Poems to Night Read online

  slowly I raise you towards my thought – and up, up,

  the powerful proof gently receives you.

  That you are gains affirmation; here, in the crowded vessel,

  night, added to nights, secretly procreates.

  Suddenly: with what feeling stands the infinite, the older,

  over the sister within me, that, inclined, I shelter.

  (Paris, December 1914)

  Often I gazed at you in wonder. I stood at the window begun yesterday,

  stood and marvelled at you. Yet the new city

  was denied me and the unpersuaded landscape

  darkened, as though I were nothing. Nor did things close by

  venture to be understood. The street thrust upwards

  at the lamp post: I could see it was an alien thing.

  Over there a room, sympathetic, clear in the lamplight –

  I was already a part; this they sensed, closed the shutters.

  Remained there. Then a child cried. I knew the mothers

  in the houses around, of what they are capable – and I knew

  at once the inconsolable argument behind all weeping.

  Or a voice sang out and reached a little beyond

  expectation, or down below an old man

  who coughed full of reproach, as if his body

  were in the right and the gentler world in error. Then the hour struck,

  but I counted too late, it fell past me.

  Like a boy, a stranger, at last deemed worthy to join in

  yet drops the ball and knows none of the games

  in which the others indulge with such ease,

  stands there, looks away – to where?: I stood and suddenly

  became aware, you approached me, played with me, I understood,

  grown-up night, and I gazed at you enraptured. Where the towers

  raged and, with fate averted, a city loomed over me

  and before me were ranged unknowable mountains

  and in the narrowing circle of hungering strangeness

  welled the random flickering of my feelings – :

  there it was, higher one,

  no shame for you, that you know me. Your breath

  passed over me, across widening solemn expanses

  your smile entered into me.

  (Paris, January 1914)

  I want to hold out. Act. Go over

  as far as you are able. Have you not composed

  the faces of shepherds, more greatly even than

  in the wombs of princesses, the future’s influence and boldness

  formed the princely expression of countless kings?

  When figureheads in the surprised wood of the frozen carving

  assume their traits in the maritime space where

  they forge on in silence:

  O, how could a sentient being, who wills, who tears himself open,

  unyielding night, in the end not resemble you.

  (Paris, January 1914)

  Ah, from an angel’s touch falls

  into the sea a beam upon a moon,

  my heart within, silently striving coral,

  dwells there in its youthful branches.

  Distress, inflicted on me by an unknown

  perpetrator, remains clouded to me,

  the current wavers, the current presses on,

  depths function and obstructions.

  Out of the rigid insentient ancients

  the creatures turn, the suddenly elect,

  and the eternal silence of all beings

  precipitates a tumult of happening.

  (Paris, February 1914)

  Is pain – as soon as the ploughshare,

  labouring, naturally reaches a new layer –

  is pain not good? And what can it mean, the last

  interrupting us in the depths of such affliction?

  How much is still to be borne: when was the time

  to achieve that other, lighter feeling?

  And yet I know, better than most,

  once resurrected, salvation.

  (Paris, autumn 1913)

  You who super-elevates me with this:

  Night, – is it not, that you are granting me

  the boundless, more due feeling

  than I can sense? Alas, from here

  the heavens are powerful, thronged with lions,

  who to us remain inscrutable.

  No, you cannot know them, for they are timid

  and only approach with diffidence.

  (Paris, autumn 1913)

  Lifting one’s eyes from the book, from the close and countable lines,

  to the consummate night outside:

  O how the compressed feelings scatter like stars,

  as if a posy of blooms were untied:

  Youth of the lighter, inclined swaying of the heavy

  and the tenderest of the quieter bow –.

  Everywhere craving for connection and nowhere desire,

  world too much and earth enough.

  (Paris, February 1914)

  POEMS TO NIGHT: DRAFTS

  Isn’t there a smile? See, what is there

  in fields that overflowed from abundance,

  is what we bring to a modest blossoming

  when we strive in our countenance?

  Nocturnal music score never finished:

  that reaches your limits, where is the margin?

  Where is the voice that has your higher tones?

  And in which man is the bass of your abyss?

  Is it not granted us, until there

  to propagate pure excitation of being,

  where grows a superabundance of soul

  blissfully happy at disclosed distances?

  There it flowed after fall and resistance

  of the running, relishing the opened,

  in silent arms, the flow diverging

  the broad becoming, the worshipper.

  (O half of all worlds, unrecognized,

  closing over my unrecognized gaze.)

  (Paris, November 1913)

  Turned upwards to the nourishing one,

  I resolved myself to healing night,

  my senses have flowed out from me

  and the heart propagates namelessly.

  (Paris, end of 1913)

  Why does the day persuade us,

  that here we succumb to privation,

  when those powerful nights bow

  from creation’s worldly harvest?

  (Paris, end of 1913)

  (To the Angel)

  Don’t wait for my choice, demand,

  you can do it, for you don’t require it.

  As you throw yourself, soughing,

  Impenetrable one, against my gait?

  My want was still inclined

  to avoid your surge.

  But who vouches, in which dykes

  when the world sea rises to the sky.

  (Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)

  How did I hold out this face, that its feeling
r />   rough spaces of strangeness worked through;

  there even the poor, delicately peeling birch

  might move cities here from the hill.

  (Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)

  When I feed on your face this way

  like the tear on the weeping one,

  my brow, my mouth multiply

  around the traits, I know of you

  (I mean around those similarities

  that separate us, because they are double

  to broaden out a pure equivalence.)

  (Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)

  Only now, at the nocturnal hour, am I without fear

  and may stand in blossoming gaze,

  because you are responsible for your infinite happenings

  laying claim to my inadequate face.

  Now the resemblance emerges from it

  (Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)

  FURTHER POEMS AND SKETCHES AROUND THE THEME OF NIGHT

  Now the red barberries are already ripening,

  ageing asters breathe weakly in the beds.

  Who is not rich now that summer is fading

  will forever wait and never know self-possession.

  Who cannot close his eyes now,

  persuaded that an abundance of faces

  is only waiting within him till night begins

  to rise up in his darkness: –

  he has passed away like an old man.

  There is nothing left, no day’s coming,

  and everything that happens lies to him;

  you too, my God. And like a stone you are,

  daily drawing him down into the deep.

  (From Das Buch der Pilgerschaft [The Book of Pilgrimage], 1901)

  From a Stormy Night

  (Title page)

  The night, urged by swelling storms,

  how wide it suddenly became –,

  there laid out together it remains

  in the tiniest creases of time.

  Where the stars counter, here it does not end

  and does not begin deep in a forest

  and not at my countenance

  and not with your form.

  The lamps falter and do not know:

  do we feign light?

  Is night the sole reality

  of a thousand years…

  (From The Book of Images, 1906; Berlin-Schmargendorf, January 1901)

  Night of the Spring Equinox

  A net of swift shadow mesh drags above

  garden paths made of moon,

  as if something captive were stirring there,

  the far distant drew together.

  Captive fragrance reluctantly lingers.

  Yet all of a sudden it is as if a wave

  were tearing the net at a luminescent place,

  and all flows there, takes flight, drifts…

  Once more breathes the vast night wind

  we have long known, in bare trees

  standing above, sharp and diamond-like,

  in the deep, solemn spaces between

  the great stars of a spring night.

  (Capri, March 1907)

  Stars Behind Olives

  Beloved, so much leaves you senseless,

  you lean backwards into the pure leafage,

  you see the places, are the stars. I believe

  the earth is no different to the night.

  Behold, as in self-forgetting branches

  the next mingles with the nameless;

  we are shown this; they do not treat us as guests,

  one only takes, amused and refreshed.

  However much we have suffered these paths,

  we have not worn out the garden,

  and hours, greater than we had requested,

  feel towards us, lean in on us.

  (Capri 1907/Paris 1908)

  Nocturnal Walk

  Nothing is comparable. For what is not

  wholly alone with itself, what can we declare;

  we name nothing, we can only endure

  and come to understand that here is a gleam,

  and there a glance has brushed against us

  as if just that which dwelled there

  were our life. He who opts for resistance

  will not receive world. And whoever knows too much

  the eternal will slip away from. Sometimes

  on such great nights we are as if

  out of danger, shared out in equitably lit

  parts of the stars. How they cluster.

  (Capri, April 1908)

  Urban Summer Night

  Greyer grows the evening below,

  and that is already night,

  hung there like warm rags

  about the street lamps.

  But higher, suddenly imprecise,

  has the light bare firewall

  of a rear building thrust upwards,

  on a night which has full moon

  and nothing but moon.

  And then a space glides up, spreading

  wider, secure and spared,

  and the windows on that side

  stand white and uninhabited.

  (Paris, 1908 or 1909)

  Moonlit Night

  Path in the garden, deep as a long drink,

  quietly in the soft branch an escaping momentum.

  Oh and the moon, the moon,

  the benches are almost blooming

  with her hesitant approach.

  Silence, how it presses.

  Are you awake now?

  Starry and sensing the window facing you.

  The wind’s hands lay over your nearing face

  far-flung night.

  (Paris, July 1911)

  Like the evening wind

  through shouldered scythes of the reapers

  softly goes the angel

  through the guiltless blade of suffering.

  Keeps long hours

  at the side of the dark rider,

  steers the same course

  as the feelings without name.

  Standing as a tower by the sea,

  minded to last forever;

  He is what you feel,

  supple at the deepest point of hardness,

  that in the rock of woe

  the crowded druse of tears,

  for so long water-pure,

  resolved into amethysts.

  (Paris, winter 1913/14)

  At night I wish to converse with the angel,

  ask if he recognizes my eyes.

  When he suddenly enquires: Can you see Eden?

  Then I must say: Eden is on fire

  I will lift my mouth to him,

  hard as one who lacks desire.

  And if the angel says: Do you know life?

  Then I must say: Life devours

  If he finds that joy within me

  that becomes eternal in his spirit, –

  and he takes it, raises it in hi
s hands,

  then I must say: joy is madness

  (Irschenhausen, September 1914)

  Night Sky and Falling Star

  The sky, vast, full of joyous retention,

  a provisional space, an excess of world.

  And we, too far away for the formation,

  too near to turn away the future.

  There a star falls! And our desire to see it,

  with a confused look, ardently conjoined:

  What has begun, and what has elapsed?

  What is guilty? And what forgiven?

  (Muzot, August 1924)

  Love the angel is space.

  Cosmic space is like granting

  loving angel, replete

  with the starry gift.

  We, in the struggling nights,

  we fall from closeness to closeness;

  and where the beloved thaws

  we are a plunging stone.

  But even here where we never

  find each other, there are spaces of the angel.