there lay in slowly self-consuming wrappings
something being slowly decomposed—
till swallowed by those unknown mouths at last,
that never speak. (Where bides a brain that may
yet trust the utterance of its thinking to them?)
Then from the ancient aqueducts there passed
eternal water into them one day—
that mirrors now and moves and sparkles through them.
A FEMININE DESTINY
As when, out shooting with his friends, the king
picks up a glass to drink from, any sort—
and afterwards the owner of the thing
preserves it like the rarest ever wrought:
Fate, also thirsty, now and then maybe
has raised a woman to its lips and drunk,
whom then some little life has too much shrunk
from fear of breaking and has carefully
placed in that tremulous vitrine, wherein
its various preciousnesses are consigned
(or objects such as pass for precious there).
As strange as if on loan she’s stood therein
and simply gone on growing old and blind
and wasn’t precious and was never rare.
GOING BLIND
She’d sat just like the others there at tea.
And then I’d seemed to notice that her cup
was being a little differently picked up.
She’d smiled once. It had almost hurt to see.
And when eventually they rose and talked
and slowly, and as chance led, were dispersing
through several rooms there, laughing and conversing,
I noticed her. Behind the rest she walked
subduedly, like someone who presently
will have to sing, and with so many listening;
on those bright eyes of hers, with pleasure glistening,
played, as on pools, an outer radiancy.
She followed slowly and she needed time,
as though some long ascent were not yet by;
and yet: as though, when she had ceased to climb,
she would no longer merely walk, but fly.
DEATH EXPERIENCED
We know just nothing of this going hence
that so excludes us. We’ve no grounds at all
to greet with plaudits or malevolence
the Death whom that mask-mouth of tragical
lament disfigures so incredibly.
The world’s still full of parts being acted by us.
Till pleasing in them cease to occupy us,
Death will act too, although unpleasingly.
When, though, you went, there broke upon this scene
a shining segment of realities
in at the crack you disappeared through: green
of real green, real sunshine, real trees.
We go on acting. Uttering what exacted
such painful learning, gesturing now and then;
but your existence and the part you acted,
withdrawn now from our play and from our ken,
sometimes recur to us like intimations
of that reality and of its laws,
and we transcend awhile our limitations
and act our lives unthinking of applause.
IN THE DRAWING-ROOM
How presently around us they all are,
these noblemen in ruffs and courtier’s dress,
each like an evening round his order-star
darkening with ever more remorselessness;
these ladies, slender, fragile, whom their clothes
so much enlarge, with one hand in repose,
small as the collar for a tiny hound:
how they stand round us: round the reader, round
the contemplator of these bibelots,
among which there are some they still possess.
They let us go on, in their tactfulness,
living the kind of life we find alluring
and they can’t grasp. They chose florescency,
and flowers are beautiful; we choose maturing,
and that means effort and obscurity.
SELF-PORTRAIT FROM THE YEAR 1906
The old, long-noble race’s unregressing
distinction in the eye-brow’s archingness.
The gaze with childhood’s blue and anxiousness
still in it, far from servile, but confessing
a server’s and a woman’s humbleness.
The mouth made like a mouth, large, strict, and less
apt for persuading than for just expressing
what’s right. The forehead, not unprepossessing,
at home in quiet down-looking shadowedness.
This, as coherence, only just divined;
never, as yet, in suffering or elation
collected for some lasting culmination;
as if from far, though, with stray things, creation
of something real and serious were designed.
THE COURTESAN
The sun of Venice in my hair’s preparing
a gold where lustrously shall culminate
all alchemy. My brows, which emulate
her bridges, you can contemplate
over the silent perilousness repairing
of eyes which some communion secretly
unites with her canals, so that the sea
rises and ebbs and changes in them. He
who once has seen me falls to envying
my dog, because, in moments of distraction,
this hand no fieriness incinerates,
scathless, bejewelled, there recuperates.—
And many a hopeful youth of high extraction
will not survive my mouth’s envenoming.
THE STEPS OF THE ORANGERY
Versailles
Like kings who simply pace at certain hours
with no more purpose than the habitude
of showing the double-rank of courtly bowers
their presence in their mantle’s solitude—
even so this flight of steps ascends in lonely
pomp between pillars bowing eternally:
slowly and By the Grace of God and only
to Heaven and nowhere intermediately;
as having ordered all its retinue
to stay behind—and they’re not even daring
to follow at a distance; none may do
so much as hold the heavy train it’s wearing.
ROMAN FOUNTAIN
Borghese
Two basins, this one over that, ascending
from an old marbled pool’s embosoming,
and, from the upper, water gently bending
to water which below stood proffering
that gentle murmurer silence for reply there,
and, as in hollowed hand, clandestinely
showing it a green- and darkness-curtained sky there
like some unrecognized reality;
itself serenely in its lovely chalice
unhomesickly outspreading, ring on ring,
just sometimes dreamily downladdering,
drop after drop, along the mossy tresses
to the last mirror, that would gently bring
its bowl’s convex to smile with changefulnesses.
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
Jardin du Luxembourg
With roof and shadow for a while careers
the stud of horses, variously bright,
all from that land that long remains in sight
before it ultimately disappears.
Several indeed pull carriages, with tight-
held rein, but all have boldness in their bearing;
with them a wicked scarlet lion’s faring
and now and then an elephant all white.
Just as in woods, a stag comes into view,
save that it has a saddle and tied fast
thereon a little maiden all in blue.
And
on the lion a little boy is going,
whose small hot hands hold on with all his might,
while raging lion’s tongue and teeth are showing.
And now and then an elephant all white.
And on the horses the come riding past,
girls too, bright-skirted, whom the horse-jumps here
scarce now preoccupy: in full career
elsewhither, hitherwards, a glance they cast—
And now and then an elephant all white.
And on it goes and hastens to be ended,
and aimlessly rotates until it’s done.
A red, a green, a gray is apprehended,
a little profile, scarcely yet begun.—
And now and then a smile, for us intended,
blissfully happy, dazzlingly expended
upon this breathless, blindly followed fun …
SPANISH DANCER
As in the hand a sulphur match, sheer white
before it flames, will stretch out scintillating
tongues on all sides, her round dance, in the tight
ring of spectators, hasty, hot, alight,
has started scintillatingly dilating.
And suddenly it’s only flame that’s there.
With one glance she has set alight her hair,
and all at once with daring artfulness
spins her whole dress into this fieriness,
from which, like serpents terribly abashing,
her naked arms stretch out aroused and gnashing.
And then, as though her fire would not suffice,
she gathers it all up, and in a trice
flings it away with proud gesticulation
and gazes: still in raging conflagration
it’s writhing on the ground unyieldingly.—
She, though, inflexible and with a sweet
saluting smile, looks up victoriously
and stamps it out with little steadfast feet.
QUAI DU ROSAIRE
Bruges
The streets are moving with a gentle gait
(like invalids the first time out of door
trying to remember: What was here before?)
and those that come to squares will long await
another street, that, with a single stride,
crosses the water evening’s clarified,
wherein, the more things round about are waning,
the mirrored world inhung will be attaining
reality those things have never known.
Did not this city vanish? Now you’re shown
it growing (in some unfathomable way)
alert and lucid in transposal there,
as though that life were no such strange affair;
there hang the gardens now with grander air,
there behind windows suddenly aflare
revolves the dance in the estaminets.
Above remained?—Just silence, I opine,
now slowly tasting, with no tasks to ply,
berry on berry from the sweet grape-vine-
cluster of chime that’s hanging in the sky.
ORPHEUS. EURYDICE. HERMES.
That was the so unfathomed mine of souls.
And they, like silent veins of silver ore,
were winding through its darkness. Between roots
welled up the blood that flows on to mankind,
like blocks of heavy porphyry in the darkness.
Else there was nothing red.
But here were rocks
and ghostly forests. Bridges over voidness
and that immense, gray, unreflecting pool
that hung above its so far distant bed
like a gray rainy sky above a landscape.
And between meadows, soft and full of patience,
appeared the pale strip of the single pathway,
like a long line of linen laid to bleach.
And on this single pathway they approached.
In front the slender man in the blue mantle,
gazing in dumb impatience straight before him.
His steps devoured the way in mighty chunks
they did not pause to chew; his hands were hanging,
heavy and clenched, out of the falling folds,
no longer conscious of the lightsome lyre,
the lyre which had grown into his left
like twines of rose into a branch of olive.
It seemed as though his senses were divided:
for, while his sight ran like a dog before him,
turned round, came back, and stood, time and again,
distant and waiting, at the path’s next turn,
his hearing lagged behind him like a smell.
It seemed to him at times as though it stretched
back to the progress of those other two
who should be following up this whole ascent.
Then once more there was nothing else behind him
but his climb’s echo and his mantle’s wind.
He, though, assured himself they still were coming;
said it aloud and heard it die away.
They still were coming, only they were two
that trod with fearful lightness. If he durst
but once look back (if only looking back
were not undoing of this whole enterprise
still to be done), he could not fail to see them,
the two light-footers, following him in silence:
The god of faring and distant message,
the traveling-hood over his shining eyes,
the slender wand held out before his body,
the wings around his ankles lightly beating,
and in his left hand, as entrusted, her.
She, so belov’d, that from a single lyre
more mourning rose than from all women-mourners—
that a whole world of mourning rose, wherein
all things were once more present: wood and vale
and that around this world of mourning turned,
even as around the other earth, a sun
and a whole silent heaven full of stars,
a heaven of mourning with disfigured stars—
she, so beloved.
But hand in hand now with that god she walked,
her paces circumscribed by lengthy shroudings,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
Wrapt in herself, like one whose time is near,
she thought not of the man who went before them,
nor of the road ascending into life.
Wrapt in herself she wandered. And her deadness
was filling her like fullness.
Full as a fruit with sweetness and with darkness
was she with her great death, which was so new
that for the time she could take nothing in.
She had attained a new virginity
and was intangible; her sex had closed
like a young flower at the approach pf evening,
and her pale hands had grown so disaccustomed
to being a wife, that even the slim god’s
endlessly gentle contact as he led her
disturbed her like a too great intimacy.
Even now she was no longer that blond woman
who’d sometimes echoed in the poet’s poems,
no longer the broad couch’s scent and island,
nor yonder man’s possession any longer.
She was already loosened like long hair,
and given far and wide like fallen rain,
and dealt out like a manifold supply.
She was already root.
And when, abruptly,
the god had halted her and, with an anguished
outcry, outspoke the words: He has turned round!—
she took in nothing, and said softly: Who?
But in the distance, dark in the bright exit,
someone or other stood, whose counte
nance
was indistinguishable. Stood and saw
how, on a strip of pathway between meadows,
with sorrow in his look, the god of message
turned silently to go behind the figure
already going back by that same pathway,
its paces circumscribed by lengthy shroudings,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
THE BOWL OF ROSES
You’ve seen the flare of anger, seen two boys
bunch themselves up into a ball of something
that was mere hate and roll upon the ground
like a dumb animal attacked by bees;
actors, sky-towering exaggerators,
the crashing downfall of careering horses,
casting away their sight, flashing their teeth
as though the skull were peeling from the mouth.
But now you know how such things are forgotten;
for now before you stands the bowl of roses,
the unforgettable, entirely filled
with that extremity of being and bending,
proffer beyond all power of giving, presence,
that might be ours: that might be our extreme.
Living in silence, endless opening out,
space being used, but without space being taken
from that space which the things around diminish;
absence of outline, like untinted groundwork
and mere Within; so much so strangely tender
and self-illumined—to the very verge—
where do we know of anything like this?
And this: a feeling able to arise
through petals being touched by other petals?
And this: that one should open like an eyelid,
and lying there beneath it simply eyelids,
all of them closed, as though they had to slumber
ten-fold to quench some inward power of vision.
And this, above all: that through all these petals
light has to penetrate. From thousand heavens
they slowly filter out that drop of darkness
within whose fiery glow the mazy bundle
of stamens stirs itself and reaches upwards.
And then the movement in the roses, look:
gestures deflected through such tiny angles,
they’d all remain invisible unless
their rays ran streaming out into the cosmos.
Look at that white one, blissfully unfolded
and standing in the great big open petals