Books by Hermann Hesse

Hermann Lauscher

Peter Camenzind

Beneath the Wheel also published as The Prodigy

Gertrud

Three Tales from the Life of Knulp

Demian

Klingsor’s Last Summer

Siddhartha

Steppenwolf

Narcissus and Goldmund

Journey to the East

The Glass Bead Game

eISBN: 978-1-58394-341-0

Copyright © 2011 Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. All rights reserved by and controlled through Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712

Cover and book design by Susan Quasha

Cover photo of Hermann Hesse, Montagnola, 1937, and portrait on this page by Martin Hesse

Cover photo and photo on this page courtesy of Editionsarchiv, Volker Michels, Offenbach am Main

Photo of Ludwig Max Fischer by Victor Dezso

The Seasons of the Soul: The Poetic Guidance and Spiritual Wisdom of Hermann Hesse is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hesse, Hermann, 1877–1962.
  [Poems. English. Selections]
  The seasons of the soul : the poetic guidance and spiritual wisdom of Hermann Hesse / translation and commentaries by Ludwig Max Fischer.
      p. cm.
  “This volume presents a selection of sixty-eight poems which were written over a time span of sixty-four years” — Introd.
  1. Hesse, Hermann, 1877–1962.—Translations into English. 2. Spiritual life—Poetry. 3. Self-realization—Poetry. 4. Spirituality—Poetry. 5. Hesse, Hermann, 1877–1962.—Poetic works. I. Fischer, Ludwig Maximilian. II. Title. III. Title: Poetic guidance and spiritual wisdom of Hermann Hesse.
  PT2617.E85A2 2011
  831′.912—dc22

2011005029

v3.1

Every book is an adventure of the mind and an
invitation to experience the gifts of the imagination.

—HERMANN HESSE

Acknowledgments

MY GRATITUDE GOES ABOVE all to Hermann Hesse himself, who made his own inner struggles and outer challenges transparent and gave them poetic form so they can serve as inspirations for future generations. May the reader receive as much guidance and joy from these poems as I felt blessed to deeply experience the wisdom in these poems while translating them.

I wish to give boundless thanks to my dear friend Andrew Harvey, the great magician of le mot juste, whose enthusiasm, insightful suggestions, and unflagging help in meticulously shaping this book were invaluable.

To Mario Martinelli, whose poetic sensibilities and linguistic skills made a significant contribution to the quality of these translations.

To Maryanne Macdonald for her skills in reading my longhand and typing these poems into their final form.

To Volker Michels, who has been the heart of Hermann Hesse’s work for over half a century, for generously providing the Hesse photos in this book.

To Adrienne Armstrong for her conscientious and inspired copyediting.

To North Atlantic Books and especially to Elizabeth Kennedy and Hisae Matsuda for their presence and patience throughout this process.

And to my life partner, Gabriella Martinelli, who supported my efforts throughout this long endeavor with tremendous help and encouragement.

Foreword

AS THE GREAT DECIDING crisis of our civilization continues to explode, the wisdom of voices like Hermann Hesse’s—wisdom like a dry but rich old red wine—becomes ever rarer and ever more important. Hesse’s voice is particularly necessary because it speaks with deep sincerity of one of the key spiritual adventures of the last hundred years, that of fusing together the best of the Western philosophical and mystery traditions with the highest understanding of unity and divine identity of the East. This is an adventure that many of us believe provides the fuel for the next evolutionary stage of humanity and for the birth of a universal mysticism that can lead to a wholescale transformation of all forms of earth life.

The problems and opportunities such a fusion of East and West arouses are explored with complex and laconic elegance in Hesse’s great novels, especially Siddhartha and his masterpiece The Glass Bead Game, which many consider the greatest philosophical novel of the twentieth century. But it is in his poems that you meet most intimately Hesse the man in all his emotional intensity, sometimes scalding self-knowledge, and fierce spiritual struggle, and so experience most completely the inner turmoil and revelations that led to his becoming one of the philosopher-sages of our tumultuous transition.

Perhaps the most moving quality of the poems that Ludwig Fischer has selected and translated with such magisterial ease is their absolute lack of pretention, their hard-won and wonderfully humane simplicity of approach. Hesse is the least pompous and gnomic of sages; he does not attain, or want to attain, the prophetic heights of a Nietzsche, or the ecstatic complexity of a Rilke, or Goethe’s all-embracing philosophical range. Hesse speaks to us nakedly, without artifice, from his profound fatherly heart, without any need to exaggerate his realization or play down or excuse his own faults and shadows. That is why we come to trust him, knowing that he has no need to convince us of his own uniqueness or seduce us to marvel at his achievement. Such wry and radical humility is rare in the Western tradition and comes, I believe, from Hesse’s deep immersion in Eastern, especially Chinese, thought, with which his reclusive temperament had the greatest affinity. Hesse is closer to Li Po or Wang Wei than he is to the earlier German romantic or landscape poets to whom he has often been compared. Hesse’s best poems radiate a secret, timeless knowledge of the mystery of cyclical change, the interconnection of “the ten thousand things” that comprise phenomenal reality, and the profound empty peace that bathes and underlies all life’s fervid dramas, revealing just how deeply the discoveries of Chinese spirituality penetrated his soul.

In an age as chaotic and noisy as ours, such a clear, humble voice could easily go unheard. But that would be a grave mistake. It is at times of ferocious change that we most need sensibilities attuned to the changeless; it is in an age of wild bombast and nihilistic irony that a temperament like Hesse’s—grounded, reverent, serious without being earnest—has most to offer those who, like him, look to the order of the cosmos and to ageless, timeless truths for consolation, inspiration, and strength of soul. The struggle ahead to secure any kind of sustainable human future is bound to be a heartbreaking and brutal one; we will all need the reminders that Hesse’s holy and sober poems give us of the necessity to trust and surrender to nature’s slowly unfolding healing rhythms and the eternal mother’s cosmic laws of Death and Rebirth.

Ludwig Fischer is an old and beloved friend of mine, whose heart and intellect I draw deep inspiration from. I salute his selection of Hesse’s poems, the honed purity and lyrical directness of his translations, and the wide-ranging depth of his introductions to each of the sections of Seasons of the Soul. May this wise, grand, radiant book find the loving army of devoted readers it deserves.

ANDREW HARVEY    
Oak Park, Illinois
May 20, 2011     

Introduction

WE ALL LOVED HESSE and carried a copy of Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, or The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) in our backpacks at one time. A whole generation read Hesse when the baby boomers needed a spiritual elder within the Western tradition who also served as a bridge builder to the great, evolving interest in Eastern philosophy and wisdom teachings.

Hesse was food for the heart, balm for the soul, and light for the spirit. A young generation was rebelling against authoritarian structures and the destruction of ideals by unlimited greed, political power plays, and bourgeois complacency. Hesse served as a beacon of authenticity, a trustworthy guide, and a fearless explorer on the perennial paths taken by pilgrims of the inner journey.

More than a hundred million people read this German author, who was translated into almost sixty languages. Hesse’s worldwide impact continued past the 1960s and 1970s, the height of his popularity. Considerable parts of his work either have not yet been translated or have not yet received the deserved attention. The poetry of the Nobel Prize–winning novelist is basically unknown. This volume presents a selection of sixty-eight poems that were written over a time span of sixty-four years. These poems are messages from a wise, old soul to every soul in search of wisdom. Hesse wrote to strengthen the will and the value of the individual, not toward selfish ego gratification, but toward a greater understanding of life. He teaches from experience, from wisdom acquired through many trials and tribulations, many great adventures, and deep, inner explorations. Hesse presents a rich harvest of insights and practical advice, but refrains from easy solutions or rigid, dogmatic ideologies. His gentle voice, full of truth, reminds us of the greater dimensions, the larger forces acting in our lives, beyond the immediate dramas of fear and desire.

The soul, love, inspiration, the mysteries of nature, the unknowable divine, time, and the stages of life are the major agents in Hesse’s world and are as relevant today as when he distilled them from his life experience. As an active witness in turbulent times, Hesse retained individual integrity while acting with social consciousness toward the pressing issues of society.

Love was one of the most difficult issues for Hesse, as it is in everyone’s life. The first love young Hermann Hesse received was, of course, the love of his parents, and it was a disaster. Later in life the author would characterize his childhood: “I was an orphan whose parents happened to be alive.”

Born on July 2, 1877, in the picturesque small city of Calw in the Black Forest of Germany, the little boy Hermann embarked on a course of conflict, controversy, and collision almost from the beginning. When he was only four years old, during the week he lived with a pastor, and he saw his strict, pietist Protestant parents only on Sundays: his father Johannes Hesse, who had spent years as a missionary in India, and his mother Marie, who had been born at a mission in India and had also served as a missionary.

Hermann Hesse describes his school years in the novel Beneath the Wheel as an intense contest between a sensitive soul trying to unfold and bring its message into the world on the one hand, and on the other his suffering from the oppressive, authoritarian discipline of his parents and teachers, which young Hermann experienced as a loveless, cold, dictatorial, despotic code of control that often came very close to breaking his spirit and will to live.

At the age of fifteen the young, disobedient rebel escaped from the Protestant theological seminary in Maulbronn and attempted suicide after a forced return. What young Hesse knew and felt to be true and the social and political reality of the late nineteenth-century Wilhelminian world around him clashed so violently that Hermann was often at the verge of madness. From June until October 1892, he was committed to an insane asylum. Later in his life he dealt with the mental illness of his first wife and his son Martin. He also underwent an intense process of psychotherapy as an adult with Dr. Lang, a student of Carl Gustav Jung.

Hermann Hesse’s education continued as an odyssey of expulsions and escapes. In 1898 he did finish an apprenticeship in a bookstore and published his first collection of poems, entitled Romantische Lieder (Romantic Songs), some of which are included in this volume. There was no doubt in Hesse’s mind that he wanted to become an author and a poet, or nothing at all. Around the turn of the century, while working in various bookstores in Basel, Hesse published his first collection of stories and diaries. Peter Camenzind became his first bestseller in 1904 and in the same year he married Maria Bernoulli and moved to a farmhouse in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance, to live closer to nature.

In 1907 Hesse joined a community at Monte Verità near Ascona, where utopian visionaries like Arnold Ehret advocated a Rousseauan return to nature, warning against the negative effects of the blind faith in industrial progress as the driving force of the twentieth century. Throughout his life an avid gardener, Hesse drew much of his poetic inspirations from analogies with the composing and decomposing forces of nature as plants emerge, unfold, decay, and return to their origin in their regular, rhythmic stages.

For Hesse, human beings are essentially one. We are nature and every fledgling and blossom, every bird and wilting rose, is a metaphor and symbol that addresses us, that tries to reach and teach us this fundamental truth of life: we are this eternal exchange; we are these infinite transformations. This has been long recognized by so-called esoteric teachings, whose ultimate wisdom teaches us as above, so below; as outside, so inside. What this tells us is that there is a season for everything: a time to long, a time to belong, a time to be home, and a time to leave; and all these are different faces of the one.

In 1911 the writer undertook a journey to India with a friend who was a painter. He stayed three months and also visited Penang, Singapore, and South Sumatra. His reflections on the different approaches to life in the East versus the West permeate much of his later works. Although Hesse maintained an enormous respect for the wisdom of ancient India and China, he did not find a spiritual home in the contemporary political and social reality of these countries. He also became painfully aware of his own limitations to fully integrate another cultural or religious tradition into his lifestyle and the impossibility of discovering his own cultural heritage through illusionary projections onto an exotic paradise.

During World War I Hesse lived in Bern and the lifelong pacifist devoted much time, energy, and resources providing German prisoners of war with books and newspapers. After the great success of his Demian, Hesse left his family and moved to Casa Camuzzi in Montagnola, Ticino, Switzerland. His small apartment in the palatial Casa Camuzzi had no heating. Hesse had no money because the royalties from Germany were worthless pieces of paper due to the extreme inflation and miserable economic conditions in 1919. The starving poet foraged for food in the forest: walnuts, chestnuts, and berries helped him survive and, of course, he wrote.

Hesse’s most famous work, Siddhartha, the story of a man whose life parallels that of Gautama Buddha, was published in 1922. The path toward enlightenment of Siddhartha goes through archetypal stages from youthful rebel to shrewd merchant to passionate lover to suffering father and finally to wise renunciate. For Hesse this progression built an inner base for a life that was still very much troubled by abrupt change and serious crises: a divorce, another short marriage, another divorce. A book of poetry published in 1928 was aptly called Krisis (Crisis). Finally, in 1931, at the age of fifty-four, Hesse’s personal life gained stability through marriage to Ninon Dolbin, with whom he stayed until his death. In the same year the restless wanderer was also offered a house that his friend Hans Bodmer had built for him. Now Hesse at least enjoyed some basic domestic stability, which allowed his literary imagination to bloom without constant existential worries. While his original homeland descended during twelve years into deepest darkness, Hesse mainly worked on the novel The Glass Bead Game, for which he received the Nobel Prize in 1946. Throughout his later years he spent much time and resources in helping people whenever he could. Hermann Hesse finally received many literary prizes, but preferred solitude and privacy, a life closer to nature in a contemplative atmosphere.

Hesse died on August 9, 1962, in Montagnola. His last poem is included in this volume. It describes his reflections about a broken branch that cannot be pulled from the tree. He is telling us, symbolically, that even where we feel broken, wounded, or injured, our connectedness to the tree of life cannot be destroyed. Hesse helped to usher in one of the most open, innovative, and creative phases of change in history.

Today Hesse’s words feel fresh and yet mature. He achieved his main goal as a writer: to strengthen the individual’s process of becoming fully who he or she is against all authoritarian oppressions, manipulation, destructive ideologies, and dogmatic norms. Hesse is a champion in modern times of what all mystical traditions recognize as the one essential journey to be taken on the earth: The journey to the self, and the marriage of the timeless self to the surrendered ego, what Jung called individuation and what the Greeks called “Know thyself,” was Hesse’s concern.

There is an immediate ring of truth, the intimacy of an earnest friend speaking to us, in every poem. An advocate for everything we long for presents and expresses what we hope for: authenticity, integrity, sincerity, and an unbridled participation in the fullness of life.

Very easily Hermann Hesse becomes a personal friend to the reader, a friend who urges us to respond to the great call of life at every moment. His poems point us to the deeper forces guiding our journeys, to find our own way through the maze of truths to accept and possibilities to pursue.

LUDWIG MAX FISCHER, PHD
Toronto, July 2011       

The Poems

I

The Tides of Love

1. Wild Heart of Mine—Vergiß es nicht (1908)

2. The Miracle of Love—Wunder der Liebe (1922)

3. Italian Night—Italienische Nacht (1898)

4. I Lied—Ich log (1901)

5. Child in Spring—Kind im Frühling (1907)

6. Dark Eyes—Dunkle Augen (1898)

7. The Seducer—Verführer (1926)

8. The End of Summer—Sommers Ende (1904)

9. Desolate Days—Wie sind die Tage (1911)

10. Without Love—Ohne Liebe (1901)

11. My Misery—Das ist mein Leid (1900)

12. For Ninon—Für Ninon (1927)

13. Love Song—Liebeslied (1922)

The Tides of Love

HESSE WAS A PASSIONATE romantic and therefore experienced febrile fluctuations in his love life: the high tides of ecstatic passions alternated with unbearable ebbs of loneliness. Love was an often merciless, strict teacher for Hesse, but his failures and triumphs, his struggles to be in love beyond fear, to surrender to a love beyond the control of the ego, have produced luminous insights into the nature of love and have engendered poems that celebrate the bliss and the blessings of love, as well as the pain and agony of its absence. In fact, Hesse equates happiness with love when he says, “Whoever is able to love, is happy.” Even more emphatically, he affirms, “Our life receives meaning only through love.”

Living at a time when extreme collectivism and exaggerated individualism expressed themselves in violently opposing ideologies, Hesse realized that the only way through for us lies in a voluntary, authentic, mature dedication to compassionate action:

It is a mysterious and yet simple secret known to the sages of all ages: the most minute act of selfless devotion, every act of compassion given in love makes us richer, whereas every effort towards possession and power weakens our strength and makes us poorer … Every time we act in the spirit of selflessness, out of loving sacrifice, every compassionate act of service, every renunciation of self-interest looks like a squandering, a self-deprivation and yet the truth is: such acts enrich us and make us grow. No other way leads forward and upward.

Again and again throughout his life and in his poems Hesse placed love in the very center of our existence. Only love guides us to an authentic life: “We can imitate and forge everything in this world, but love. You cannot steal love or copy love. Love only lives in those hearts who can give themselves fully. Love is the source of all art.”

This timeless message is of acute relevance to our disordered time. If we looked honestly at our present world we would realize that we suffer from a “love-deficiency disorder.” We lack heroes and have traded authentic, genuine love for artificial substitutes. We have an excess of idols, too many champions of conquest, adorable queens of attraction, plenty of glamour and glitter, and pseudo-romantic infatuations projected onto the screens of modern entertainment. Do we “love” these stars or are they idolized parasites of our own inner potential? Disappointed with the routine of daily life, with necessities and responsibilities, we begin to “love” the substitutions, the constant intoxication with illusions that gradually degrade our dedication to appreciate what and who is actually present, providing us with an opportunity to love. Sustained devotion, responsible commitment, and an inspired imagination can guide us closer to the elusive mystery of love, but addiction to grandiose spectacles on screens impoverishes this capacity.

Hesse suggests “to cultivate the art of bestowing the devotion and love which we lavish on distant and unreachable beauty also to the beauty which is close and familiar.” The journey from the fake grandiose to the extraordinary potential of the ordinary is much more rewarding than it seems initially: “It is true for love as well as art. Whoever is able to adore the grandiose a little bit, is less and poorer than the person who can be enthused by something minute.”

Is it not amazing how many ways we invented to run from love? Some of the most common defense systems against love are irony, cynicism, criticism, and abstract theories, which all lead to “superior,” “objective,” untouchable positions and unassailable perspectives. Eventually an aching longing, an increasingly vulnerable loneliness, will make us leave these cherished states of elevated righteousness. Before long, hopefully the call of love will knock on the doors of our control towers, where we hide, frightened and isolated, in the fake cocoon of well-insulated invulnerability. Our sophisticated models of reality and precise maps of the world arranged according to our technologically enforced will, our complex schemes to force our future experience into final submission to the constant and instant demands of our desires, will be unpredictably flooded by the infinitely more powerful tides of love. Faced with the fragility of our intention, we will find within us deeper resources to respond to life: a sense of reverence, a feeling of awe, a contemplative clarity of mind less distorted by fear and desire, a more forgiving humility, an awareness of connectedness beyond gain and loss. Hesse invites us to love this world and our life as it is: “To cut through the charades of this world, to despise it, may be the aim of great thinkers. My only goal in life is to be able to love this world, to see it and myself and all beings with the eyes of love and admiration and reverence …”

On the long road to love, Hesse—like every one of us—practiced and played many roles, fell in and out of love, alternated between fierce desire and agonizing despair, between blissful union and broken rejection, between being the seducer, causing harm, and the deceived, innocent victim of lies. But Hesse endured and thrived through the challenges and confusions. He lived to deliver the message that our often difficult journey toward love is worth every ordeal and suffering.

Wild Heart of Mine

Even the hottest, toughest days

end in the evening, cool and calm

and quiet, gentle mother night

embraces every one of them.

You must find solace too, my heart,

although you feel inflamed with passion.

The night is near, the caring mother,

to hold you in her tender arms.

With hidden hands she builds

an invisible shrine, a sanctuary of repose

for you, the restless wanderer.

In her temple you will finally find peace.

Wild heart of mine, remember this.

And love each feverish passion

and the bitterness of pain, love too

before you have to enter your eternal rest.

Even the hottest, toughest days

end in the evening cool and calm

and quiet, gentle mother night

embraces every one of them.

The Miracle of Love

Life simply seems to cease sometimes,

turns dark, stands still, stays frozen.

We dread these difficult, dire days

when our zest for life becomes self-disgust

and grabs us by our despised throat,

spews spiteful charges against us and God.

What miracle, when even then

the light of love begins to shine

its quiet, tender flame on our dreary path.

Without this grace we would be lost forever,

in deep, dark dungeons of demonic despair,

the light in us and God destroyed.

Italian Night

I love those lush and luminous nights

when the red flaming passion of my verses

begins to swing with the flickering lanterns.

My beloved, watch the young lovers lost in tight embraces.

Now a silver slice of moon wanes only for us

as it hangs between the dark smoke of the torches.

In such nights my heart quivers between pain and passion,

longing both for youthful desire and a restful abode.

While my heart rejoins the rousing rhythms of amorous tunes

my watchful eyes, however, observe the moon in the distance

as it climbs on its path on a well-defined orbit,

not unlike the unyielding course of my solitude.

Beloved, my young years were a fanciful frolic,

a feverish dance, a tempestuous, frivolous flurry,

a fast falling star, fading with a few sparkles.

My mind remained restless, I crisscrossed the whole world

searching in vain for a home and for someone to hear my song,

but I was able only in my dreams to build a chimerical refuge.

Watch the crazed crowd over there, my dear.

Everyone revels unrestrained in wild dances

and leaps high with zest into a brief ecstasy.

I feel the young buck in me joining them,

intoxicated by exotic, sensuous smells.

It is the old, familiar attraction replayed in endless variations.

What an ancient game! But now I observe it from a distance.

I weigh the sweet temptations of inebriating potions

on the cold scale of reason and my lips stay dry.

My mind gazes on life’s landscape with detachment

and keeps the homesick, quickened heartbeats

at an even pace like a well-tempered tune.

I Lied

I lied! I lied! I am not old

and not at all disgusted with life,

and every lady’s lovely curves

still pump my pulse and passion.

I still have dreams of hot, nude lovers,

some full of virtue, some of vices.

I dream of rapturous rhythms and wild waltzes,

of nights I lose myself in love.

I even can imagine a kind of love

so pure, so peaceful and pristine,

like the first one, which was holy

and still even now moves me to tears.

Child in Spring

The trees stand white and festive

in May’s full bloom and splendor.

But soon a breeze will blow away

this brilliant flourish of blossoms.

Your spring days too, young child,

with all their joyful play and frolic,

their blissful charm and laughing pleasures,

will wilt in time and lose their colors.

Sweet fruit can only ripen

in somber nights of grieving sorrow.

But when your labors reach fruition

no pain was borne in vain.

Dark Eyes

My love and my yearning for home

ignited in the heat of this night

like the sweet fragrance of foreign flowers

fanning the flames of a fierce fervor.

My love and my yearning for home

and all my fortune and misfortune

now stand like silent stanzas of a song

in the dark mirror of your mythic gaze.

My love and my yearning for home

have turned away from the noise of this world

and in your dark eyes

have built a vast, secret throne.

The Seducer

I waited in front of many doors,

singing sweet songs for many women.

I tried to seduce countless beauties.

At times I was successful.

Oh, every time these luscious lips surrendered,

each time my lust had met its target,

a sacred dream was stained and spoiled,

turned into flesh between still hungry hands.

The kiss I had achieved with ardent cunning,

the night I had desired with so much passion,

were mine at last—but broken blossoms,

a faded fragrance—I had trashed a treasure.

I left so many lairs of lust tormented

until my thrills changed to disgust.

I wished to flee from all this excess

and yearned for dreams again and solitude.

Oh, what a curse to find no joy in those possessions.

The real woman conquered, killed the dream

I had created with such care while wooing.

My blissful longing may remain poetic praise.

But no, my hands begin to reach slowly for new blossoms,

my poem is ready to intone new serenades …

Tighten your dress, oh beautiful temptress, protect yourself.

Delight me, entice me—but refuse me.

The End of Summer

Rain drops its tears into this sultry evening,

a steady, slow flow, a low, lulling lament

like weak whimpers of a weeping child

pouring its grief upon the midnight hour.

The summer, overfull with celebrations,

throws off its withering wreath of flowers.

The summer bows before the approaching autumn

and is now ready to take leave.

Our love too was a festive wreath of blossoms

blazing high in the heat of summer’s exaltation,

but now the last steps of our final dance

tumble down with the rain as the guests retreat.

Let us not grieve over our lost love

or stand ashamed before the ashes of our passion.

Let us take leave from our love.

This fateful night ends our season too.

Desolate Days

My days now drag me down.

No hearth to give me warmth.

No sun to smile on me.

The world feels void,

frozen and without mercy.

Even the bright lights of stars

stream only rays of desolation

ever since my heart has learned

that love can die.

Without Love

My days and nights seep through my hands

the way water spills over the rim of a deep well.

No purpose, passion, pain, or poem can move me.

Life falls from my hands like wilted summer roses.

Time passes by, I do not care.

What I loved, moved far away from me

like a fleeting, fast fading star

leaving dim shadows on my life’s horizon.

My Misery

My misery comes from my great talent

to wear too many masks too well.

I learned to deceive every one, myself included.

I became a master manipulator of my feelings.

No true song could reach my heart.

Behind each step I take lurks a shrewd scheme.

I know the source of all my suffering.

I have traced it to my innermost core:

Even my heartbeat is controlled and calculated.

I make sure no dream’s deep, dark foreboding,

no imprisoned passion, no stirring sorrow

can break through this armor to my soul.

For Ninon

Why would you want to stay with me,

while darkness descended on my life?

Far from me much greater destinies unfold,

with their dazzling brilliance and false glamour.

But you do understand the core of life

beyond the thousand busy, fancy follies.

Your presence and your love

serve me as source and spirit.

You see the light in me

beyond the dimming darkness.

Your love helps me remember

the honey core of all life.

Love Song

I wish I were a flower

And you were just walking by

And picked me as your own

And held me captive in your hand.

Or I wish I were red wine

And you would drink my sweetness

And take me deep inside yourself.

Both you and I would be healed.

II

To Imagine Is to Inspire

1. The Living Word—Sprache (1928)

2. Three Harmonies—Dreistimmige Musik (1934)

3. The Glass Bead Game—Das Glasperlenspiel (1933)

4. Valse Brillante—Valse Brillante (1901)

5. Books—Bücher (1918)

6. Proverb—Spruch (1908)

7. Advice—Rat (1898)

8. Do You Know This Too?—Kennst Du das auch? (1901)

9. In a Town Unknown—Fremde Stadt (1901)

10. Aboard at Night—Nachts in der Kabine (1911)

11. Facing Africa—Gegenüber von Afrika (1911)

12. Now and Then—Manchmal (1904)

13. There Are Times—Manchmal (1917)

To Imagine Is to Inspire

WHEN JOHN LENNON ASKED us to “imagine” living life in peace, he spoke to all the dreamers in the world and encouraged them to join with him in making the world one. The lifelong pacifist Hermann Hesse too asks us to join the growing group of “dreamers,” to muster the courage to walk on our path with trust:

Today I am more aware than ever that I stand alone in my role as a “dreamer.” I am conscious of this fact and see it not only as a curse, but an appointed office.… I am neither a minister nor a therapist and I act without authority or entitlement, but I strengthen each and every individual to the extent I am able to understand him, in those aspects which distinguish him from the norm, and I try to show him the meaning of his uniqueness.

Hesse chose the sovereign authority of the imagination as his teaching instrument. Some may call it fiction, but what he longed to bring across from his spirit, from his soul, from his heart, from his life experience—to our spirit, soul, and heart and enhanced life experience—transcends analytic, academic, scientific knowledge. It cannot be boxed into training manuals or produce certified instructions for a specific skill or expertise. His message concerns each of us, in every stage, in every place, at all times. His intention is not to amuse or indoctrinate:

In the end all art and especially poetry has only a raison d’être if it offers more than entertainment, but has a direct effect on life, provides solace, clarification, counsel, aid and fortification in life’s struggles and helps overcome what is difficult in life.

A more lucid and inspiring definition of poetry has rarely been given to us than in Hesse’s words.

We live today in an even less poetic world than Hesse did. The despotism of pragmatism, the fascism of efficiency, and the addiction to unlimited desires leave the body distraught, the heart frozen, the spirit denied, and the soul starving. Hesse’s journey into the truth of poetry as he defined it brought him often to the brink of insanity, just as he wrote, “the neuroses of the poets today may be a form of health, the only possible response of soulful people to an age which recognizes only money and numbers and has lost its soul.”

Hesse saw himself as an advocate for the soul, as an activist for the spirit in everyone beyond ideologies and doctrines. His efforts to reclaim the poet—the bard’s role as a guide toward insight, toward the conscious life beyond materialistic and hedonistic goals, to an appreciation of the sanctity and inherent dignity of all life—make him very much what the writer Andrew Harvey would call a “Sacred Activist,” someone who is concerned at all times to act from a unified, sacred consciousness. The poet is not a court jester, not an aesthetic garnish on the loaded plate of greed and desire. For Hesse,

Great poets feel into the future with most sensitive antennas and live out ahead of us a piece of future development, a yet unrealized potential. Poets and philosophers, if they do not sell out to please, but have the courage to be themselves, represent the most precious and dangerous models a culture can have. They don’t supply a readymade set of duties and doctrines to be followed, but they show and teach the opposite: the path to individuality and personal conscience.

A poet is an explorer, a visionary, imagining what convention censors, a messenger “between the familiar and the unknown as if he were at home in both places.”

During times when quantitative, objectivist science claimed its exclusive supremacy as the only permissible worldview, Hesse offered a more holistic understanding of life, where faith and art, story and myth, marry analytical logic to birth a more unified wisdom.

It is an old, uneven battle between criticism and creativity, between science and art, whereby the former is always right without serving anyone and the latter again and again sows the seeds of faith, love, solace and a sense of the eternal falling on a fertile soil. Because life is stronger than death and faith is stronger than doubt.

The dangers of the modernism that ruled the twentieth century were ice clear to Hesse. He concurs with the Indian sage who, after a visit to the temple of distraction, Disneyland, simply remarked: “There must be very little joy in a culture which needs to have that much fun.” Hesse saw through the fallacy of replacing creative imagination and soul-inspired art with mega displays of fantasy and illusions: the fast, dazzling intoxication of the senses that results in quick-acting overstimulation and a quick-acting distraction called “fun.” But, as Hesse warns us: “The excessive emphasis on the fast-paced instant way of life is undoubtedly the most dangerous enemy of joy. As much as possible, as fast as possible, its motto. It leads to more and more fun and less and less joy.”

Art in Hesse’s vision and practice leads the way to joy. The true artist nourishes the soul. The true poet’s medium is the sacred word. Hesse tries to restore the word as an instrument of the possible and the imagined, as a luminous bridge to the unknown. He is profoundly concerned about the unconscious use and abuse of the word because when words become worn, meaning diminishes, potential shrinks, profit maximizes briefly, fun becomes addiction, the healing power of joy can be lost, and as Hesse writes in the last lines of the poem “The Living Word”:

Poetry and music invite you
to understand the splendors of creation.
A look into a mirror will confirm it.
What disturbs us often as disjointed
becomes clear and simple in a poem:
Flowers start laughing, the clouds release their rain,
the world regains its soul, and silence speaks.

The Living Word

The sun speaks to us through light.

Flowers give voice to fragrance and color.

The air communes through clouds, snow, and rain.

From the sacred center of the world

streams forth an irrepressible desire

to overcome the silence between things.

Art, the ever flowing fountain, reveals

the secret of life through word and gesture, color and sound.

The world wants to be known to spirit

and find expression for timeless wisdom.

All life longs for a language.

Deep intuitions wish to surface,

find words and numbers, lines and tones,

always evolving forms of understanding.

The red and blue of flowers

and the verses of the poet

point to the inner workings of creation,

always pregnant with beginning and never ending.

When word and sound marry,

where songs soar and art unfolds

all life is brimmed again with spirit.

And every melody and book

and every painting is a revelation,

is another fresh attempt

to unfold the harmony of life.

Poetry and music invite you

to understand the splendors of creation.

A look into a mirror will confirm it.

What disturbs us often as disjointed

becomes clear and simple in a poem:

Flowers start laughing, the clouds release their rain,

the world regains its soul, and silence speaks.

Three Harmonies

A lonely voice at night

sings out its fear and courage

through the menacing darkness

and conquers the frightful gloom.

Singing is sacred.

A second voice arises and joins in,

attunes, and keeps pace with the first,

plays call and response, breaks into laughter.

Two voices meeting in the night

can brim with delight.

When a third voice chimes in

the harmony is complete.

They soar to heaven

and match the magic of the stars.

They pounce upon and bounce off each other,

grab and repel each other,

because singing in the darkness

awakens love and brings us joy.

Three voices conjure up a firmament,

hold, release, tease, and console each other.

This world would fall into terror and darkness

without your voice, and mine and yours alternating.

The Glass Bead Game

We are ready to receive in reverence

the music of the masters, the symphonies of the spheres,

and invoke in sacred celebrations

the ancient holy spirits of the blessed ages.

We let ourselves be exalted

by magic, sacred secrets

that capture life’s wild, stormy vigor,

to transform it into revealing symbols.

Like stellar constellations those invocations

pull us into their orbit, give meaning to our life,

and nobody can fall from these circles

except toward the sacred center.

Valse Brillante

A piece by Chopin fills the hall,

a wild, licentious dance.

Lightning scorches through the window.

A wilted wreath adorns the grand piano.

You play the keys, I stroke the violin.

We play and play and play

full of fear about

who will break the magic first?

will lose the beat

and push away the candlestand

and ask the very question

we cannot answer?

Books

All the books of the world

will not bring you happiness,

but build a secret path

toward your heart.

What you need is in you:

the sun, the stars, the moon,

the illumination you were seeking

shines up from within you.

The quest for wisdom

made you comb the libraries.

Now every page speaks the truth

that flashes forth from you.

Proverb

You must become brother and sister

to each and every thing

so that they flow through you

dissolving every difference

between what belongs to you and others.

No star, no leaf shall fall—

you fall with them—

to rise again

in every new beginning.

Advice

Young man, don’t follow my example.

Find your way alone, let me move on.

My path moves slow and crooked,

through brambles, gloom, and the pain of change.

Go ahead and join the many.

Their roads are paved and far more traveled.

I need to protect my solitude,

remain alone and make time for prayer.

You see me high above you, yes.

Please, never envy me.

For you I reached the summit.

But I know this mountain is just a hill.

Do You Know This Too?

Do you know this too?

You are in the middle of a cheerful party,

when a sudden stillness takes hold of you,

and you hastily have to leave the happy hall.

Back in your bed you lay awake

like someone suffering from a sudden heartache.

The fun and laughter disappear like smoke

and you break into tears: do you know this too?

In a Town Unknown

A strange sorrow stabs my soul.

I walk through this town unknown.

The place is deep asleep this night.

The roofs reflect the moon.

The clouds flee across the sky

high over steeples and spires

without a sound, but full of force

like a homeless spirit searching for peace.

And you feel seized by a sudden sorrow.

You yield to this mysterious magic,

let all you carry drop from your hand

and weep and weep your bitter tears.

Aboard at Night

The ocean is pounding on the wall,

the night sky gazes through my porthole,

and the desert air blows its hot breath on me.

Ten times already I have awakened.

Speechless, breathless, I lay restless in this burning heat.

I have given up on getting back to sleep.

The ship’s engines throb and thump

like a heart thrashing in wild desire,

beating, pushing onward into endless spaces

in futile, pain-soaked pursuit of something always new.

Oh, if your heart now quivers

and if you lack a crystal-clear spirit

this cabin won’t serve as a nest to rest.

You will remain besieged by relentless, incessant yearning,

pursued by most familiar sorrows, chase love in vain,

and ardent, unfulfilled desires rob you blind.

Demons and devils will haunt you everywhere

because your true enemy rules your heart,

from whom you cannot run or flee.

Facing Africa

Good is the comfort of a home,

sweet to slumber under your own roof,

the comfort of children, a garden, and a dog.

But hardly returned from the last journey,

the wide, wild world lures you again.

Better to long to belong

while you wander alone under the stars

with your yearning your only companion.

To feel contained and serene

you must have found peace in your heart,

while the true wandering soul is always

weary and worn by broken dreams.

It is easier to bear the worries of wandering

than to find peace in your hometown,

where only the sage can live in a happy house

surrounded by trite troubles and daily distractions.

I prefer to seek and search without luck

instead of staying tied to snug comfort.

To me even good fortune is always only a brief visit

and never like a lasting home.

Now and Then

Now and then everything feels wrong and desolate,

and sprawling in pain, weak and exhausted,

every effort reverts to grief,

every joy collapses with broken wings.

And our longing listens for distant summons,

aching to receive news filled with joy.

But we still miss bliss,

fortunate fates elude from afar.

Now is the time to listen within,

tend our inner garden mindfully

until new flowers, new blessings can blossom.

There Are Times

There are times when a bird calls

or a breeze rustles the branches

or a dog barks from a distant home

and I must fall silent and listen.

My soul returns to forgotten places

where a thousand years ago

the birds and the wind blowing

were more like my brothers.

My soul transforms into a tree,

into a creature, and a cloud passing by,

my soul returns to me with questions,

but I stay the same and find no answer.

III

Nature: Source of Strength and Solace

1. Like a Wave—Wie eine Welle (1901)

2. A Rainy Night—Regennacht (1903)

3. Bursting with Blossoms—Voll Blüten (1918)

4. Autumn Takes Hold of My Life—Gang im Spätherbst (1919)

5. Pruned Oak—Gestutzte Eiche (1919)

6. Rain at Night—Nächtlicher Regen (1933)

7. To a Leaf Wilting—Welkes Blatt (1933)

8. What Would My Life Mean?—Was war mein Leben? (1903)

9. September—September (1927)

10. Walking at Night—Gang bei Nacht (1913)

11. On a Long March through the Night—Auf einem nächtlichen Marsch (1915)

12. At the Summit of Summer—Höhe des Sommers (1933)

13. The Creaking of a Broken Branch—Knarren eines geknickten Astes (1962)

Nature: Source of Strength and Solace

NATURE WAS HESSE’S FIRST and foremost teacher: the garden, the forest, animals. An appreciation of, a devotion to, a never-tiring observation and contemplation of natural life inspired Hesse’s writing on every page. The young boy already fled the narrow streets of Calw to explore a less structured, less regimented, much freer playground for his limitless curiosity and imagination. Even during his apprentice years and work in bookshops in Tübingen and Basel, Hesse used every opportunity to escape city life and went on long hiking trips in the mountains of Germany and Switzerland. Between 1904 and 1912 he lived in a rural setting in Gaienhofen on Lake Constance, where he built his own house. Reading good books and a walk in the woods alternated and filled Hesse’s daily schedule throughout his years. An avid gardener with much knowledge about the art and science of taking care of plants, he nourished his creativity by direct experience, by the cultivation of contemplative interaction with nature. The harvest of this dedication was rich, full of insightful analogies and an abundance of perceptive metaphors.

With a growing awareness he understood the meaning of the great Hermes Trismegistos’s adage—As above, so below; as outside, so inside—and perceived the eternal rhythms underlying the seasonal changes. The progressions in nature are the same in the life of every plant and animal as they are in a human being. The natural and spiritual build a dynamic polarity of change upon a common base of unity. The decline of the West was not obvious only to Oswald Spengler. Hesse saw clearly the problems and the destructive forces in society that led to the catastrophes of the early twentieth century.

In Hesse’s young years finding strength and solace in nature became a popular movement. Naturist communities like the one at Monte Verità near Ascona in Switzerland served as islands of sanity and a counterweight to the hectic and stress-filled city existence during an age of rapid industrialization when unhealthy working and living conditions caused much suffering, especially in the factory workers.

Young Hesse met Gusto Gräser, the founder of the naturist community at Monte Verità, and spent months with people like Arnold Ehret, who advocated vegetarianism, raw food, growing one’s own food, fasting, and other ways to “return to nature” that became popular again at the turn of the twenty-first century as the signs of our devastation of nature were becoming inescapably, chillingly clear. In 1914 Hesse wrote to a friend: “Give my regards to the people at Monte Verità … I have always carried the seeking of these people in my heart.” Hesse remained close to the nature seekers but also continued on his own unique path, as he did throughout his life. For him a naive and sentimental journey back to the reclaimed Garden of Eden is neither possible nor desirable. Nature provides sustenance, nature is to be honored, nature is sacred, but not a sort of tropical paradise fantasy where a cornucopia of fruit drops into our mouths: “Nothing feels better during hard times than blending with nature, but not as a passive hedonism, but as a source for creative work.”

To a man attuned to nature as Hesse was to the unsentimental rigors of natural change, a gray sky became an opportunity to understand his own life:

I am lying down and look at the evening sky, which has been for hours increasingly covered with little, silent, irregular clouds. There must be winds above which we do not feel down here. The winds spin the cloud-strings like yarn. Just like the evaporation and condensation as rain of water above the earth follows a certain rhythm, just like the seasons of the year and ebb and high tide follow firm laws and carry certain consequences, so everything happens within us according to certain laws and rhythms … It would be impossible for me to declare whether this cloudy sky, quietly moving by itself in these manifold forms is producing a mirror in my soul or whether it is the other way around. I see this sky as an image of my inner movements.

Hesse’s love of nature received much criticism even from his friends in a time when the speed of trains and cars and then airplanes brought a fascination and even an obsession with the machine, with the rapidly progressing technologies promising to deliver a tangible utopia and final liberation from the unwelcome constraints nature places upon us:

My friends and foes know this about me and scold me for not sharing their pride and joy and their faith in technology so dominant in our times. I do not believe in the idea of progress, I do not believe in the glory and greatness of our world today or any of the leading ideologies, but I have an infinite reverence for what we call nature.

The alienation from nature was one of the main characteristics of the twentieth century and cost a heavy price, which we may or may not be able to reverse through the increasing ecological awareness that emerged toward the end of that century. Hesse saw the dangers in this separation and not only warned us in his writing but actively practiced a lifestyle of respect for and intense interaction with, as well as symbolic contemplation of, the natural world. For Hesse, the harmony ruling nature is not a sweet, idyllic bed of blooming roses offering perpetual bliss, not a home of complete comfort in which we can move, guided by infallible instinct, as plants and animals experience nature. But as Hesse patiently shows us, we can reduce our alienation from nature, and move from control and domination fantasies, from insulation of natural processes in us, toward an appreciation, a more intimate relationship, a reconciliation, and toward an attitude of grateful awe.

Hesse’s poetic path renders words magical. He speaks about nature with a language full of symbols, metaphors, associations, rhythms, and rhymes that can lead us from an attitude and an ideology of “efficient” use and seemingly legitimate abuse of nature to a less aggressive, less violent, more caring, and more participatory way of being with and being in nature. The more we value nature the more it bestows on us. Hesse’s nature poems are invitations to reenter the garden with a softer touch, a gentler footprint, a deeper interest in seeing the garden growing. The patient tending of this outer growth will yield a much richer inner harvest than we can ever imagine. It will fashion a lamp to guide us through the darkness of our era, when all our karmic debts come back like a tsunami, threatening to devastate and destroy us.

Like a Wave

Like a wave crowned with foam

flinging upward its frothing brilliance

before sinking seaward again.

Like a cloud floating on a breeze

stirring the souls of so many seekers

fading soon as a silver sliver in the sky.

And like a song rising from the edge of a hot street,

with mysterious sounds and magical rhymes

seizing the heart and kneading it over the land.

So my life drifts slowly through time

and will wane before long and still reach the placeless space

where the tides of desire rejoin the timeless ocean.

A Rainy Night

A steady stream of almost silent rain

drops on every roof and windowsill

and stretches like a veil

deep over the darkness of the land.

It trickles and tumbles in the wind

with no movement of its own and yet alive.

The fields draw near the clouds.

Even heaven bows to the solid ground.

A rhythmic, subtle song sates the space,

swells, sways, and soaks the night in sorrow

as if a lone violin were delving deep

into dark, secret yearnings

transforming fiery torment into tone

while touching here and there a homeless heart,

which found no words

for its deep longings.

What neither words nor music could express

the wind and rain intone with quiet strength.

They fill the rainy night with a tender lullaby

and the steady rhythms of this song

sustain and cradle and appease

all unheard struggles, all unhealed pain.

Bursting with Blossoms

The peachtree is bursting with blossoms.

Some will ripen as fruit.

The peach blossoms shine bright in rose colors

through the blue sky and the passing clouds.

Ideas too break open like buds of blossoms,

at least a hundred every day—

Let them unfold and roam as they wish!

Don’t ask for rewards!

There must be time for play and innocence in life

and room for boundless blossoms.

The world would otherwise be too small

and our life not a delight.

Autumn Takes Hold of My Life

Autumn rain has drenched the gray forest.

A brisk morning breeze blows through the valley.

The chestnuts crack hard, tumbling from the trees.

They burst open, moist, brown as if full of joy.

Autumn takes hold of my life.

Gales split and tear my leaves.

My branches are shaking—did I bear fruit?

My flowers of love bear the fruit of suffering.

My flowers of faith bear the fruit of hate.

The wind rattles my brittle branches, but I laugh.

I still stand strong in the storm.

What do I care about bearing fruit, about achieving goals?

I blossomed and flowers were my purpose.

Now I am wilting and nothing but wilting is my aim.

Hearts don’t beat for distant goals.

God lives in me, God dies in me,

God suffers in my soul: that is enough purpose.

Right or wrong, flower or fruit,

nothing but names, it is all the same.

A brisk morning breeze blows through the valley.

The chestnuts crack hard, tumbling from the trees.

They burst open, I too break open, burnished with joy.

Pruned Oak

Oh oak tree, how they have pruned you.

Now you stand odd and strangely shaped!

You were hacked a hundred times

until you had nothing left but spite and will!

I am like you, so many insults and humiliations

could not shatter my link with life.

And every day I raise my head

beyond countless insults toward new light.

What in me was once gentle, sweet, and tender

this world has ridiculed to death.

But my true self cannot be murdered.

I am at peace and reconciled.

I grow new leaves with patience

from branches hacked a hundred times.

In spite of all the pain and sorrow

I’m still in love with this mad, mad world.

Rain at Night

The sound of rain slipped into my sleep

and touched me until I woke.

Now I hear the rain and feel it.

Its thousand voices fill the night,

each drop a message moist and cool.

It whispers, laughs, and groans.

Enchanted, I begin to listen

to its symphony of flowing tones.

After the dry, hard notes

of unrelenting sunny days

the rain’s sad, mellow sorrow

calls me like a sobbing soul.

I keep a child buried in my heart

deep beneath lots of pride and hard scales of conceit.

But someday the child will shatter the armor

and burst out in a torrent of tears.

Long-held walls of separation will crumble

and what was silenced will reclaim its voice.

New joy, new grief will gush freely

and this is how my soul grows wide.

To a Leaf Wilting

Every blossom wants to become fruit.

Every morning turns into evening without regret.

Nothing on earth is eternal

except change, except taking leave.

The most splendid summer

yearns to fade into fall.

Oh, autumn leaf, be still and yielding

when the wind wants to seize you.

Do not resist, be a player in the game.

Surrender to the change in motion.

Let yourself be broken, seized,

and blown to the next home.

What Would My Life Mean?

What would my life mean, if it ended today?

Was it wasted, adrift in dreams? No, it was a circle

of inner joys I gathered to me with both hands

and passed on and received again and again.

It was a union of passion with the earth,

whose fervor drenched happiness on me

and always furthered my goals

with glowing gestures toward eternal life.

It was a lifelong brotherly union with water,

with the winds blowing through mountains and fields,

a covenant with the clouds crossing the blue sky.

These brothers invoked for me the hymns of home.

I belonged to these great, eternal elements

who served me as my family.

My crime in all these years was

that I loved them more than people.

September

The garden is mourning.

Cold rain drags the flowers down.

Summer is leaving

in a slow, silent retreat.

Golden leaf after golden leaf

drops from the acacia tree.

Fading summer smiles in surprise

at the dying garden splendor.

Summer stays a little longer with the roses

as the passing season readies for rest and peace.

Slowly it closes its big, blooming eyes.

Even summer has grown tired.

Walking at Night

Bush and meadow, field and tree,

stand in their self-sufficient silence.

Each belonging wholly to itself.

Each deep in its own dream.

Clouds float by and stars stream light

as if appointed as higher sentinels

and the mountain with its steep ridges

towers above, dark, tall, and distant.

Everything remains and will continue.

Only I am alone with anguish and grief.

I drift far from the heart of God

without a purpose through the land.

On a Long March through the Night

We march with storm and slanted rain.

Dark open fields and cloud shadows

are our solemn companions.

Suddenly a path of light

opens between dark clouds.

And a moon-filled night

gazes quietly over the swarming landscape.

The heavens offer islands of blue,

solid stars send their greetings,

and the edges of the clouds

burn in silver flames of moonlight.

Soul of mine, be ready.

Distant brothers are calling

to take us from the darkness

to step upward on a golden ladder.

Soul of mine, now drink deeply of these symbols.

Drown yourself totally in this vast space!

Your dark path too has God

as guide toward the light.

At the Summit of Summer

The passionate blue of the summer sky

weathers toward a more ethereal light,

softens into a poetic, magic color

which only September can engender.

The summer’s fullness almost overnight

transforms into the golden embers of harvest.

Everything brims over with the joys of being full

and is more than ready to receive fall.

Now, soul of mine, take off the cloak of time,

discard your suffering and sorrows,

begin to prepare yourself for the ascent

toward that dawn you longed for long.

The Creaking of a Broken Branch

This broken branch stuck spliced

to the tree perhaps for years,

it creaks in the wind with a hoarse crackle,

barren of all leaves, barren of all bark.

Still this branch clings worn and torn,

clings to life and death too long.

It forces out a tuneless squeak,

harsh, spiteful, still clenched

and full of fear of the final crack.

Still it may creak just one more summer

or even through another ashen winter.

1962: the last poem Hesse wrote before his death

IV

In Dialogue with the Divine

1. Philosophy—Philosophie (1900)

2. We Loaf through Life—Wir leben hin (1907)

3. God, I Am Alone—Der Einsame an Gott (1914)

4. Going to Sleep—Beim Schlafengehen (1911)

5. Fateful Days—Schicksalstage (1918)

6. Confession—Bekenntnis (1918)

7. The Inner Path—Weg nach innen (1918)

8. Contemplation—Besinnung (1933)

9. Pain—Schmerz (1933)

10. The Savior—Der Heiland (1940)

11. Bhagavad Gita—Bhagavad Gita (1914)

12. An Ancient Buddha Decaying in a Japanese Forest Ravine—Uralte Buddha-Figur in einer japanischen Waldschlucht verwitternd (1958)

13. A Raised Finger—Der erhobene Finger (1961)

In Dialogue with the Divine

ALL OF HESSE’S WORKS and certainly all of his contemplative poetry can be read as a never-ending, constantly evolving dialogue with the inner and outer divine. Hesse is a pilgrim of the world who writes to tell others about his journey, be it in Demian, Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Journey to the East, or his masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game. Hesse’s parents were missionaries in India before he was born. His uncle was a highly respected scholar of Indian religion and spoke ten Indian languages, but the pious, Protestant Christian home had as many strict rules as it had little love. Young Hesse constantly rebelled against the parental indoctrination, hated the blind obedience demanded of him, was crushed, barely survived, and rebelled again in ever-repeating cycles until he found refuge and inspiration for his spiritual quest in the ancient, sacred texts of Hinduism, Chinese Buddhism, and Taoism. The relation between the individual and the divine, between the realm of faith and the secular world, became one of his life’s themes. The sacred scriptures of the East gave him soul support and strengthened the sincere seeker in his quest for truth and meaning. Somewhere between the rigid dogmatism of his Christian environment and the hectic hedonism of modern materialism there must be a deeper path, a more profound way to experience and interpret this human existence. With tremendous courage and a mind open to face mystery and uncertainty, Hesse explored the spiritual world. He wanted to cultivate a continuous dialogue with God, break out of schematic thinking, and address the larger questions of life that neither science nor the church nor the marketplace could answer.

Myth, story, poetry, parables, and language enriched with symbol and metaphor, rhythm and rhyme, are capable of reaching much deeper into the mysteries of life. The perpetual struggle to express just a small aspect of truth that eludes us means again and again to retreat into the realm of the unsayable and indefinable. This back-and-forth was a most consuming endeavor for this author:

Nothing eludes the grasp of words more and is all the more necessary to undertake than to present to the readers realities for which there is neither evidence nor even probability. But to find words for the voice of being and draw our attention to it, brings us a step closer to give birth to our own growth and consciousness.

Care of the soul, developing inner potential, the inward journey as the foundation, the primary prerequisite, and indispensable inspiration of social action—these were Hesse’s ambitious aims. In thousands of letters to his readers Hesse diligently answered questions, gave advice, and helped when he could. To one reader, who accused him of overemphasizing the inner life of a person, Hesse retorted:

You tell me the seeking of the Self is less important than the finding of appropriate social relations, but these are not two different matters. Whoever searches for his true Self is at the same time looking for the laws of all life, because the innermost being is the same for all human beings. It is the divine essence, it is spirit. That is why the Brahmin greets each stranger with “Tat twam asi”—this is you!

The philosopher Hesse, the spiritual pilgrim and poetic sage, was not understood or appreciated by his contemporaries or by the freedom-loving Hesse fans of the 1960s or by the literary critics who dismissed him with facile arrogance as a neo-romantic throwback. A true encounter with Hesse’s insights yields a far richer, deeper, more primordial, and timeless wisdom that we are now more in a position to respect:

Our objective, empirical, individual ego, if we observe it a bit, has a very fickle, constantly vacillating character which is very dependent on external circumstance …, but then there is the Self, hidden within the Ego, intertwined with it, but not to be confused with it. The Self, the holy, sacred “I” (what the Indians call Atman and see as equal to Brahman), is not personal, but is our participation with God in life; in the impersonal and transpersonal totality of being. To embark on the journey towards that Self is much more valuable than yielding to the demands of the Ego. The timeless Self is quiet and patient whereas the Ego is incessantly vociferous and anxious.

The act of writing was a form of prayer for Hesse, an invocation to the divine, a spiritual act of devotion: “Religion, myths and poetry are the human attempt to transform the unsayable into symbols which the scientific age tries in vain to flatten and fit into its rational categories.” What Hesse was looking for was not the security of belief or the certainty of dogma, but the living experience of the divine with and without the expanding joy in and the reverence for the mystery of life that it brings. Belief systems were for Hesse the antidote to the experience of faith:

I believe in spite of all its obvious absurdities, life nevertheless has a meaning. I surrender to my inability to comprehend the ultimate meaning of life, but I am willing to sense it, even if it requires sacrificing myself. You cannot force this faith on anyone, not even yourself, but it can become experience. The absence of this felt faith is usually replaced by beliefs in a church or in science or in patriotism or socialism, some kind of refuge where conventional moralities, conformist programs and standardized recipes are dispersed. Certified affiliations, lifelong membership cards to organized social structures guarantee a false comfort, the illusion of security, an illusionary ticket to salvation.

Fears of exclusion or even repercussions from a group we once belonged to keep many of us in line with a not at all silent, but very noisy and judgmental majority. However, words in the service of spirit can offer a different path:

Whoever leaves a congregation initially has to face a solitude which often makes him soon miss the community. Only at the end of his solitary journey will he realize that he has joined a great, new, but invisible community which encompasses all cultures and all religions. He will be stripped of everything rational and dogmatic, but will instead feel enriched by the spiritual brotherhood of all times, all nations and all languages.

Our brothers in this invisible community are always available and ready to advise us. They are accessible by reaching for a book or making a few clicks on the internet. Rilke, Rumi, Kabir, St. Francis, Yeats, Ramakrishna, and T. S. Eliot—just to name a few poetic guides—provide powerful insights toward living a more conscious, fulfilling, and meaningful life.

In his search for a universal spiritual brotherhood that transcends all laws and dogmas of religion, Hesse joined this community of great mystics, inspiring us to live a life radiant with sacred knowledge and sacred purpose.

Philosophy

We evolve from the unconscious to total awareness

and spiral once back to our dark source through many paths

to what we knew in the beginning.

From there we get expelled without mercy

into the prison of doubt: philosophy.

And slowly make our first steps

in the maze of irony.

What follows is intense contemplation,

through many polished mirrors.

We are caught in the cold darkness

of the mind’s iron grid

mired in the icy split,

the frozen pit of world contempt.

But then we are guided back

through the narrow gate of conscious wisdom

to the bittersweet bliss of the elder peace

grounded on well-earned self-contempt.

We Loaf through Life

We loaf through life, fritter ourselves on form and farce.

Only in days of torment and desolation

we sense the timeless ground of life,

that one ground sometimes illumined by dark dreams.

We amuse ourselves with sham and fraud.

We are like the blind stumbling after the blind.

We scavenge in vain in time and space

For what can only be found in the eternal.

We hope for healing and salvation

from vapid, ephemeral illusions—

Let us never forget: we are divine

and primary partners in creation.

God, I Am Alone

I am lonely, God, shaken by the storms of fate.

Unloved and abandoned

I struggle in this hostile night.

My heart grows heavy, and grows bitter

each time I think of you.

You are a blind God, full of cruelties,

full of actions we do not understand.

Why do you, you who have the power,

why do you let the monsters and the scoundrels

be happy, while the noble souls

have to endure their ghastly misery?

Why do you torture me who loved you,

chase me into the night alone?

Why do you rob me of everything

while you give freely to every vicious fool?

Rarely I complained to you,

and almost never cursed you.

For years I served you as a faithful priest

and praised you as my Lord and God.

You were the goal and purpose of my life.

I strove for the good and aspired to love.

I pursued compassion and purity as my highest goals

even if I was flailing in the dark.

And yet you never fulfilled a dream of mine,

you never answered any of my prayers.

Instead you graced my enemies with favor after favor.

For me it was always work and struggle

while next door the happy rabble

played guitar and sang and danced.

Oh God, you are my torturer

who threw me to those who mocked and despised me

when my heart reached out tenderly

to blind and loving, trusting hope.

You left me divided, smeared, and in contempt.

I had to flee in shame from women’s scorn.

Now I am lonely and have lost all faith

and walk through this world without God.

My nights are sleepless, my days are dark with dank.

I tear myself in torment, for you a shard of nothing.

Although your brutal hand breaks me with passion,

your fingers, God, dig into my wounds.

Yet you shall not see me giving up, God,

or falling on my knees, or crying out.

Oh merciless God, your most ferocious desire to flay me

cannot flay me from love for you.

All you want from me is to love my life,

to embrace this life devoid of purpose

with wild passion and total surrender.

In spite of all humiliation and oppression

I still know how to love life.

My heart now loves you in spiteful defiance:

You and your mysterious ways.

Yes, I love you, God, and love you with passion

and love this crazy world, so badly ruled by you.

 … Listen, God! I hear the laughter and weeping

of the revelers who are my neighbors.

I hear women shriek and silver goblets clink

but my unlucky, starving heart

beats for a much deeper, sweeter mystic passion,

not satisfied with frivolous frills.

I am loving life and all I am.

When my eyes grow weary,

I shake off this weakness with a new fervor,

immerse myself into the night and wind,

breathe in the shining stars and every cloud.

I beg my eager senses to feed my ever-hungry soul.

Going to Sleep

This day has made me tired.

I wish to sleep

and welcome this starlight

like a child after play.

Hands of mine, stop doing.

Mind of mine, stop thinking.

All my senses are getting ready

to sink soon into slumber and sweet sleep.

No longer fettered, my soul slips free,

ready to soar upward in its infinite flight,

to live fully its thousand lives

in the magic journeys of the night.

Fateful Days

When the days turn gray

and the world looks cold and unkind,

your tentative, tender, timid trust

is then thrust back on itself.

When there is no further way forward

and your old life has lost its luster

your faith will find new paths

to new heavens never dreamt of.

What was foreign and hostile to you,

you will find nested in your inmost center.

You give your destiny another name,

throw your arms around it.

Whatever seemed to beat you down,

now shows its friendship freely, provides inspiration,

serves as a guide, as a messenger,

to call you always toward greater heights.

Dedicated to Romain Rolland

Confession

The games of glamour and glitter

I have played with gusto.

Let others have goals and ambitions,

for me, living is enough.

Whatever has moved me

has all become a symbol.

I always feel the power of this moment,

the presence of boundless oneness in my life.

To make my life inspired and abundant

I read in life’s open book of symbols

because now I have that depth within me.

My eternal, changeless essence is at peace.

The Inner Path

Someone who found the inner path

who, dedicated to deep meditation,

got a glimpse of this essential truth,

that we choose God and World

only as metaphors and symbols.

Every thought and action then

becomes an inner conversation,

a meeting between God and World.

Contemplation

The spirit is divine and eternal.

Our paths lead toward it.

We are its mirror and instrument.

Our innermost passion is to become spirit,

to shine in its light.

But we are made of earth and are mortal,

feel heavy, and carry the burden of creatures.

Mother Nature nurtures and nourishes us,

nurses us along from cradle to the grave,

and yet she cannot give us peace.

The mythic mother is ruptured

by the eternal spark of the spirit.

The heavenly father turns the child into man,

leaves innocence behind,

and summons us to conflict and conscience.

Torn between mother and father,

torn between body and spirit,

we, the most fragile child of creation, hesitate.

We, who are able to endure in our souls

suffering like no other being.

We, who are capable of the most noble achievement:

Love fueled and filled by faith and hope.

The path is thorny, sin and death its food.

We often stray into darkness and feel

it had been better never to be born.

But our yearning always calls us

toward our ultimate calling: to light and spirit

and we do feel it deeply: God loves this fragile creature

with a unique tender blaze of affection.

Therefore love is ever present and possible

when we brothers get confused in conflict.

We know neither condemnation nor hatred

will bring us closer to our most sacred goal,

but only patient love and loving patience.

Pain

Pain is a humbling master,

a wild fire burning through our life

which we no longer recognize as ours,

a wall of flames surrounding and separating us.

Wisdom and love become shrunken,

solace and hope grow thin and vanish.

But pain embraces us with passion.

We waste away to become essence.

Our earthly form withers and twists,

our ego flusters and fights the flames

then sinks still into ashes

and surrenders to its master.

The Savior

Again and again the savior is born in human form.

His message is received by the pious, but also falls on deaf ears.

The savior gets close to us and then we lose him again.

Again and again the savior rises above the world,

carries the burdens and the desires of all people,

and each time we nail him to the cross again.

Time and again God sends his message,

reaches from heaven to the valley of sin,

longs as eternal spirit to suffuse flesh.

The savior is always moving among us,

in order to bless us today and tomorrow.

He looks with calm eyes straight into

our fears, tears, problems, and agonies

but we do not dare to face him directly.

Only the eyes of children can bear his gaze.

Bhagavad Gita

Once more I lay awake for hours.

Strange suffering had seized my soul.

I saw fires blaze across the earth,

thousands of innocents maimed and killed.

My heart renounced the blind god of war,

that grim reaper of pain without purpose.

But then a glimmer from the past

came into my dark, lonely brooding.

From an ancient Indian sacred book

I recalled wise words concerning peace.

“War and peace, they count the same

because no death can touch the spirit realm.

“Whether peace reigns or is ruined,

the world’s woes will wear on.

“You have to struggle, cannot rest.

Apply your strength, it is God’s will!

“But even if you succeed a thousand times,

the world’s heart will beat on unchanged.”

An Ancient Buddha Decaying in a Japanese Forest Ravine

Long rain and cold nights of frost

unveil your shape, soft and worn away.

Covered with moss, your face still shines serene.

Your half-closed eyes still reveal

your calm focus on eternity,

your tranquil yes to the changing over

into the formless void of the unlimited.

The slowly withering features of your face

still speak of your noble mission,

but dampness, mud, and soil

are finishing the fate of form, completing its purpose.

Tomorrow you will be root and rustling leaf.

Tomorrow you will turn into water mirroring clear sky.

You will curl as ivy, grow as fern and algae,

become symbol of all transformations,

and show the eternal oneness behind all change.

A Raised Finger

Master Dju-dschi, it is told,

was a quiet, gentle man.

He had renounced all words and teachings,

because words carry illusions,

and he took great pains to shun deception.

Many of his disciples, monks and novices,

were engaged in fervent speech and elegant debate

about the meaning of this world, the highest good,

but the master remained silently attentive

and mindful of excessive zeal.

And whenever they consulted him,

with all their serious and pretentious questions

about the true meaning of ancient scriptures,

about the names of Buddha, about enlightenment,

about the beginning of creation and the end of this world,

Master Dju-dschi simply remained silent.

The wise man would raise one finger,

pointing upward with a wordless, eloquent gesture

that became an ever more ardent and urgent admonition.

This gesture talked and taught, praised and punished,

and pointed so straight to the heart of truth,

that some of his disciples in time began

to understand his gently raised finger,

were shaken by its message, and awakened.

V

The Seasons of Life and the Passage of Time

1. Dreaming of Paradise—Paradies-Traum (1926)

2. It Is Too Late Now—Zu Spät (1909)

3. Devotion—Andacht (1917)

4. Happiness—Glück (1907)

5. Metamorphosis—Wandlung (1912)

6. The Night—Die Nacht (1917)

7. Growing Old—Im Altwerden (1914)

8. The Road to Solitude—Weg in die Einsamkeit (1918)

9. The Pilgrim—Der Pilger (1921)

10. Aging—Altern (1931)

11. Departure—Abschied (1920)

12. When I Saw Her Again—Wiedersehen (1916)

13. Alone—Allein (1906)

14. Reaching a Goal—Dem Ziel entgegen (1906)

15. Resignation—Resignation (1907)

16. Stages—Stufen (1941)

The Seasons of Life and the Passage of Time

HERMANN HESSE NOT ONLY lived to the ripe age of eighty-five, he continued to appreciate the blessings and challenges each phase of life brings and takes away. The precious wisdom of maturity, so rarely savored in our time and so eagerly traded for the ephemeral ecstasies of adolescence, was for Hesse a dark wine to be relished. He penned his masterpiece, The Glass Bead Game, in his sixties. Some of his most profound poems were composed shortly before his death.

The games of modern humanity were in Hesse’s eyes trivial and futile: “Behind the acting mask is a huge baby, excessively stupid, full of feigned happiness and incessantly smiling.” A foolish, super-rosy outlook and the addiction to sensational novelties, movie stars as idols replacing heroes, a daily diet of catastrophes and violence disguised as news: these are the drugs of the modern lifestyle, ever present and delivered in massive doses to a degree that other choices are simply drowned out and do not even have to be illegalized. Hesse wanted to keep a different path open for the seeking individual.

The febrile war our culture wages against time, its constant message to us to compress one’s life into a glorified permanent juvenile arrest, was clearly identified by Hesse as one of the most dangerous and destructive follies of contemporary society:

Aging is far from being only a process of reducing, wilting and fading. Old age, like every other stage of life has its own merits, its own magic, its own wisdom, its own sorrow. In the peak periods of all cultures, old age was revered for good reasons. Today we worship adolescence and we won’t hold it against the young that they see their phase as the best, but let us not believe this nonsense propaganda that old age is worthless.… Whoever becomes old consciously, can observe that in spite of diminishing powers and potencies, every year brings an increase and an enhancement in the infinite web of relations and connections. As long as one is conscious, nothing temporary, no past experience is ever truly lost.

The loss we feel at every transition, from stage to stage in life, is always balanced with a hitherto unexpected, and previously unimaginable, gain. Insisting on only one stage as the correct, desirable phase causes us harm and pain. In moving through time we acquire an invaluable wealth of impressions, knowledge, and understanding: what Hesse calls the treasures of experience:

Who would we old people be without the gallery of memories, the treasures of experience? But with these treasures we are rich and we do not drag a used up body towards its end and oblivion, but know, we are also the carriers of treasure which remains alive and radiant as long as we breathe.

Words lose their power and meaning through careless usage—they do not stay “young”—but in poetry they reveal their timeless origin and value as an ever fresh invocation of astonishment, awe, and appreciation of life. “Not until we are old do we truly notice how rare beauty is and what a miracle makes flowers bloom next to factories and cannons and that poetry survives in the flood of newspapers and stock reports.”

In a letter, Hesse congratulated a reader for his achievement of an advanced age:

As you enter a new dimension of life, the vestibulum of old age, an already old person wishes you the gifts which life offers us at this stage: increased independence from the judgment of others, less vulnerability to compulsion and more undisturbed reverence before the eternal.

The problems of old age are compensated for with new gifts of grace. Old age can “lead to lethargy, senility, an ugly indifference, but it can also shine forth differently in a given situation as serenity, patience, humour, deep wisdom and Tao.” So much depends on our genuine acceptance and authentic appreciation of every phase, of every season of life. It may seem strange at first, but this flowing with time eventually releases the grip of time on us, bestows a freedom from time, and allows us to feel the timeless present.

Hesse speaks of aging as a kind of comedy:

In order to experience happiness you must become independent of time and with it independent of fear and hope. We read this or that and struggle for a while through the world of perennial problems, each of which can never be solved but only experienced, and in the end life always throws us back into a situation where we once again attempt the seemingly impossible, where we engage in a seemingly hopeless task with new desire and new zeal. A conscious man has only one consolation in this hopeless, age-old game: everything that takes place in time can be overcome, time is an illusion, all conditions, all ideals, all phases of life do not progress in a linear, successive fashion as taught in schools and are not only connected through a documentable causality, but also have an eternal, extratemporal existence. This means that the kingdom of God and every other human ideal which we project into an astronomically remote future can at any moment become experience and reality.

We are reminded of Hesse’s spiritual novel Siddhartha, of Vasudeva, the ferryman who teaches the Brahmin seeker the relativity of time while they are together by the river. This ancient symbol of the current passing by, carrying the boat with its underlying never-ending flow, illustrates time and the timeless as coexisting realities. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once eloquently expressed this relationship in the Sonnets to Orpheus: “Take time as nothing but a tiny step within the presence of the infinite.”

Old and young, birth and death, are complementary poles in larger, meaningful sequences and concurrences that are continuously generated and regenerated by ever deeper rhythmic and cyclical forces. Hesse did not shy away from reflecting on the ultimate mystery of death. Although he was not a proponent of a belief in a literal reincarnation, he had a clear sense that “The call of life to us will never end,” as he puts it in his famous poem “Stages.”

Strongly influenced by Hindu philosophy and yet deeply anchored in the Christian tradition, he formulated his understanding of the threshold at the end of physical life:

To die means to return to the collective unconscious, to merge with it in order to be transformed into form, into pure form.… Every path, whether directed towards the sun or the light leads towards death and to a new birth whose pains the soul shuns. But every living being walks this path, every living being dies, and each and every one is born, because the eternal mother returns every life forever back to the world.

Dreaming of Paradise

Blue flowers flaunt their fragrance.

The white lotus drinks my eyes.

Each leaf radiates a magic spell.

Every tendril coils a silent serpent.

Every calyx morphs into a lithe body.

I see tiger eyes blinking through green blades,

white women lurking through fertile swamps,

and watch red flowers springing from their head.

I smell the steamy sweat of Eros and seduction

and feel dark desires for the lascivious and the forbidden.

Each and every fruit demands a kiss

and irresistibly intoxicates my mind.

I breathe in lust and exhale bold passion.

My hungry fingers glide over breasts and bellies

of alluring women with eyes of serpents,

but I am not wooed by just one open chalice,

they all entice me with endless titillations.

A sylvan thicket of figures, flesh, and sensuous forms

encircles me, gives me a world ensouled with bliss.

Slowly my sweet melancholy yields its yearning,

stretches out in all directions.

I dissolve into a grove of women, into tree and lake,

into spring and lotus, into the open sky.

My soul I had considered sound and stable

takes flight and rises with a thousand wings.

I grow boundless and dissolve

in this lustrous cosmos united with the world.

It Is Too Late Now

I was young, shy, and needy

when I confessed to you

my tender, timid wish for love.

You found my yearning heart amusing.

Now you are exhausted, done with games.

You look at me with darkened eyes.

This time, it’s you who are in dire need

and wish to receive the love

I offered you when I was young.

Oh, dear, this love is long gone.

It can never be reclaimed.

My love no longer knows names

and simply wants to be alone.

Devotion

What people desire so furiously

leads to battle, blood, and guilt.

Once you find your home in nature,

the earth becomes your holy home

and every person is your kin.

Everywhere throughout this world

winds blow and water falls

and blue skies and precious jewels

greet you from everywhere.

My treasures are the golden clouds at dusk,

the soft gleam of the rising moon,

birds calling and the cries of creatures in the woods,

birch trees, long, sandy beaches,

rolling hills and mountain paths.

These are my heart’s possessions,

the comforts of my soul, in which it safely rests.

Don’t pit one fault against another,

just gauge yourself in every step

by the timeless, patient laws of nature.

It is she who carries you through life.

May she be your real home.

Then every morning and evening

will find you safely sheltered

in your father’s house.

Happiness

As long as you chase happiness,

you are not ready to be happy,

even if you owned everything.

As long as you lament a loss,

run after prizes in restless races,

you have not yet known peace.

But when you have moved beyond desire,

become a stranger to your goals and longings

and call no longer on happiness by name,

then your heart rises calmly

above the ebb and flow of action

and peace has reached your soul.

Metamorphosis

When I was a young man

and took my first timid steps

toward the longed-for land of love,

despair and misery threw me back

into a harsh reality I did not understand.

I found a strange way of consolation

by digging deep into my pain.

I wallowed in a lust for bitterness.

I forced every brightness into black.

My desperate desire turned into torture

of my wild and exhausted heart.

In the evening I avoided gatherings,

hid in the shadows of beech trees

along the banks of the river,

far away from every path and trail.

I felt drawn to drown myself,

pulled into dark, drifting waves.

My heart was on fire with desire for death.

Now I spend dull days

feeling nothing for hours.

I have lost touch with my soul.

Without a glimmer of hope left I see

my youthful ideals were childish illusions.

Sometimes I still remember the darkest days of my youth

as a treasure of gold buried out of reach.

But I have finally left the dead-end path

of wallowing in sweet melancholic indulgence.

When the quiet hour of dusk approaches

I brighten my room with the light of a candle.

Death and sorrow can no longer disturb my dreams.

Instead of being bombarded by pictures of chaos

I imagine nothing but a world full of light:

I imagine heavenly gardens, passionate, innocent lovers,

blissful embraces, and flower-filled celebrations.

I fashion in my dreams pure, noble women,

and men full of compassionate fervor,

and so retrieve the remains of lost treasures

and gather them into more harmonious designs.

In the solitude of tranquil hours

my yearning becomes play again.

I often laugh then without reason,

outwitting the senseless cruelties of life

with my sensual flights of fantasy.

The most beautiful image of a young woman

I had pursued with so much ardent desire,

for whom I had sacrificed the glory of my young years

—that woman who has succumbed long ago

to that daily dread of domestic duties—

is transformed in my dreams, lighter than ever,

remains without a blemish like the blossoms of spring.

She glides serenely across the magic carpet

I have laid out for her with the sweet song

of my imagination.

As she strides like a goddess

my life’s sorrows begin to fade

and my days regain a secret purpose:

To be the goddess’s reflection

and dignifying mirror.

So since I was very young

I began to build a temple

for a special kind of love

to be restored in the last hour:

A lasting power of love

without loss and desire.

The Night

The fragrance of flowers fills the valley,

the blossoms of my long-gone childhood

show their secret chalices

so rarely revealed to a dreamer.

Their innermost core mirrors the sun.

The night reigns over the mountains.

Her womb is shrouded with robes of darkness.

She spreads her gifts with a smile

to everyone who dreams.

Below, the people have lain down and sleep,

exhausted from a hard day.

Their eyes are crisscrossed from dreams

and they sigh as they turn their faces

toward the bright blossoms of childhood,

whose fragrances charm them with tenderness

to dark, mysterious realms

far away from the dour demands of the day.

The tired can rest and return

to the gentle arms of mother night.

She will caress with soothing hands

the hair of the dreaming.

We are children, quickly worn out by the sun.

Although light is our goal and holy future

every evening we recoil

back into the mother’s womb.

We babble baby names,

stumble back to an original source.

The solitary seeker stumbles too

who had set his aim so hard toward the light.

By midnight, he too is where he came from.

Even the average sleeper awakened by a nightmare

senses in the darkness of his meandering soul

this fundamental truth.

Whether aimed at the light or the night,

every life leads to death and rebirth

and the soul shrinks from these sorrows,

but nature forgets no one.

Everyone dies, everyone is being born

because the eternal mother

returns us all forever to life.

Growing Old

To be young and do good is easy,

we can ignore the brutal truth;

but when our heartbeat starts to stumble

a smile becomes a conscious task.

If you can still smile, you will be young,

will still stand strong,

pursue your passions with power,

and bend with forceful fists

the poles of the world together.

Although we see death waiting,

let us not stay standing still.

Let us face death head on.

Let us chase death away.

Death is neither here nor there.

Death walks with us everywhere.

Death is within me and within you

every time we betray life.

The Road to Solitude

The world reels from you,

each joy chars into ash.

Whatever you loved

is destroyed, dark, and dead.

This dead world feels cold,

pushing you deeper into your soul

as if pushed by a stranger’s hand.

In a distance you hear

the fading echoes of a lost home,

children’s voices and dimming whispers of love.

The road to solitude is hard,

much harder than you thought.

Even the well of dreams runs dry.

But trust your life. A greater home

is waiting at the end of the journey:

Death and rebirth are approaching.

Within you is the grave and the eternal mother.

The Pilgrim

I was always on a journey,

I was always a pilgrim,

I have kept little for myself.

All bliss and pain are behind me.

I did not know the goal

or purpose of my journey.

A thousand times I must have stumbled,

but I steadied myself each time.

Oh, I was on my way

to find the star of love.

I sensed it shining down from the heaven

with a light distant and holy.

Now that I can finally see it,

it turns out to be too late.

It has moved on in its soaring.

A heavy morning rain blows in my face.

The bright and brilliant world

I had grown to love is leaving.

I never found the pot of gold,

but I know this: my journey was brave.

Aging

Aging turns the joys of youth into sorrows

when the spring of life shrinks to a trickle.

Even pain loses its benign sting.

“This too shall pass” becomes your consolation.

What we used to fight so hard,

commitments, burdens, and imposed duties,

become refuge, comfort, cherished solace,

the desire to get another day’s work done well.

But the comforts of the safe life wear out soon.

The soul thirsts for more spirited flights.

Behind ego and time she feels death approaching

and inhales it with deep, quickening breaths.

Departure

I hear the train whistling

down in the valley green.

Tomorrow, tomorrow, I too will be gone.

I pick a last bouquet of flowers randomly,

and they wilt already before I leave.

Parting is a bitter herb,

it grows in every place I loved.

Wherever I built a house,

I never found the peace of home.

I must find shelter in myself.

All other shells crumble fast.

Whenever I truly felt at home,

home soon became strange.

But deep in my heart

I carry a seed

that grows daily in silence.

When it is ripe, I will be home

and my restless pulse will find its rest.

When I Saw Her Again

Have you forgotten

our arms were once in full embrace

and immeasurable pleasures moved back and forth

between our mouths and hands?

Have you forgotten

for a short time in spring your blonde hair

became the blissful shelter of my love?

Have you forgotten

this world full of fragrances and songs?

Now our cocoon gapes before us gray and deserted,

empty of any fiery passions of flamboyant follies.

However we have hurt each other

time heals, the heart forgets,

but the hours of our blissful union

will remain glazed with a grace

that will never end.

Alone

You can travel so many roads

and so many trails all over this world,

but remember all paths

lead to the same finish.

You can ride, you can drive

in twos or in threes,

but you must take

the last step alone.

No schooling, no skill

will suffice or save you

from having to face

each grave challenge alone.

Reaching a Goal

I always walked without a goal,

never moved toward a resting place.

My paths all seemed to be without an end.

At last, I realized I moved in circles,

and I became tired of the journey,

and on that day my life was transformed.

Now I approach goals with hesitation

because I know: at the end of each path

a death will wait for me to take my hands.

Resignation

Whoever has seen the ways of the world

will find little reason to worry

which way the compass points in the end.

He knows all paths are the same.

This one too—like all the others—

will end short of completion.

He knows the inner guidance of his heart

will always point up the same, steep street

to new sorrow and a freezing of delight.

Stages

All blossoms will wilt,

each youth fold into the mold of age.

Wisdom and virtue never last forever.

Your heart must always be ready to leave

and ready to begin again,

must form new bonds

with courage and without regret.

Every beginning offers a magic power

that protects us and helps us to endure.

This journey through the realms of life

was not meant to end in one home only.

World spirit does not want to tie us down,

wants us to soar into the open.

When we stay too long in one place,

get stuck in norm and habit, we wear out.

Only embarking on new, unknown journeys

can free us from the prison of stagnation.

Maybe the moment of our death too

is just another gate to new dimensions.

The call of life to us will never end.

Well, then, my heart, take leave and heal.

About the Translator

PROFESSOR LUDWIG MAX FISCHER, PhD, has taught German literature at American and German universities for the past four decades with numerous academic publications in the area of twentieth-century literature. He lives in Toronto, Canada.