Subject: Fifth Elegy
From: Paul Miller (phm@midsouth.rr.com)
Date: Fri Mar 31 2000 - 12:50:56 EST
Rilke's fifth duino elegy is dedicated to Frau Hertha Koenig in whose
apartment he stayed in Munich where he admired Picasso's "Family of
Saltimbanques". In fact this painting was the inspiration for the fifth
elegy.
Fifth Elegy
Tell me, who are these itinerants, these only slightly less
Prone to flight than ourselves; who from early on urgently
Twist us--we whose urgings
Are never settled? But they wring us,
Bend us, stretch us and swing us,
Throw us up and catch us again, as if down
>From the shiny air they come
To the carpet worn thin by eternal jumping--
Eternity's forlorn carpet
Laid out there like a sticking plaster as if the foretaste
Of heaven had harmed the earth.
And barely landed,
Upright there and distinct:
Huge crude letters standing there . . . and then, the strongest
Men roll them again for fun, grabbing them again
And again like August the Strong juggling tin plates
At the table.
And amid these--
The rose of the onlookers, her
Buds and blossoms. With these
Stamps, these impressions, received from the
Blossoming dust itself, fertilizing the lack of joy
Once more to bear apparent fruit,
The never conscious, shiny veneer of
Lightly laughing joylessness.
There is the withered and wrinkled strongman;
Now, old, reduced to beating his drum,
Withdrawn into his mighty skin, as if earlier
Two men had lived inside it and one was
Already in the grave. The other survives,
Deaf and sometimes a little crazy in the widowed skin.
But the young one, the one looking like the offspring of a
Bull neck and a nun--taut and erect and full of
Muscles and simple-mindedness.
Or her,
Hurt as a child as if given pain for a toy,
In her long convalescence.
You, who can fall as fruit falls from trees,
Unripe.
A hundred times a day you fall from the tree of common
Structured motion (a tree that flows in minutes
Through the seasons, like rushing water)--
You fall and sprawl against your grave.
Sometimes, in half a second, your face
Assumes the loving aspect of your seldom tender
Mother. But it is quickly lost,
Absorbed by the surface of your shy
And passive face. . . . And again
The man claps his hands to begin and before the
Clear pain touches you beside your
Beating heart, he feels it burning within him,
His source. And it brings sudden, sought-for
Loving tears to his eyes.
And in spite of it all, blindly,
A smile. . . .
Angel! O take and pluck the small-blossomed herb of healing.
Bring a vase--preserve the bloom. Place it under that, our still
Private joy--in a loving urn
Praise it with a blossom of soaring inscription:
"Subrisio Saltat."
You then, love,
Struck dumb by overwhelming
Joy. Perhaps your extravagance will
Bring you luck
Or over your young firm
Breasts the green shimmering silk
Has you feeling endlessly indulgent, lacking nothing.
You
Always on the balance point of the swaying scales,
Sitting like the ripened fruit of serenity,
Openly beneath the beam.
Where then is that place I carry in my heart,
Where she is fading away, we are falling away
>From each other like the poorly matched animals
Brought to mate;
Where the weights are still heavy;
Where the plates still whirl in vain
On painted sticks. . . .
And suddenly in this troublesome nowhere, suddenly
The unspeakable place, the ungraspable infinitesimal
Metamorphoses change all
Into that empty infinite
Where the endless number goes uncounted.
The squares, a square in Paris, an unending show
Where the model, Madame Lamort,
Slinks and winds the restless ways of the earth
With endless ribbons and newly discovered bows,
Frills, flowers, cockade, plastic fruit--all
Falsely painted--for the cheap
Winter hats of fate.
Angel, there was a square, that we knew nothing of and
There, on an unspeakable carpet, the lovers showed that
It would never be possible,
Their brave high image of passion, their tower of joy,
Their long ladders where there was no ground,
Only their leaning together, trembling--
And could they, surrounded by an audience,
Die uncountable silent deaths,
Would they throw their last spare,
Always hidden and misunderstood,
Ever-guilty coins of fortune to the smiling pair
On the silent carpet?
Paul
daumier@salinger.org
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