Duino Elegies The Fourth Elegy
Author: Unknown
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Fourth ElegyThe Fourth Elegy

O trees of life, oh, what when winter comes? We are not of one mind. Are not like birds in unison migrating. And overtaken, overdue, we thrust ourselves into the wind and fall to earth into indifferent ponds. Blossoming and withering we comprehend as one. And somewhere lions roam, quite unaware, in their magnificence, of any weaknesss.

But we, while wholly concentrating on one thing, already feel the pressure of another. Hatred is our first response. And lovers, are they not forever invading one another’s boundaries? -although they promised space, hunting and homeland. Then, for a sketch drawn at a moment’s impulse, a ground of contrast is prepared, painfully, so that we may see. For they are most exact with us. We do not know the contours of our feelings. We only know what shapes them from the outside.

Who has not sat, afraid, before his own heart’s curtain? It lifted and displayed the scenery of departure. Easy to understand. The well-known garden swaying just a little. Then came the dancer. Not he! Enough! However lightly he pretends to move: he is just disguised, costumed, an ordinary man who enters through the kitchen when coming home. I will not have these half-filled human masks; better the puppet. It at least is full. I will endure this well-stuffed doll, the wire, the face that is nothing but appearance. Here out front I wait. Even if the lights go down and I am told: “There’s nothing more to come,” -even if the grayish drafts of emptiness come drifting down from the deserted stage -even if not one of my now silent forebears sist beside me any longer, not a woman, not even a boy-he with the brown and squinting eyes-: I’ll still remain. For one can always watch.

Am I not right? You, to whom life would taste so bitter, Father, after you - for my sake - slipped of mine, that first muddy infusion of my necessity. You kept on tasting, Father, as I kept on growing, troubled by the aftertaste of my so strange a future as you kept searching my unfocused gaze -you who, so often since you died, have been afraid for my well-being, within my deepest hope, relinquishing that calmness, the realms of equanimity such as the dead possess for my so small fate -Am I not right?

And you, my parents, am I not right? You who loved me for that small beginning of my love for you from which I always shyly turned away, because the distance in your features grew, changed, even while I loved it, into cosmic space where you no longer were…: and when I feel inclined to wait before the puppet stage, no, rather to stare at is so intensely that in the end to counter-balance my searching gaze, an angel has to come as an actor, and begin manipulating the lifeless bodies of the puppets to perform. Angel and puppet! Now at last there is a play! Then what we seperate can come together by our very presence. And only then the entire cycle of our own life-seasons is revealed and set in motion. Above, beyond us, the angel plays. Look: must not the dying notice how unreal, how full of pretense is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is to be itself. O hours of childhood, when behind each shape more that the past lay hidden, when that which lay before us was not the future.

We grew, of course, and sometimes were impatient in growing up, half for the sake of pleasing those with nothing left but their own grown-upness. Yet, when alone, we entertained ourselves with what alone endures, we would stand there in the infinite space that spans the world and toys, upon a place, which from the first beginnniing had been prepared to serve a pure event.

Who shows a child just as it stands? Who places him within his constellation, with the measuring-rod of distance in his hand. Who makes his death from gray bread that grows hard, -or leaves it there inside his rounded mouth, jagged as the core of a sweet apple?…….The minds of murderers are easily comprehended. But this: to contain death, the whole of death, even before life has begun, to hold it all so gently within oneself, and not be angry: that is indescribable.

Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming

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