Books by Hermann Hesse

Peter Camenzind

Beneath the Wheel

Gertrude

Rosshalde

Knulp

Demian

Strange News from Another Star

Klingsor’s Last Summer

Wandering

Siddhartha

Steppenwolf

Narcissus and Goldmund

The Journey to the East

The Glass Bead Game

If the War Goes On …

Poems

Autobiographical Writings

Stories of Five Decades

My Belief

Reflections

Crisis

Tales of Student Life

Hours in the Garden

Pictor’s Metamorphoses

Soul of the Age: Selected Letters of Hermann Hesse

Poems by
Hermann Hesse
Selected and
Translated by
James Wright

FARRAR, STRAUS

AND GIROUX

NEW YORK

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright © 1970 by James Wright
copyright © 1953 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Berlin
All rights reserved
Distributed in Canada by Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 1970
This paperback edition, 2008

The quotation from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf (translated by Basil Creighton; copyright © 1929, 1957 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc.) is reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2007934249
ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52641-2
ISBN-10: 0-374-52641-9

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Michael di Capua — J.W.

Translator’s Note

Few American readers seem aware that Hesse was a poet. In the seven-volume German edition of his works, there are some 480 pages of poems, Die Gedichte. Some are very fine, and it goes without saying that a fine short poem can have the resonance and depth of an entire good novel. Readers of Hesse’s novels are already aware that they contain many passages of literal verse. His Novellen, that peculiarly German form which Goethe first mastered and which contains some of the most profoundly beautiful and illuminating bodies of feeling in the literature—Keller, Eichendorff, and Storm come to mind, not to mention the very master of them all, Thomas Mann—are lyrical in themselves; and one of them, In the Pressel Summerhouse (Im Presseischen Gartenhaus), is itself a story about poets. It deals with the young Mörike’s visit to the aging Hölderlin. It is a story by an artist about an artist who is visiting another artist, in this case a master, and it bears some resemblance to Mörike’s own prose masterpiece, Mozart on the Way to Prague (Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag).

I don’t intend here to offer more than an implicit judgment of Hesse’s work. I like his poems very much, or I would not have tried to translate some of them. But I should say something about the poet’s theme. Both his curious erudition and his own writings make clear his abiding concern with art as a way of searching for knowledge. Whether or not the strange and haunted old man ever learned anything worth knowing is a matter still open to question. It has been argued by scholars and artists alike. All I wish to do is to offer a selection of Hesse’s poems which deal with the single theme of homesickness.

I suppose the word, like love, is simple enough at first glance. If somebody else is in love, love looks charmingly silly. If somebody else is homesick, we chuckle. The poor fellow hasn’t grown up. But his struggle, his growth itself, is a serious theme, and Hesse has touched this theme with a traditionally endearing delicacy.

During the recent proliferation of translations which have brought so many of Hesse’s works to the attention of American readers, and particularly to the attention of the young, there has been a need to identify him, to describe his limits. Otherwise, he might go the way of a fad, as so many things—and not all of them worthless, either—have a way of doing in America. To my mind, the best criticism of this indispensable kind has been provided by the brilliant American novelist Stephen Koch. He is particularly qualified to warn against the inflation of Hesse. Quite aside from Mr. Koch’s own mastery of lyrical prose, and quite aside from his learning, he is himself a young man who has written profoundly in defense of the distressed, assaulted new generation in this country. So, in his penetrating review of Hesse’s Narcissus and Goldmund (The New Republic, July 13, 1968), Mr. Koch describes Hesse’s limitations, and thereby, I think, reveals his true powers:

Like everything else in his work, Hesse’s thought is irretrievably adolescent, so that in his chosen role of artist of ideas, he is invariably second-rate, although unlike the other prophets of the New Age, he is never less than second-rate. His thought is never cheap, never trashy, but neither is it ever intellectually exalting, the way the professorial, unfashionable Mann so often is. Almost without exception, Hesse’s ideas are derivative, school-boyish, traditional to the point of being academic, influenced by all the right people, and boringly correct. […] So it goes, book after book, the Great Ideas chasing the Terrific Experiences home to their all-too-obvious destinations. Flawed though it sometimes is, Hesse’s aesthetic sense is different and better than this; it does sometimes rise to extraordinary levels, does transform itself into “something else,” as the kids say. The final third of Steppenwolf is one of the great moments in modern literature, a moment original to the point of being in a class by itself, and one with an importance to future art which is not to be patronized.

I think that Mr. Koch has caught the nature and value of Hesse’s art so beautifully in this passage that it remains only to offer yet another few lines, taken from the closing pages of Steppenwolf, which I have followed as my guide in selecting and translating some of Hesse’s poems. The lines I mean do indeed appear in the final third of Steppenwolf. I have abbreviated them; but they provide what I take to be Hesse’s best and noblest expression of his artistic theme. In this passage, the girl Hermine is trying to explain to the forty-year-old Harry Haller why his life is nothing, and yet not nothing:

“Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death.”

“Nothing else?”

“Yes, eternity.”

“You mean a name, and fame with posterity?”

“No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that all true and real men have been famous and known to posterity?”

“No, of course not.”

“Then it isn’t fame. Fame exists in that sense only for the schoolmasters. No, it isn’t fame. It is what I call eternity. The pious call it the kingdom of God. I say to myself: all we who ask too much and have a dimension too many could not contrive to live at all if there were not another air to breathe outside the air of this world, if there were not eternity at the back of time; and this is the kingdom of truth. The music of Mozart belongs there and the poetry of your great poets. The saints, too, belong there, who have worked wonders and suffered martyrdom and given a great example to men. But the image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it or hands it down to posterity. […] Ah, Harry, we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our homesickness.”

That is what I think Hesse’s poetry is about. He is homesick. But what is home? I do not know the answer, but I cherish Hesse because he at least knew how to ask the question.

A translation of this kind is always a collaboration difficult to identify. But I would like to express my gratitude to Mr. Michael Roloff, who did his best to correct my inaccuracies of translation; to the poet Jerome Mazzaro, a masterful translator whose advice means almost as much as his friendship; and to Mr. and Mrs. Morgan Epes of Buffalo, N.Y., and Mr. and Mrs. Orrin Bly of Old Chatham, N.Y., at whose homes most of these translations were made.

James Wright

February 22, 1970

I Know, You Walk—

I walk so often, late, along the streets,

Lower my gaze, and hurry, full of dread,

Suddenly, silently, you still might rise

And I would have to gaze on all your grief

With my own eyes,

While you demand your happiness, that’s dead.

I know, you walk beyond me, every night,

With a coy footfall, in a wretched dress

And walk for money, looking miserable!

Your shoes gather God knows what ugly mess,

The wind plays in your hair with lewd delight—

You walk, and walk, and find no home at all.

Across the Fields …

Across the sky, the clouds move,

Across the fields, the wind,

Across the fields the lost child

Of my mother wanders.

Across the street, leaves blow,

Across the trees, birds cry—

Across the mountains, far away,

My home must be.

Elizabeth

I should tell you a story,

The night is already so late—

Do you want to torment me,

Lovely Elizabeth?

I write poems about that,

Just as you do;

And the entire history of my love

Is you and this evening.

You mustn’t be troublesome,

And blow these poems away.

Soon you will listen to them,

Listen, and not understand.

Ravenna (1)

I, too, have been in Ravenna.

It is a little dead city

That has churches and a good many ruins.

You can read about it in books.

You walk back through it and look around you:

The streets are so muddy and damp, and so

Dumbstruck for a thousand years,

And moss and grass, everywhere.

That is what old songs are like—

You listen to them, and nobody laughs

And everybody draws back into

His own time till night falls into him.

Ravenna (2)

The women of Ravenna,

With their deep gazes and affectionate gestures,

Carry a knowledge of the days

Of the old city, their festivals.

The women of Ravenna

Weep like children who won’t tell you: deep, light.

And when they laugh, a glittering song

Rises in the sludge of the text.

The women of Ravenna pray

Like children: gentle, fully contented.

They can speak love’s words without even knowing

Themselves they are lying.

The women of Ravenna kiss

Rarely and deep, they kiss back.

And all they know about life is that

We all have to die.

Lonesome Night

You brothers, who are mine,

Poor people, near and far,

Longing for every star,

Dream of relief from pain,

You, stumbling dumb

At night, as pale stars break,

Lift your thin hands for some

Hope, and suffer, and wake,

Poor muddling commonplace,

You sailors who must live

Unstarred by hopelessness,

We share a single face.

Give me my welcome back.

A Swarm of Gnats

Many thousand glittering motes

Crowd forward greedily together

In trembling circles.

Extravagantly carousing away

For a whole hour rapidly vanishing,

They rave, delirious, a shrill whir,

Shivering with joy against death.

Whole kingdoms, sunk into ruin,

Whose thrones, heavy with gold, instantly scattered

Into night and legend, without leaving a trace,

Have never known of so fierce a dancing.

The Poet

Only on me, the lonely one,

The unending stars of the night shine,

The stone fountain whispers its magic song,

To me alone, to me the lonely one

The colorful shadows of the wandering clouds

Move like dreams over the open countryside.

Neither house nor farmland,

Neither forest nor hunting privilege is given to me,

What is mine belongs to no one,

The plunging brook behind the veil of the woods,

The frightening sea,

The bird whir of children at play,

The weeping and singing, lonely in the evening, of a man secretly in love.

The temples of the gods are mine also, and mine

The aristocratic groves of the past.

And no less, the luminous

Vault of heaven in the future is my home:

Often in full flight of longing my soul storms upward,

To gaze on the future of blessed men,

Love, overcoming the law, love from people to people.

I find them all again, nobly transformed:

Farmer, king, tradesman, busy sailors,

Shepherd and gardener, all of them

Gratefully celebrate the festival of the future world.

Only the poet is missing,

The lonely one who looks on,

The bearer of human longing, the pale image

Of whom the future, the fulfillment of the world

Has no further need. Many garlands

Wilt on his grave,

But no one remembers him.

Mountains at Night

The lake has died down,

The reed, black in its sleep,

Whispers in a dream.

Expanding immensely into the countryside,

The mountains loom, outspread.

They are not resting.

They breathe deeply, and hold themselves,

Pressed tightly, to one another.

Deeply breathing,

Laden with mute forces,

Caught in a wasting passion.

At Night on the High Seas

(from an Asian journey: Malayan Archipelago)

At night, when the sea cradles me

And the pale star gleam

Lies down on its broad waves,

Then I free myself wholly

From all activity and all the love

And stand silent and breathe purely,

Alone, alone cradled by the sea

That lies there, cold and silent, with a thousand lights.

Then I have to think of my friends

And my gaze sinks into their gazes

And I ask each one, silent, alone:

“Are you still mine?

Is my sorrow a sorrow to you, my death a death?

Do you feel from my love, my grief,

Just a breath, just an echo?”

And the sea peacefully gazes back, silent,

And smiles: no.

And no greeting and no answer comes from anywhere.

To a Chinese Girl Singing

We traveled down the still river in the evening,

The acacia stood in the color of rose, casting its light,

The clouds cast down the rose light. But I scarcely saw them,

All I saw were the plum blossoms in your hair.

You sat smiling in the bow of the garlanded boat,

Held the lute in your skillful hand,

Sang the song, that holy country of your own,

While your eyes promised fire, and you were so young.

Without saying anything, I stood at the mast, and what I wanted,

For myself, was to give in to those gleaming eyes, over and over,

To listen to the song forever in blessed pain,

To the song that could make me happy, tangled in your delicate hands.

Departure from the Jungle

With my suitcase, I sit on the beach;

Below me, on the steamer, Indians,

Chinese, Malayans are shouting,

Laughing loudly and trading their knickknacks.

Behind me, feverish nights, and days

Of glowing life, that even now I carry

Carefully as treasures in my deepest thoughts,

As though I still wet my feet in the jungle stream.

I know many countries and cities are still waiting,

But never again will the night of the forests,

The wild fermenting garden of the earliest world

Lure me in, and horrify me with its magnificence.

Here in this endless and gleaming wilderness

I was removed farther than ever from the world of men—

And I never saw so close and so clearly

The image in the mirror of my own soul.

Evil Time

Now we are silent

And sing no songs any more,

Our pace grows heavy;

This is the night, that was bound to come.

Give me your hand,

Perhaps we still have a long way to go.

It’s snowing, it’s snowing.

Winter is a hard thing in a strange country.

Where is the time

When a light, a hearth burned for us?

Give me your hand!

Perhaps we still have a long way to go.

On a Journey

(IN MEMORY OF KNULP)

Don’t be downcast, soon the night will come,

When we can see the cool moon laughing in secret

Over the faint countryside,

And we rest, hand in hand.

Don’t be downcast, the time will soon come

When we can have rest. Our small crosses will stand

On the bright edge of the road together,

And rain fall, and snow fall,

And the winds come and go.

Night

I like the dark night well enough;

But sometimes, when it turns bleak

And peaked, as my suffering laughs at me,

Its dreadful kingdom horrifies me,

And I wish to God I could take one look at the sunlight

And the blue of heaven brought back to light by its clouds,

And I want to lie down warm in the wide spaces of the day.

Then I can dream of the night.

Destiny

In our fury and muddle

We act like children, cut off,

Fled from ourselves,

Bound by silly shame.

The years clump past

In their agony, waiting.

Not a single path leads back

To the garden of our youth.

Ode to Hölderlin

Friend of my young manhood, on many an evening

I return gratefully to you, when in the elder bushes

Of the garden fallen asleep

Only the rustling fountains still make a sound.

Nobody knows you, my friend; this new age has driven

Far away from the silent magic of Greece.

Without prayer, and cheated out of gods,

People stroll reasonably in the dust.

But to the secret gathering who sink in their inner lives,

Whose souls God has stricken with longing,

The heavenly strings of your songs

Are ringing, even today.

We turn passionately, exhausted by day,

To the ambrosia, the night of your music,

Whose fanning wing casts us into

A shadow of golden dream.

Yes, and luminously, when your song delights us,

Sorrowfully burning for the blessed land of the past,

For the temples of the Greeks,

Our homesickness lasts forever.

Childhood

My farthest valley, you are

Bewitched and vanished.

Many times, in my grief and agony,

You have beckoned upward to me from your country of shadows

And opened your legendary eyes

Till I, lost in a quick illusion,

Lost myself back to you wholly.

O dark gate,

O dark hour of death,

Come forth,

So I can recover from this life’s emptiness

And go home to my own dreams.

Lying in Grass

Is this everything now, the quick delusions of flowers,

And the down colors of the bright summer meadow,

The soft blue spread of heaven, the bees’ song,

Is this everything only a god’s

Groaning dream,

The cry of unconscious powers for deliverance?

The distant line of the mountain,

That beautifully and courageously rests in the blue,

Is this too only a convulsion,

Only the wild strain of fermenting nature,

Only grief, only agony, only meaningless fumbling,

Never resting, never a blessed movement?

No! Leave me alone, you impure dream

Of the world in suffering!

The dance of tiny insects cradles you in an evening radiance,

The bird’s cry cradles you,

A breath of wind cools my forehead

With consolation.

Leave me alone, you unendurably old human grief!

Let it all be pain,

Let it all be suffering, let it be wretched—

But not this one sweet hour in the summer,

And not the fragrance of the red clover,

And not the deep tender pleasure

In my soul.

How Heavy the Days …

How heavy the days are.

There’s not a fire that can warm me,

Not a sun to laugh with me,

Everything bare,

Everything cold and merciless.

And even the beloved, clear

Stars look desolately down,

Since I learned in my heart that

Love can die.

In a Collection of Egyptian Sculptures

Out of jeweled eyes

Silent and eternal, you gaze away

Over us late brothers.

Neither love nor longing appears to be known among

Your smooth gleaming procession.

Once, inconceivable, you walked, majestic

Brothers and sisters of constellations,

Among the temples.

Even today, holiness like the distant fragrance of gods

Drifts round your brows,

Dignity round your knees:

Your beauty breathes calmly,

Your home is eternity.

But we, your younger brothers,

Stagger godless through a confusing life,

Our trembling souls stand eagerly, opened

To all the sufferings of passion,

To every burning desire.

Our goal is death,

Our belief a belief in what perishes,

No great distance of time defies

Our fleeting faces.

Nevertheless, we also

Bear, burned into our very souls,

The sign of a secret affinity to the spirit,

We have a foreboding of gods, a feeling for you,

Images of the silent past,

A fearless love. Look:

We hate nothing that exists, not even death,

Suffering and dying

Does not horrify our souls,

As long as we learn more deeply to love.

Our heart is the bird’s heart,

And it belongs to the sea and the forest, and we name

Slaves and wretches our brothers,

We still name with loving names both animal and stone.

So also the images

Of our perishing lives will not survive us

In hard stone:

They will vanish smiling,

And in the flickering dust of sunlight

Every hour to new joys and unhappiness,

Impatient, eternal, they will rise.

Without You

My pillow gazes upon me at night

Empty as a gravestone;

I never thought it would be so bitter

To be alone,

Not to lie down asleep in your hair.

I lie alone in a silent house,

The hanging lamp darkened,

And gently stretch out my hands

To gather in yours,

And softly press my warm mouth

Toward you, and kiss myself, exhausted and weak—

Then suddenly I’m awake

And all around me the cold night grows still.

The star in the window shines clearly—

Where is your blond hair,

Where your sweet mouth?

Now I drink pain in every delight

And poison in every wine;

I never knew it would be so bitter

To be alone,

Alone, without you.

The First Flowers

Beside the brook

Toward the willows,

During these days

So many yellow flowers have opened

Their eyes into gold.

I have long since lost my innocence, yet a memory

Touches my depth, the golden hours of morning, and gazes

Brilliantly upon me out of the eyes of flowers.

I was going to pick flowers;

Now I leave them all standing

And walk home, an old man.

Spring Day

Wind in bushes and bird piping

And high in the highest fresh blue

A haughty cloud ship, becalmed …

I dream of a blond woman,

I dream of my youth,

The high heaven blue and outspread

Is the cradle of my longing

Where I choose to lie calm

And blessedly warm

With the soft humming,

Just like a child held

On his mother’s arm.

Holiday Music in the Evening

Allegro

The cloudbank breaks up; down from the luminous heaven

Giddy light fumbles across the bedazzled valleys.

Blown by the storm of south wind

I flutter along, unwearied,

Through an overcast life.

Oh, if only for a moment

Between me and the light that lasts forever

A storm would be kind enough to shatter the fog.

Strange country surrounds me,

Overwhelming breakers drive me, torn loose

Far away, from my home to this place.

South wind, hunt down the clouds,

Tear the veil away,

So light can fall on me among the confusing paths.

Andante

Again, every time, comforting

And, every time, new in the gleam of endless creation,

The world laughs in my eyes,

Comes alive and stirs into a thousand breathing forms,

Butterflies tumble in the wind streaming with sunlight,

Swallows sail into the blessing, the blue light,

Sea waves stream on the beach rocks.

Again, every time, star and tree,

Cloud and bird, my close kindred;

The stone greets me as brother,

The unending sea calls me, friendly.

My road, that I do not understand, leads me

Toward a blue, lost distance,

Nowhere a meaning, nowhere a definite goal—

Nevertheless, every forest brook speaks to me,

And every humming fly, of a deep law,

A right way that is holy,

Whose firmament spreads out above me also,

Whose secret tones,

As in the pace of the stars,

Beat time in my heart as well.

Adagio

A dream gives what the day wore out;

At night, when the conscious will surrenders,

Some powers, set free, reach upward,

Sensing something godly, and following.

The woods rustle, and the stream, and through the night-blue sky

Of the quick soul, the summer lightning blows.

The world and my self, everything

Within and without me, grows into one.

Clouds drift through my heart,

Woods dream my dream,

House and pear tree tell me

The forgotten story of common childhood.

Streams resound and gorges cast shadows in me,

The moon, and the faint star, my close friends.

But the mild night,

That bows with its gentle clouds above me,

Has my mother’s face,

Kisses me, smiling, with inexhaustible love,

Shakes her head dreamily

As she used to do, and her hair

Waves through the world, and within it

The thousand stars, shuddering, turn pale.

Thinking of a Friend at Night

(SEPTEMBER 1914)

In this evil year, autumn comes early …

I walk by night in the field, alone, the rain clatters,

The wind on my hat … And you? And you, my friend?

You are standing—maybe—and seeing the sickle moon

Move in a small arc over the forests

And bivouac fire, red in the black valley.

You are lying—maybe—in a straw field and sleeping

And dew falls cold on your forehead and battle jacket.

It’s possible tonight you’re on horseback,

The farthest outpost, peering along, with a gun in your fist,

Smiling, whispering, to your exhausted horse.

Maybe—I keep imagining—you are spending the night

As a guest in a strange castle with a park

And writing a letter by candlelight, and tapping

On the piano keys by the window,

Groping for a sound …

—And maybe

You are already silent, already dead, and the day

Will shine no longer into your beloved

Serious eyes, and your beloved brown hand hangs wilted,

And your white forehead split open—— Oh, if only,

If only, just once, that last day, I had shown you, told you

Something of my love, that was too timid to speak!

But you know me, you know … and, smiling, you nod

Tonight in front of your strange castle,

And you nod to your horse in the drenched forest,

And you nod in your sleep to your harsh clutter of straw,

And think about me, and smile.

And maybe,

Maybe some day you will come back from the war,

And take a walk with me some evening,

And somebody will talk about Longwy, Lüttich, Dammerkirch,

And smile gravely, and everything will be as before,

And no one will speak a word of his worry,

Of his worry and tenderness by night in the field,

Of his love. And with a single joke

You will frighten away the worry, the war, the uneasy nights,

The summer lightning of shy human friendship,

Into the cool past that will never come back.

Autumn Day

(NOVEMBER 1914)

For moments at a time, the distance is silent,

And all the mountains grow light

Blue overhead, and glow in the moist

November air like young white ornaments.

The hilltops stand bare

As so often, joyfully, I’ve seen them

In a better time

With fresh snow fallen beneath them.

Not a person around me, the flocks are in the valley,

Abandoned meadows lie still in their winter nakedness.

         In a cool resting place, I measure the distance

         With a peaceful gaze, and I see the blue of the evening,

         And sense the first star behind the ridge,

         And, breathing in, I sense the approaching

         Frost and dew. Then, with my evening shiver,

         Memory comes back to me

         And fury and suffering and deep lamentation—

         So much for my joy in wandering.

And again my thoughts stand up

Trembling over the distant struggle,

Inhale gangrene, inhale the reek of the battle,

Tremble with thousands of the wounded, the dying, the sick,

And search, with blundering feelings,

For beloved brothers in the blasting and tearing of the battle,

And cling like children to the hands of their good mother

Grateful and full of anguish for my fatherland.

To Children

(AT THE END OF 1914)

You know nothing of time,

You know only that, somewhere in the distance,

A war is being fought,

You whittle your wood into sword and shield and spear

And play your game blissfully in the garden,

Set up tents,

Carry white bandages marked with the red cross.

And if my wish for you has any power,

So war will remain

For you, always, only a dim legend,

So you will never stand in the field

And never die

And never rush out of a house crumbling in fire.

Nevertheless, you will be soldiers one day

And one day you will know

That the sweet breath of this life,

The precious possession of the heartbeat,

Is only a loan, and that whatever was lost

In the past, and the heir you long for,

And the farthest future,

Rolls through your blood,

And that for every hair on your head

Somebody endured one struggle, one pain, one death.

And you shall know that whatever is noble

In your soul is always a warrior,

Even though he bears no weapons,

That every day a struggle and a destiny is waiting.

Do not forget this I

Think of the blood, the shambles, the ruin

On which your own future reposes,

And how, even more, upon death and sacrifice is builded

The tiniest happiness.

Then your life will flame out more

And one day gather even death

Into its arms.

Flowers, Too

Flowers, too, suffer death,

And yet they are guiltless.

So, too, our own being is pure

And suffers only grief,

Where we ourselves do not wish to understand.

What we call guilt

Is absorbed by the sun,

It comes to meet us out of the pure throats

Of flowers, fragrance and the moving gaze of children.

And as flowers die,

So we die, too,

Only the death of deliverance,

Only the death of rebirth.

Uneasiness in the Night

The clock speaks uneasily with the spider web on the wall,

The wind tears at the shutters,

My flickering candles are

Utterly dripped away and burned down,

No more wine in the glass,

Shadows in every corner

Whose long fingers stretch out toward me.

Just as in childhood

I close my eyes and breathe heavily,

Uneasiness clutches me cowering in my chair,

But no mother comes any more,

No kindly, scolding maid comes to me any more

So friendly, she charmed the horrifying world

Away from me and brightened me new with comfort.

I stay a long time, cowering in the darkness,

Hear the wind in the roof and crackling death in the walls,

Hear sand running behind the wallpaper,

Hear death spinning with his cold fingers;

I force my eyes open, I want to look and to grasp,

Look into the emptiness and hear him far off

Whistling lightly out of his mocking lips,

I edge into bed—I wish I could sleep I

But sleep has turned into a frightened bird,

Difficult to catch, to hold, yet easy to kill;

Whistling he flies off, his voice full of bitter disdain,

The rustling of a wing, away in the straining wind.

All Deaths

I have already died all deaths,

And I am going to die all deaths again,

Die the death of the wood in the tree,

Die the stone death in the mountain,

Earth death in the sand,

Leaf death in the crackling summer grass

And the poor bloody human death.

I will be born again, flowers,

Tree and grass I will be born again,

Fish and deer, bird and butterfly.

And out of every form,

Longing will drag me up the stairways

To the last suffering,

Up to the suffering of men.

O quivering tensed bow,

When the raging fist of longing

Commands both poles of life

To bend to each other!

Yet often, and many times over,

You will hunt me down from death to birth

On the painful track of the creations,

The glorious track of the creations.