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128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1914
Under tent of stars, a solitary man
Moves through a silence of midnight.
The boy awakes bewildered from his dreams,
His gray face shrinking in the moon.
At the window stiff with lattice-work
A foolish woman weeps with unbound hair.
In awe lovers drift by on the pond,
Floating in sweet journey.
The murderer smiles pale in the wine;
The horror of death infects the sick.
Naked and wounded, nuns pray
Before the savior's agony.
The mother sings softly in sleep.
The child gazes peacefully toward night
With eyes wholly sincere.
Laughter rings in the brothel.
In the tavern below, by grease lamp
And with white hand the dead paints
A leering silence on the wall.
The sleeper still whispers.
- Ballad to Night (pg. 20-21)
Always you return, melancholy,
O gentleness of the lonely soul.
A golden day glows toward its end.
Humbly the patient one endures pain,
Entoning harmony and gentle madness.
Look! darkness already falls.
Again night returns and a mortal laments
And suffers with another.
Shuddering under autumnal stars
Each year the head bows more deeply.
- In an Old Album (pg. 41)
At evening the homes lie brown and desolate.
A gray stench permeates the air.
The roar of a train on arched bridges
And sparrows flutter over bush and fence.
Humble shacks, paths scattered in disorder,
Confused motions in the gardens,
While lamentation swells from muffled movement,
A red dress runs through a crowd of children.
A chorus of rats screams, enamored on the rubbish.
Women carry entrails in baskets;
In a loathsome procession of rotting filth,
They emerge from twilight.
And suddenly from beneath the slaughterhouse
A canal spews rich blood into the calm river.
Föhn winds colour the sparse shrubs brighter
And the red creeps slowly through the stream.
A whisper, which drowns in troubled sleep.
Images leap up from water ditches,
Perhaps the memory of an earlier life
Which rises and falls with the warm winds.
From the clouds plunge shimmering avenues
Filled with lovely chariots, bold riders.
Then a boat is seen foundered upon reefs;
Or sometimes rose-tinged mosques.
- Suburb in Föhn (pg. 53)
O the black angel, who softly stepped from the soul of the tree,
When we were tender playmates in the evening
At the edge of the blue-tinged fountain.
Calm was our step, the round eyes in the brown coolness of autumn,
O the purple sweetness of the stars.
But one descended the stone steps of the Mönchsberg,
A blue smile on his face and strangely enfolded
In his quieter childhood, and died;
And the silver dace of his friend remained in the garden,
Listening in the leaf or ancient stone.
The soul sang death, the green decay of the flesh,
And it was the soughing of the forest,
The fervent lament of the deer.
Always the blue evening bells pealed from dusky towers.
Time came when the other saw shadows in a purple sun,
Shadows of putrefaction in bare branches;
At evening, when by the twilit wall the blackbird sand,
The ghost of the dead youth quietly appeared in the room.
O the blood that runs from his singing throat,
Blue flower; o the fiery tear
Wept into night.
Golden cloud and time. In a lonely room
You more often invite the dead child to be your guest,
You wander in intimate conversation under elms along the green river.
- To One Who Died Young (pg. 117)