Duino Elegies : The Fifth Elegy

But who are they, tell me, these Travellers, even more transient than we are ourselves, urgently, from their earliest days, wrung out for whom – to please whom, by a never-satisfied will? Yet it wrings them, bends them, twists them, and swings them, throws them, and catches them again: as if from oiled more slippery air, so they land on the threadbare carpet, worn by their continual leaping, this carpet lost in the universe. Stuck on like a plaster, as if the suburban sky had wounded the earth there. And scarcely there, upright, there and revealed: the great capital letter of Being.........and already the ever-returning grasp wrings the strongest of men again, in jest, as King August the Strong would crush a tin plate. Ah, and around this centre, the rose of watching flowers and un-flowers. Round this stamp, this pistil, caught in the pollen of its own flowering, fertilised again to a shadow-fruit of disinterest, their never-conscious, seeming-to-smile, disinterest, gleaming lightly, on surface thinness. There, the withered, wrinkled lifter, an old man, only a drummer now, shrunk in his massive hide, as though it had once contained two men, and one was already lying there in the churchyard, and the other had survived him, deaf, and sometimes a little confused in his widowed skin. And the young one, the man, as if he were son of a neck and a nun: taut and erectly filled with muscle and simple-mindedness. O you, that a sorrow, that was still small, once received as a plaything, in one of its long convalescences...... You, who fall, with the thud that only fruit knows, unripe, a hundred times a day from the tree of mutually built-up movement (that, swifter than water, in a few moments, shows spring, summer and autumn), fall, and impact on the grave: sometimes, in half-pauses, a loving look tries to rise from your face towards your seldom affectionate mother: but it loses itself in your body, whose surface consumes the shy scarcely-attempted look.....And again the man is clapping his hands for your leap, and before a pain can become more distinct, close to your constantly racing heart, a burning grows in the soles of your feet, its source, before a few quick tears rush bodily into your eyes. And yet, blindly, that smile........ Angel! O, gather it, pluck it, that small-flowered healing herb. Make a vase, keep it safe! Place it among those joys not yet open to us: on a lovely urn, praise it, with flowery, swirling, inscription: ‘Subrisio Saltat: the Saltimbanque’s smile’ You, then, beloved, you, that the loveliest delights silently over-leapt. Perhaps your frills are happy for you – or the green metallic silk, over your firm young breasts, feels itself endlessly pampered, and needing nothing. You, market fruit of serenity laid out, endlessly, on all the quivering balance scales, publicly, beneath the shoulders. Where, oh where is the place – I carry it in my heart – where they were still far from capable, still fell away from each other, like coupling animals, not yet ready for pairing: - where the weights are still heavy: where the plates still topple from their vainly twirling sticks....... And, suddenly, in this troublesome nowhere, suddenly, the unsayable point where the pure too-little is changed incomprehensibly -, altered into that empty too-much. Where the many-placed calculation is exactly resolved. Squares: O square in Paris, endless show-place, where the milliner, Madame Lamort, winds and twists the restless trails of the earth, endless ribbons, into new bows, frills, flowers, rosettes, artificial fruits – all falsely coloured, - for winter’s cheap hats of destiny. Angel: if there were a place we know nothing of, and there, on some unsayable carpet, lovers revealed what here they could never master, their high daring figures of heart’s flight, their towers of desire, their ladders, long since standing where there was no ground, leaning, trembling, on each other – and mastered them, in front of the circle of watchers, the countless, soundless dead: Would these not fling their last, ever-saved, ever-hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid coins of happiness in front of the finally truly smiling pair on the silent carpet?