunged from the hearts high rim. For whenever the hero stormed through sojourns of love each heartbeat meant for him lifted him beyond. Already turned away, he stood at the end of the smiles, transformed. THE SEVENTH ELEGY Dont let wooing be the nature of your cry anymore, no, not wooing, O outgrown voice, though its true you could call as pure as a bird when the rising season lifts it, nearly forgetting its an afflicted creature and not just a single heart, which she flings into the brightness, into the intimate skies. Youd woo as well as the bird, no lessso that your still invisible friend would come to know you, she so tranquil, in whom a reply slowly awakens and warms itself in listening, becoming the glowing partner of your emboldened feeling. Oh, and the spring would understandTheres no place that wouldnt carry the note of annunciation. First, the tiny questioning sound which a pure affirming day surrounds with increasing stillness. Then, up the stairs, up the steps of the cry, to the dreamed-of temple of the futurethen the trill, the fountain, which already anticipates descent for the surging jets in tantalizing playAnd ahead of it, the summer. Not only all the summer dawnsnot only the way they turn into day and are radiant with beginning. Not only the days which are delicate around flowers while being strong and imposing around the shaped trees. Not only the devotion of these unfolded forces, not only the paths, not only the evening meadows, not only the breathing clarity that follows a late thunderstorm, not only the approaching sleep and a foreboding, in the evening But the nights! But the high summer nights, but the stars, the stars of the earth. O someday to be dead and to know them infinitely, all the stars: then how, how, how to forget! Look I might call my beloved. But she wouldnt come all by herselfGirls would come out of the frail graves and stand thereor how could I limit the call, once madehow? The buried are always still searching for earth.You children, a single thing once acquired here could count for many.

Dont believe that fate is more than childhoods density. How often did you outrun your lover, panting, panting after a blissful race, going nowhere, except into the open. To be here is magnificent. You knew it, girls, you, too, who seemed to have missed it, you who sank in the worst streets of the cities, festering or exposed to filth. For each one was given an hourperhaps not quite an hour, a period between two durations, that could hardly be gauged with the measures of time when she had real existence. Everything. The veins filled with existence. But we forget so easily whatever our laughing neighbor neither confirms nor envies. We want to be able to show it visibly, although the most perceptible joy makes itself visible only when we transform it within. Theres nowhere, my love, where the world will ever be, but within Our life passes in change. And the outside world, always diminishing, fades away. Where once an enduring house stood, an invented structure insinuates itself, so completely fitting the imaginable as if it stood entirely in the mind. The Zeitgeist creates cast granaries of power, shapeless as the tensed impulse it extracts from everything. Its no longer acquainted with temples. More and more furtively we save this extravagance of the heart. Yes, whenever one thing still endures, a thing once prayed to, served and knelt before it reaches, just as it is, into the unseen world. Many dont perceive it anymore and miss the chance now of building it so much greater, with columns and statues, within. Each oppressive change of the world brings those who are so disinherited that they possess neither whats already happened nor whats to come. For the imminent, too, for human beings, is far. This shouldnt confuse us; let it strengthen in us the preservation of a form we still can recognize. This stood among men at one time, stood in the midst of fate, destructive fate, in the midst of Not-Knowing-Where-To it stood, as if existing, and bent down stars to itself out of the secured skies. Angel, Ive still got you to show it tothere! in your gaze its at last redeemed, finally standing up straight. Pillars, pylons, the Sphinx, the grey aspiring thrust of the cathedral rising from some vanished or alien city. Wasnt it a miracle? O Angel, be amazed, for its we, we, O mighty one; say that we were capable of it, my breaths inadequate for this praise. So then we havent neglected these spaces, these ample spaces that are ours. (How terribly vast they must be inasmuch as millenniums of our feeling have not filled them to overflowing.) But a tower was great, wasnt it? O Angel, it really was even compared with you. Chartres was greatand music reached even higher, surpassing us. But even

a lover alone at her window at night didnt she reach to your know? Dont think Im wooing you. And, Angel, even if I were, you wouldnt come. Because my call is always full of Get away. Against so powerful a current you cant make headway. My call is like an outstretched arm. And its grasping hand, upturned and open, remains before you, like defense and warning. Incomprehensible being, spread wide open.

THE EIGHTH ELEGY Dedicated to Rudolf Kassner With all its eyes the animal looks out into the Open. Only our eyes are as if reversed and set like traps entirely around it, encircling its free exit. We know whats beyond only from the animals face; for even the child, while hes still young, we turn around and compel to look backwards at configuration, not at the openness which is so deep in the animals face. Free from death. Were the only ones who see death; the free animal has its destruction continually behind it and God in front of it, and when it passes on, it goes into eternity just as fountains do. Its we who never have, even for a single day, pure space ahead of us in which the flowers endlessly unfold. Its always world and never Nowhere without negation; the pure unguarded thing which you breathe and know infinitely and dont crave; as a child you get lost in it, in stillness, and you have to be shaken from it. Or someone dies and is it. Once youre close to death you wont see death anymore and you stare out, perhaps with an animals great glance. If it were not for the other who blocks the viewlovers are near to it and are amazed As if by oversight it opens up to them behind the otherbut no one gets beyond the other and again the world takes over. Always turned toward the creation, we see in it only the mirroring of the open, obscured by ourselves. Or that a mute animal glancing up, calmly looks through us. This is whats called destiny: to be opposites and nothing else and opposite forever. If the secure animal approaching us

in the other direction had our sort of consciousnessit would pull us around with the change in it. But to itself its being is infinite, unpenetrated and blind to its own condition, pure, like its outward gaze. And where we see the future, there it sees everything, and itself in everything, and forever healed. And yet, in the watchful warm-blooded animal theres the weight and care of a great sadness. For something clings to him, too, which often overpowers usmemory, as if whatever we want the most had once already been closer, more faithful, and its attachment infinitely tender. Here everything is separation, and there it was breathing. After the first homeland the second seems to him ambiguous and windswept. O blessedness of the tiny creature always remaining in the womb that bore it; O happiness of the gnat, which still leaps within, even on its wedding-day: for womb is everything. And see the half-certainty of the bird almost aware of both since its origin like an Etruscan soul springing from a dead man, contained in a space which uses his own resting figure as a lid. And how dismayed is the creature who, though begun in a womb, still has to fly. AS if frightened by itself, it flashes through the air, like a crack through a cup, just as the bats trail tears through the porcelain of the evening. And we: spectators, always, everywhere, turned toward everything and never beyond! It fills us to overflowing. We set it straight. It disintegrates. We set it straight again and disintegrate ourselves. Whos turned us around this way, then, so that no matter what we do, were always in the position of one who leaves? Just as someone on the last hill, which shows him once more the whole of his valley, turns around, stops, lingers so we live and are forever taking our leave.

THE NINTH ELEGY Why, if its possible to spend the term of existence as laurel, a little darker than all other green, with small waves on each leaf-edge (like a winds smile)why, then,

do we have to be humanand while dodging destiny, still long for it?... Oh, not because theres happiness, that rash profit of approaching loss. Not out of curiosity, or just to exercise the heart; that could happen in the laurel, too But because being here amounts to so much, and because it seems that everything thats here, this transience, needs us and strangely involves us. Us, the most transitory of all. Only one time, everything, only one time. Once and no more. And we too only once. Never again. But to have been even this one time, even if only one time: to have existed here on earth, that seems irrevocable. And so we press on and try to achieve it, try to encompass it in our simple hands, in our overloaded glance and in our speechless heart. Try to become it. To give it to whom? Wed prefer to keep all of it foreverBut what are we allowed to take into the other dimension? Not our way of perceiving, learned her so slowly, and not anything thats happened. Nothing. The pains, then. Above all the heaviness of being, the prolonged experience of love and the purely unutterable. But later, under the stars, what good is it: theyre more unutterable yet. For the wanderer doesnt bring down from the mountains slope into the valley a handful of earth thats ineffable, but a word hes acquired, a pure one, the yellow and blue gentian. Maybe were here in order to say: house, bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window at most: pillar, towerbut to say them, do you understand, oh, to say them in such a way as even the things themselves inwardly never intended to be. Isnt it the secret cunning of this reticent earth that it urges lovers to bring everything to rapture in their feeling? Threshold: What does it amount to for two lovers to wear down a little more their own worn threshold, they too, following the many before, preceding the many to comeeffortlessly. Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home. Speak up and testify. The things we can experience are falling away more than ever; and what shoves them aside and replaces them is an act without image. An act beneath crusts that will easily tear, as soon as the action within enlarges and finds other limits. Our heart endures between the hammers as the tongue endures between the teeth and in spite of everything continues to praise. Praise the world to the angelnot the unutterable; you

cant impress him with your magnificent emotions. In the universe where he feels things so much more deeply, youre just a novice. So show him something simple, shaped in successive generations, that lives as our possession, close at hand and in our sight. Tell him of things. Hell be more astonished, just as you were next to the ropemaker in Rome or the potter by the Nile. Show him how joyful a thing can be, how innocent and how much ours, how even lamenting sorrow resolves purely into form, serves as a thing or dies in a thingand over there blissfully rises from the violin. And these things, that live by perishing, understand that youre praising them; transitory, they rely on us for salvation, on us, the most transitory. They want us to transform them completely inside our invisible hearts intooh infinitelyinto ourselves whoever we finally may be. Earth, isnt this what you want: to arise invisibly in us? Isnt it your dream one day to be invisible?Earth! Invisible! What is your urgent commandment, if not transformation? O dear Earth, I will. Believe me, it wouldnt require more of your springtimes to win me overone, oh, a single one, is already too much for the blood. Im utterly resolved to be yours from afar. You were always right and your most sacred notion is death as intimate friend. Look, Im alive. On what? Neither childhood nor the future diminishes..Overflowing being springs up in my heart.

THE TENTH ELEGY That someday at the close of this grim vision I may sing jubilation and praise to assenting angels. Let not one of the hearts clearly struck hammers fail because of weak, doubting or breaking strings. That my streaming face may make me more radiant; that an unpretentious weeping may bloom. Then how dear youll become to me, nights touched with grief. Why didnt I kneel and accept you, inconsolable sisters, why didnt I unwind more easily into your unwound hair? We, wasters of sorrows. How we stare into the dreary duration beyond them to foresee if perhaps they might end. Yet they are simply our winter foliage; our dark evergreen, one of the seasons of our secret yearnot only seasonbut place, settlement, camp, soil, dwelling. Strange, indeed, are the streets of the City of Pain,

where in the counterfeit silence made of cacophony, spoutings from the mold of the void swagger powerfully, the gilded uproar, the exploding monument. O how thoroughly an angel would obliterate the Comfort Market, with the church next door, bought ready-made: as immaculate, shut and disappointed as a post office on Sunday. Outside, though, theres always the curling fringe of the Fair. Swings of freedom! High-divers and jugglers of eagerness! And the metaphorical shooting-range of dolled-up luck where a target wiggles like a tin when a better shot hits it. He staggers on from applause to good luck; booths appealing to every kind of curiosity advertise, drum, and blare. For adults only, however, something special to see: how money reproduces, anatomically, not just for amusement: moneys genitalia, all, the whole thing, the act itselfits instructive and increases futility. .Oh, but immediately beyond it, behind the last billboard plastered with posters of Deathless, that bitter beer that tastes so sweet to its drinkers, just in back of the billboards, right behind them, its real. Children are playing and lovers hold one anotherto one side, gravely, in the thin grass and dogs do what comes naturally. The young man is drawn further; perhaps hes in love with a young Lament.He pursues her into the meadows. She says: A long way. We live out there. Where? And the young man follows. Hes moved by her manner. The shoulder, the neck perhaps shes of noble descent. But he leaves her, turns back, turns around, waves.What good is it? Shes a lament! Only those who died young, in the first state of timeless serenity, that of weaning, follow her lovingly. She waits for girls and befriends them. Gently she shows them what shes wearing. Pearls of pain and the fine-spun veils of patience. With young men she walks silently. But there, where they live, in the valley, one of the older Laments responds to the young man when he questions here: She says We were a great race once, we Laments. Our fathers worked the mines in the great mountain-chain; among men you sometimes find a fragment of polished primal pain or, out of an old volcano, slaggy petrified rage. Yes, it came from there. Once we were rich. And she guides him gently through the immense landscape of Laments; shows him the pillars of the temples or the ruins of those fortresses from which Princes of Lament once wisely ruled the land. Shws him the lofty

trees of tears and fields of blossoming wistfulness (the living know them only as soft foliage); shows him the grazing herds of griefand sometimes a startled bird, flying straight across their field of vision, scrawls in enormous letters its solitary cry. In the evening she leads him to the graves of ancestors of the House of Laments, sibyls and noble prophets. With night approaching they wander more gently, and soon there rises in the moonlight the sepulcher watching over everything, brother to the one on the Nile, the sublime Sphinx; face of the hidden chamber. And theyre amazed at the crowned head that eternal silent, laid the human face on the stars scale. Still reeling from early death, his glance cant take it in. But her gaze from behind the double crowns border scares away the owl. And the bird brushes the cheek with a slow downward stroke, the cheek with the ripest curve, and on the deads new hearing, as though on the facing pages of an open book, he gently sketches the indescribable outline. And higher, the stars. New ones. The stars of the land of sorrow. Slowly the lament names them: Look, here: the Rider, the Staff, and the fuller constellation they call Garland of Fruit. Then, farther, toward the pole: Cradle, Path, the Burning Book, Doll, Window. But in the southern sky, pure as the palm of a consecrated hand, the clear, shining M, symbolizing Mothers But the dead must be on his way, and silently the older Lament brings him as far as the glen where glimmering in the moonlight is the spring of joy. She names it in reverence and says: Among men its a transporting river. They stand at the foot of the mountain, and there she embraces him, weeping. Alone he climbs the mountains of primal pain. And not once does his step make a sound from his soundless face. Still, if these infinitely dead awakened a metaphor in us, look, maybe theyd point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel, or theyd mean the rain that falls on the dark earth in early spring.

And we, who think of happiness as ascending, would feel an emotion that nearly shocks us when a joyous thing falls.