GRATIFICATION

By Rabindranath Tagore
The moment when tears flooded mine eyes in a monsoon of sorrow,
Before the threshold of my heart stopped the chariot of my friend.
By handing over to Him the chalice of union that was brimming
With separation and pain, I have no more regrets, regrets none.
Gathering secretly in my mind, a hope, neglected for years...
That thirst for a touch was quenched in a twinkling of eye.
I knew at last for whom I shed all my tears :
Blessed be this awakening, blessed these tears, blessed all.

___________________

REGRETS

By Rabindranath Tagore
Why did I not strew the dry dust with my tears ?
Who could guess that You would appear like an uninvited ?
You have waded through the desert sand
Without any shadowy tree,
I imposed on You this dire wayfaring,
Curse on me!
Whereas I had been whiling away my idle days
In the shade of my home,
I ignored all that you suffered
At every step.
That suffering, however, inside my being
Had resounded with a secret smart,
Stigmatising my heart with a profound wound.

THIS FLAME OF MELODY

By Rabindranath Tagore
This flame of melody that You have set inside my heart,
That flame has pervaded all through-and-through.
Dances that flame while keeping the beats
From branch to branch upon worn out trees :
Whom does it invoke in the sky
With the elated hands ?
The stars stare dumb-founded in the dark,
Maddened a wind rises from nowhere
Immaculate, at the dead of the night,
Blossoms this golden lotus :
None can fathom the spell of that flame.

EXPECTATION

By Rabindranath Tagore
You remain ever present
Beyond my songs,
My melodies reach Your feet
Though I cannot attain You.
The wind bids imploring :
"Do not keep mooring the raft !"
Steering across, come up
To the centre of my heart.
The game of my songs with You
Is a game with the remoteness,
The aching notes of the flute
Throughout all day.
Seizing my flute, when shall You
Come over and blow into it,
In the dense obscurity
Of a joyous and mute night ?

Conviction

By Rabindranath Tagore
Gratifying all my thorns,
The flower shall bloom,
And all my suffering
Shall redden into a rose.
In my life-long craving for the sky
Zephyr shall rush to blow,
Maddening my heart it will
Plunder all fragrant treasures.
I shall feel no more amiss
Once I have treasures to share,
Once my intimate worship blossoms
In beauteous forms.
When by the end of night
My Beloved shall caress them,
All the petals unto the last
Will bedeck His feet.

_________________

REFT FROM LOVE

By Rabindranath Tagore
If You cared not to fill the heart with love
Why did You permeate the morning sky
With abundant songs ?
Why weave wreaths with the stars ?
Why the flowery beds ?
Why does the west-wind murmur
A secret message in our ears ?
If You cared not to fill the heart with love,
Why keeps the sky staring at us

Intently ?
Why does my heart frequently
Become enraged
Embarking the raft on an ocean
Where the shore remains unknown ?

KNOWING YOU

      By Rabindranath Tagore
Countless are the persons You made me know,
Sheltered me in countless homes,
You turned the distant into an intimate, O Friend,
And the foreigner into a brother.
Each time I have to leave an old dwelling
My mind gets worried not to know what is up
Forgetting that You remain the familiar
In the midst of the new,
You turned the distant into an intimate, O Friend,
And the foreigner into a brother.
In life or in death, in the totality of this globe,
Wherever you choose to carry me,
O my life-long acquaintance,
Whatever You will reveal to me.
Others cease to be strangers once You are known,
Taboos vanish and vanishes all fear;
You remain wakeful by uniting everybody
May I always realise it,
You turned the distant into an intimate, O Friend,
And the foreigner into a brother.

_____________________

SURRENDER

           By Rabindranath Tagore
O bend my head up to the dust of Your feet,
Wash out all my vanity with mine own tears.
Seeking ever to glorify my self
I keep on merely humiliating myself,
Ceaselessly winding around myself
I roam about from moment to moment
Wash out all my vanity with mine own tears.
Let me no more vaunt myself in mine occupation,
Accomplish Your own will throughout my life.
I long for the absolute peace from You,
Inside my being Your effulgence,
Protect me by standing on the lotus of my heart,
Wash out all my vanity with mine own tears.

The Chorus of Old Men in “Aegeus”

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Ye gods that have a home beyond the world,
Ye that have eyes for all man’s agony,
Ye that have seen this woe that we have seen, —
Look with a just regard,
And with an even grace,
Here on the shattered corpse of a shattered king,
Here on a suffering world where men grow old
And wander like sad shadows till, at last,
Out of the flare of life,
Out of the whirl of years,
Into the mist they go,
Into the mist of death.
O shades of you that loved him long before
The cruel threads of that black sail were spun,
May loyal arms and ancient welcomings
Receive him once again
Who now no longer moves
Here in this flickering dance of changing days,
Where a battle is lost and won for a withered wreath,
And the black master Death is over all,

Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman by Edwin Arlington Robinson
The master-songs are ended, and the man
That sang them is a name. And so is God
A name; and so is love, and life, and death,
And everything. But we, who are too blind
To read what we have written, or what faith
Has written for us, do not understand:
We only blink, and wonder.
Last night it was the song that was the man,
But now it is the man that is the song.
We do not hear him very much to-day:
His piercing and eternal cadence rings
Too pure for us — too powerfully pure,
Too lovingly triumphant, and too large;
But there are some that hear him, and they know
That he shall sing to-morrow for all men,
And that all time shall listen.
The master-songs are ended? Rather say
No songs are ended that are ever sung,
And that no names are dead names. When we write
Men’s letters on proud marble or on sand,
We write them there forever.

The Night Before

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Look you, Dominie; look you, and listen!
Look in my face, first; search every line there;
Mark every feature, — chin, lip, and forehead!
Look in my eyes, and tell me the lesson
You read there; measure my nose, and tell me
Where I am wanting! A man’s nose, Dominie,
Is often the cast of his inward spirit;
So mark mine well. But why do you smile so?
Pity, or what? Is it written all over,
This face of mine, with a brute’s confession?
Nothing but sin there? nothing but hell-scars?
Or is it because there is something better —
A glimmer of good, maybe — or a shadow
Of something that’s followed me down from childhood —
Followed me all these years and kept me,
Spite of my slips and sins and follies,
Spite of my last red sin, my murder, —
Just out of hell? Yes? something of that kind?
And you smile for that? You’re a good man, Dominie,
The one good man in the world who knows me, —
My one good friend in a world that mocks me,
Here in this hard stone cage. But I leave it
To-morrow. To-morrow! My God! am I crying?
Are these things tears? Tears! What! am I frightened?
I, who swore I should go to the scaffold

Supremacy

Supremacy by Edwin Arlington Robinson
There is a drear and lonely tract of hell
From all the common gloom removed afar:
A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are,
Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell.
I walked among them and I knew them well:
Men I had slandered on life’s little star
For churls and sluggards; and I knew the scar
Upon their brows of woe ineffable.
But as I went majestic on my way,
Into the dark they vanished, one by one,
Till, with a shaft of God’s eternal day,
The dream of all my glory was undone, —
And, with a fool’s importunate dismay,
I heard the dead men singing in the sun.

Sonnet

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
When we can all so excellently give
The measure of love’s wisdom with a blow, —
Why can we not in turn receive it so,
And end this murmur for the life we live?
And when we do so frantically strive
To win strange faith, why do we shun to know
That in love’s elemental over-glow
God’s wholeness gleams with light superlative?
Oh, brother men, if you have eyes at all,
Look at a branch, a bird, a child, a rose, —
Or anything God ever made that grows, —
Nor let the smallest vision of it slip,
Till you can read, as on Belshazzar’s wall,
The glory of eternal partnership!

Verlaine

Verlaine by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Why do you dig like long-clawed scavengers
To touch the covered corpse of him that fled
The uplands for the fens, and rioted
Like a sick satyr with doom’s worshippers?
Come! let the grass grow there; and leave his verse
To tell the story of the life he led.
Let the man go: let the dead flesh be dead,
And let the worms be its biographers.
Song sloughs away the sin to find redress
In art’s complete remembrance: nothing clings
For long but laurel to the stricken brow
That felt the Muse’s finger; nothing less
Than hell’s fulfilment of the end of things
Can blot the star that shines on Paris now.

Sonnet

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
The master and the slave go hand in hand,
Though touch be lost. The poet is a slave,
And there be kings do sorrowfully crave
The joyance that a scullion may command.
But, ah, the sonnet-slave must understand
The mission of his bondage, or the grave
May clasp his bones, or ever he shall save
The perfect word that is the poet’s wand!
The sonnet is a crown, whereof the rhymes
Are for Thought’s purest gold the jewel-stones;
But shapes and echoes that are never done
Will haunt the workshop, as regret sometimes
Will bring with human yearning to sad thrones
The crash of battles that are never won.

The Wilderness

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Come away! come away! there’s a frost along the marshes,
And a frozen wind that skims the shoal where it shakes the dead black water;
There’s a moan across the lowland and a wailing through the woodland
Of a dirge that sings to send us back to the arms of those that love us.
There is nothing left but ashes now where the crimson chills of autumn
Put off the summer’s languor with a touch that made us glad
For the glory that is gone from us, with a flight we cannot follow,
To the slopes of other valleys and the sounds of other shores.
Come away! come away! you can hear them calling, calling,
Calling us to come to them, and roam no more.
Over there beyond the ridges and the land that lies between us,
There’s an old song calling us to come!
Come away! come away! — for the scenes we leave behind us
Are barren for the lights of home and a flame that’s young forever;
And the lonely trees around us creak the warning of the night-wind,
That love and all the dreams of love are away beyond the mountains.
The songs that call for us to-night, they have called for men before us,
And the winds that blow the message, they have blown ten thousand years;
But this will end our wander-time, for we know the joy that waits us
In the strangeness of home-coming, and a faithful woman’s eyes.
Come away! come away! there is nothing now to cheer us —
Nothing now to comfort us, but love’s road home: —
Over there beyond the darkness there’s a window gleams to greet us,
And a warm hearth waits for us within.
Come away! come away! — or the roving-fiend will hold us,
And make us all to dwell with him to the end of human faring:
There are no men yet can leave him when his hands are clutched upon them,

There are none will own his enmity, there are none will call him brother.
So we’ll be up and on the way, and the less we brag the better
For the freedom that God gave us and the dread we do not know: —
The frost that skips the willow-leaf will again be back to blight it,
And the doom we cannot fly from is the doom we do not see.
Come away! come away! there are dead men all around us —
Frozen men that mock us with a wild, hard laugh
That shrieks and sinks and whimpers in the shrill November rushes,
And the long fall wind on the lake.

_____________________

The Chorus of Old Men in “Aegeus”

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Ye gods that have a home beyond the world,
Ye that have eyes for all man’s agony,
Ye that have seen this woe that we have seen, —
Look with a just regard,
And with an even grace,
Here on the shattered corpse of a shattered king,
Here on a suffering world where men grow old
And wander like sad shadows till, at last,
Out of the flare of life,
Out of the whirl of years,
Into the mist they go,
Into the mist of death.
O shades of you that loved him long before
The cruel threads of that black sail were spun,
May loyal arms and ancient welcomings
Receive him once again
Who now no longer moves
Here in this flickering dance of changing days,
Where a battle is lost and won for a withered wreath,
And the black master Death is over all,
To chill with his approach,
To level with his touch,
The reigning strength of youth,
The fluttered heart of age.
Woe for the fateful day when Delphi’s word was lost —
Woe for the loveless prince of Aethra’s line!
Woe for a father’s tears and the curse of a king’s release —
Woe for the wings of pride and the shafts of doom! —
And thou, the saddest wind
That ever blew from Crete,
Sing the fell tidings back to that thrice unhappy ship! —
Sing to the western flame,

Sing to the dying foam,
A dirge for the sundered years and a dirge for the years to be!
Better his end had been as the end of a cloudless day,
Bright, by the word of Zeus, with a golden star,
Wrought of a golden fame, and flung to the central sky,
To gleam on a stormless tomb for evermore: —
Whether or not there fell
To the touch of an alien hand
The sheen of his purple robe and the shine of his diadem,
Better his end had been
To die as an old man dies, —
But the fates are ever the fates, and a crown is ever a crown.

Walt Whitman

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
The master-songs are ended, and the man
That sang them is a name. And so is God
A name; and so is love, and life, and death,
And everything. But we, who are too blind
To read what we have written, or what faith
Has written for us, do not understand:
We only blink, and wonder.
Last night it was the song that was the man,
But now it is the man that is the song.
We do not hear him very much to-day:
His piercing and eternal cadence rings
Too pure for us — too powerfully pure,
Too lovingly triumphant, and too large;
But there are some that hear him, and they know
That he shall sing to-morrow for all men,
And that all time shall listen.
The master-songs are ended? Rather say
No songs are ended that are ever sung,
And that no names are dead names. When we write
Men’s letters on proud marble or on sand,
We write them there forever.

_____________________

The Night Before

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Look you, Dominie; look you, and listen!
Look in my face, first; search every line there;
Mark every feature, — chin, lip, and forehead!
Look in my eyes, and tell me the lesson
You read there; measure my nose, and tell me
Where I am wanting! A man’s nose, Dominie,
Is often the cast of his inward spirit;
So mark mine well. But why do you smile so?
Pity, or what? Is it written all over,
This face of mine, with a brute’s confession?
Nothing but sin there? nothing but hell-scars?
Or is it because there is something better —
A glimmer of good, maybe — or a shadow
Of something that’s followed me down from childhood —
Followed me all these years and kept me,
Spite of my slips and sins and follies,
Spite of my last red sin, my murder, —
Just out of hell? Yes? something of that kind?
And you smile for that? You’re a good man, Dominie,
The one good man in the world who knows me, —
My one good friend in a world that mocks me,
Here in this hard stone cage. But I leave it
To-morrow. To-morrow! My God! am I crying?
Are these things tears? Tears! What! am I frightened?
I, who swore I should go to the scaffold
With big strong steps, and — No more. I thank you,

Supremacy

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
There is a drear and lonely tract of hell
From all the common gloom removed afar:
A flat, sad land it is, where shadows are,
Whose lorn estate my verse may never tell.
I walked among them and I knew them well:
Men I had slandered on life’s little star
For churls and sluggards; and I knew the scar
Upon their brows of woe ineffable.
But as I went majestic on my way,
Into the dark they vanished, one by one,
Till, with a shaft of God’s eternal day,
The dream of all my glory was undone, —
And, with a fool’s importunate dismay,
I heard the dead men singing in the sun.

Sonnet

          by Edwin Arlington Robinson
When we can all so excellently give
The measure of love’s wisdom with a blow, —
Why can we not in turn receive it so,
And end this murmur for the life we live?
And when we do so frantically strive
To win strange faith, why do we shun to know
That in love’s elemental over-glow
God’s wholeness gleams with light superlative?
Oh, brother men, if you have eyes at all,
Look at a branch, a bird, a child, a rose, —
Or anything God ever made that grows, —
Nor let the smallest vision of it slip,
Till you can read, as on Belshazzar’s wall,
The glory of eternal partnership!

Verlaine

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
Why do you dig like long-clawed scavengers
To touch the covered corpse of him that fled
The uplands for the fens, and rioted
Like a sick satyr with doom’s worshippers?
Come! let the grass grow there; and leave his verse
To tell the story of the life he led.
Let the man go: let the dead flesh be dead,
And let the worms be its biographers.
Song sloughs away the sin to find redress
In art’s complete remembrance: nothing clings
For long but laurel to the stricken brow
That felt the Muse’s finger; nothing less
Than hell’s fulfilment of the end of things
Can blot the star that shines on Paris now.

Sonnet

by Edwin Arlington Robinson
The master and the slave go hand in hand,
Though touch be lost. The poet is a slave,
And there be kings do sorrowfully crave
The joyance that a scullion may command.
But, ah, the sonnet-slave must understand
The mission of his bondage, or the grave
May clasp his bones, or ever he shall save
The perfect word that is the poet’s wand!
The sonnet is a crown, whereof the rhymes
Are for Thought’s purest gold the jewel-stones;
But shapes and echoes that are never done
Will haunt the workshop, as regret sometimes
Will bring with human yearning to sad thrones
The crash of battles that are never won.

_______________________

Grodek

   By Georg Trakl

At evening the woods of autumn are full of the sound
Of the weapons of death, golden fields
And blue lakes, over which the darkening sun
Rolls down; night gathers in
Dying recruits, the animal cries
Of their burst mouths.
Yet a red cloud, in which a furious god,
The spilled blood itself, has its home, silently
Gathers, a moonlike coolness in the willow bottoms;
All the roads spread out into the black mold.
Under the gold branches of the night and stars
The sister’s shadow falters through the diminishing
grove,
To greet the ghosts of the heroes, bleeding heads;
And from the reeds the sound of the dark flutes of
autumn rises.
O prouder grief! you bronze altars,
The hot flame of the spirit is fed today by a more
monstrous pain,
The unborn grandchildren.

Sleep

   By Georg Trakl

Not your dark poisons again,
White sleep!
This fantastically strange garden
Of trees in deepening twilight
Fills up with serpents, nightmoths,
Spiders, bats.
Approaching stranger!
Your abandoned shadow
In the red of evening
Is a dark pirate ship
Of the salty oceans of confusion.
White birds from the outskirts of the night
Flutter out over the shuddering cities
Of steel.

Mourning

   By Georg Trakl

The dark eagles, sleep and death,
Rustle all night around my head:
The golden statue of man
Is swallowed by the icy comber
Of eternity. On the frightening reef
The purple remains go to pieces,
And the dark voice mourns
Over the sea.
Sister in my wild despair
Look, a precarious skiff is sinking
Under the stars,
The face of night whose voice is fading.

On The Eastern Front

   By Georg Trakl

The ominous anger of masses of men
Is like the wild organ of the winter storm,
The purple surge of battle,
Leafless stars.
With broken eyebrows and silver arms
The night waves to dying soldiers.
In the shade of the ash tree of autumn
The souls of the slain are sighing.
A thorny desert surrounds the city.
The moon chases the shocked women
From the bleeding stairways.
Wild wolves have broken through the door.

A Winter Night

   By Georg Trakl

It has been snowing. Past midnight, drunk on purple wine, you leave the gloomy shelters of men, and the red fire of their fireplaces. Oh the darkness of night.
Black frost. The ground is hard, the air has a bitter taste. Your stars make unlucky figures.
With a stiff walk, you tramp along the railroad embankment with huge eyes, like a soldier charging a dark machinegun nest. Onward!
Bitter snow and moon.
A red wolf, that an angel is strangling. Your trouser legs rustle, as you walk, like blue ice, and a smile full of suffering and pride petrifies your face, and your forehead is white before the ripe desire of the frost;
or else it bends down silently over the doze of the night watchman, slumped down in his wooden shack.
Frost and smoke. A white shirt of stars burns on your clothed shoulders, and the hawk of God strips flesh out of your hard heart.
Oh the stony hill. The cool body, forgotten and silent, is melting away in the silver snow.
Sleep is black. For a long time the ear follows the motion of the stars deep down in the ice.
When you woke, the churchbells were ringing in the town. Out of the door in the east the rose-colored day walked with silver light.

The Evening

   By Georg Trakl

With the ghostly shapes of dead heroes
Moon, you fill
The growing silence of the forest,
Sickle-moon—
With the gentle embraces
Of lovers,
And with ghosts of famous ages
All around the crumbling rocks;
The moon shines with such blue light
Upon the city,
Where a decaying generation
Lives, cold and evil—
A dark future prepared
For the pale grandchild.
You shadows swallowed by the moon
Sighing upward in the empty goblet
Of the mountain lake.

The Mood of Depression

   By Georg Trakl

You dark mouth inside me,
You are strong, shape
Composed of autumn cloud,
And golden evening stillness;
In the shadows thrown
By the broken pine trees
A mountain stream turns dark in the green light;
A little town
That piously dies away into brown pictures.
Now the black horses rear
In the foggy pasture.
I think of soldiers!
Down the hill, where the dying sun lumbers,
The laughing blood plunges,
Speechless
Under the oak trees! Oh the hopeless depression
Of an army; a blazing steel helmet
Fell with a clatter from purpled foreheads.
The autumn night comes down so coolly.
With her white habit glittering like the stars
Over the broken human bodies
The convent nurse is silent.

In Venice

   By Georg Trakl

Silence in the rented room.
The candlestick flickers with silver light
Before the singing breath
Of the lonely man;
Enchanted rosecloud.
Black swarms of flies
Darken the stony space,
And the head of the man who has no home
Is numb from the agony
Of the golden day.
The motionless sea grows dark.
Star and black voyages
Vanished on the canal.
Child, your sickly smile
Followed me softly in my sleep.

The Heart

   By Georg Trakl

The wild heart grew white in the forest;
Dark anxiety
Of death, as when the gold
Died in the grey cloud.
An evening in November.
A crowd of needy women stood at the bare gate
Of the slaughterhouse;
Rotten meat and guts fell
Into every basket;
Horrible food.
The blue dove of the evening
Brought no forgiveness.
The dark cry of trumpets
Travelled in the golden branches
Of the soaked elms,
A frayed flag
Smoking with blood,
To which a man listens
In wild despair.
All your days of nobility, buried
In that red evening!
Out of the dark entrance hall
The golden shape
Of the young girl steps
Surrounded by the pale moon,
The prince’s court of autumn,
Black fir trees broken
In the night’s storm,
The steep fortress.
O heart
Glittering above in the snowy cold.

Descent and Defeat

   By Georg Trakl

To Karl Borromaus Heinrich
Over the white fishpond
The wild birds have blown away.
An icy wind drifts from our stars at evening.
Over our graves
The broken forehead of the night is bending.
Under the oaks we veer in a silver skiff.
The white walls of the city are always giving off
sound.
Under arching thorns
O my brother blind minute-hands we are climbing
toward midnight.

De Profundis

   By Georg Trakl

It is a stubble field, where a black rain is falling.
It is a brown tree, that stands alone.
It is a hissing wind, that encircles empty houses.
How melancholy the evening is.
A while later,
The soft orphan garners the sparse ears of corn.
Her eyes graze, round and golden, in the twilight
And her womb awaits the heavenly bridegroom.
On the way home
The shepherd found the sweet body
Decayed in a bush of thorns.
I am a shadow far from darkening villages.
I drank the silence of God
Out of the stream in the trees.
Cold metal walks on my forehead.
Spiders search for my heart.
It is a light that goes out in my mouth.
At night, I found myself on a pasture,
Covered with rubbish and the dust of stars.
In a hazel thicket
Angels of crystal rang out once more.

Birth

   By Georg Trakl

These mountains: blackness, silence, and snow.
The red hunter climbs down from the forest;
Oh the mossy gaze of the wild thing.
The peace of the mother: under black firs
The sleeping hands open by themselves
When the cold moon seems ready to fall.
The birth of man. Each night
Blue water washes over the rockbase of the cliff;
The fallen angel stares at his reflection with sighs,
Something pale wakes up in a suffocating room.
The eyes
Of the stony old woman shine, two moons.
The cry of the woman in labor. The night troubles
The boy’s sleep with black wings,
With snow, which falls with ease out of the purple
clouds.

In Hellbrun

   By Georg Trakl

Once more following the blue grief of the evening
Down the hill, to the springtime fishpond—
As if the shadows of those dead for a long time were
hovering above,
The shadows of church dignitaries, of noble ladies—
Their flowers bloom so soon, the earnest violets
In the earth at evening, and the clear water washes
From the blue spring. The oaks turn green
In such a ghostly way over the forgotten footsteps
of the dead
The golden clouds over the fishpond.

On The Marshy Pastures

   By Georg Trakl

A man who walks in the black wind; the dry reeds
rustle quietly
Through the silence of the marshy pastures. In
the grey skies
A migration of wild birds move in ranks
Catty-corner over dark waters.
Insurgence. In the collapsing houses
Decay is fluttering out with black wings;
Crippled-up birches breathe heavily in the wind.
Evening in empty roadhouses. The longing for home
settles about
The delicate despair of the grazing flocks,
Vision of the night: toads plunge from silver waters.

The Rats

   By Georg Trakl

In the farmyard the white moon of autumn shines.
Fantastic shadows fall from the eaves of the roof.
A silence is living in the empty windows;
Now from it the rats emerge softly
And skitter here and there, squeaking,
And a grey malodorous mist from the latrine
Follows behind them, sniffling:
Through the mist the ghostly moonlight quivers.
And the rats squeak eagerly as if insane
And go out to fill houses and barns
Which are filled full of fruit and grain.
Icy winds quarrel in the darkness.

My Heart at Evening

         By Georg Trakl

Toward evening you hear the cry of the bats.
Two black horses bound in the pasture,
The red maple rustles,
The walker along the road sees ahead the small
tavern.
Nuts and young wine taste delicious,
Delicious: to stagger drunk into the darkening woods.
Village bells, painful to hear, echo through the black
fir branches,
Dew forms on the face.

Song of The Western Countries

         By Georg Trakl

Oh the nighttime beating of the soul’s wings:
Herders of sheep once, we walked along the forests
that were growing dark,
And the red deer, the green flower and the speaking
river followed us
In humility. Oh the old old note of the cricket,
Blood blooming on the altarstone,
And the cry of the lonely bird over the green silence
of the pool.
And you Crusades, and glowing punishment
Of the flesh, purple fruits that fell to earth
In the garden at dusk, where young and holy men
walked,
Enlisted men of war now, waking up out of wounds
and dreams about stars.
Oh the soft cornflowers of the night.
And you long ages of tranquillity and golden
harvests,
When as peaceful monks we pressed out the purple
grapes;
And around us the hill and forest shone strangely.
The hunts for wild beasts, the castles, and at night,
the rest,
When man in his room sat thinking justice,
And in noiseless prayer fought for the living head
of God.
And this bitter hour of defeat,
When we behold a stony face in the black waters.
But radiating light, the lovers lift their silver eyelids:
They are one body. Incense streams from rose-
colored pillows
And the sweet song of those risen from the dead.

The Sun

         By Georg Trakl

Each day the gold sun comes over the hill.
The woods are beautiful, also the dark animals,
Also man; hunter or farmer.
The fish rises with a red body in the green pond.
Under the arch of heaven
The fisherman travels smoothly in his blue skiff.
The grain, the cluster of grapes, ripens slowly.
When the still day comes to an end,
Both evil and good have been prepared.
When the; night has come,
Easily the pilgrim lifts his heavy eyelids;
The sun breaks from gloomy ravines.

The Sun

         By Georg Trakl

Each day the gold sun comes over the hill.
The woods are beautiful, also the dark animals,
Also man; hunter or farmer.
The fish rises with a red body in the green pond.
Under the arch of heaven
The fisherman travels smoothly in his blue skiff.
The grain, the cluster of grapes, ripens slowly.
When the still day comes to an end,
Both evil and good have been prepared.
When the; night has come,
Easily the pilgrim lifts his heavy eyelids;
The sun breaks from gloomy ravines.

The Sun

         By Georg Trakl

Each day the gold sun comes over the hill.
The woods are beautiful, also the dark animals,
Also man; hunter or farmer.
The fish rises with a red body in the green pond.
Under the arch of heaven
The fisherman travels smoothly in his blue skiff.
The grain, the cluster of grapes, ripens slowly.
When the still day comes to an end,
Both evil and good have been prepared.
When the; night has come,
Easily the pilgrim lifts his heavy eyelids;
The sun breaks from gloomy ravines.

Trumpets

         By Georg Trakl

Under the trimmed willows, where brown children
are playing
And leaves tumbling, the trumpets blow. A quaking
of cemeteries.
Banners of scarlet rattle through a sadness of maple
trees,
Riders along rye-fields, empty mills.
Or shepherds sing during the night, and stags step
delicately
Into the circle of their fire, the grove’s sorrow
immensely old,
Dancing, they loom up from one black wall;
Banners of scarlet, laughter, insanity, trumpets.

Summer

                      By Georg Trakl
At evening the complaint of the cuckoo
Grows still in the wood.
The grain bends its head deeper,
The red poppy.
Darkening thunder drives
Over the hill.
The old song of the cricket
Dies in the field.
The leaves of the chestnut tree
Stir no more.
Your clothes rustle
On the winding stair.
The candle gleams silently
In the dark room;
A silver hand
Puts the light out;
Windless, starless night.