Duino Elegies Read Free Page A

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    Â Â Â Â Â Â O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace
    gnaws at our faces—, for whom won’t the night be there,
    desired, gently disappointing, a hard rendezvous
    for each toiling heart. Is it easier for lovers?
    Ah, but they only use each other to hide what awaits them.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â You still don’t see? Cast the emptiness from your arms
    into the spaces we breathe: perhaps the birds
    will sense the increase of air with more passionate flying.
    Yes, the springtimes needed you. Many a star was waiting
    for your eyes only. A wave swelled toward you
    out of the past, or a violin surrendered itself
    as you walked by an open window. All that was mission.
    But were you up to it? Weren’t you always
    distracted by expectation, as though each moment
    announced a beloved’s coming? (But where would you keep her,
    with all those huge strange thoughts in you
    going and coming and sometimes staying the night?)
    No, in longing’s grip sing women who loved:
    their feats of passion still lack undying fame.
    The bereft ones you almost envy, since you
    found them so much bolder in love than those fulfilled.
    To begin ever anew their impossible praise.
    Remember: the hero lives on. Even his downfall
    was only a pretext for attained existence, a final birth.
    But nature, depleted, takes back into herself
    women who loved, as though she lacked the strength
    to create them a second time. Have you invoked Gaspara Stampa
    enough so that any girl abandoned by her lover
    would feel from this exalted model
    of a woman’s love: let me be as she was!
    Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours
    grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves
    from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived:
    the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string
    to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.
    Voices, voices. Listen, my heart, as before now
    only saints had listened, while that vast call
    raised them off the ground; yet they paid no heed
    and kept on kneeling, those impossible ones,
    listening wholly absorbed. Not that you could bear
    God’s voice—by no means. But listen to the wind’s breathing,
    that uninterrupted news that forms from silence.
    It’s rustling toward you now from all the youthful dead.
    When you entered a church in Rome or Naples,
    didn’t their fate speak quietly to you?
    Or an inscription echoed deep inside you,
    as, not long ago, that tablet in Santa Maria Formosa .
    Their charge to me? —that I brush gently aside
    the veil of injustice that sometimes
    hinders a bit their spirits’ pure movement.
    True, it’s strange to dwell on earth no longer,
    to cease practicing customs barely learned,
    not to give roses and other things of such promise
    a meaning in some human future;
    to stop being what one was in endlessly anxious hands,
    and ignore even one’s own name like a broken toy.
    Strange, not to go on wishing one’s wishes. Strange,
    to see all that was once so interconnected
    now floating in space. And death demands a labor,
    a tying up of loose ends, before one has
    that first feeling of eternity. —But the living
    all make the same mistake: they distinguish too sharply.
    Angels (it’s said) often don’t know whether they move among
    the living or the dead. The eternal current
    bears all the ages with it through both kingdoms
    forever and drowns their voices in both.
    In the end, those torn from us early no longer need us;
    they grow slowly unaccustomed to earthly things, in the gentle manner
    one outgrows a mother’s breasts. But we, who need
    such great mysteries, for whom so often blessed progress
    springs from grief—: could we exist without them?
    Is it a tale told in vain, that myth of lament for Linos ,
    in which music first pierced the shell of numbness:
    shocked Space, which an almost divine youth
    had suddenly left forever; then, in the void, vibrations