And death exacts a labor,Ī long finishing of things half-done, before To see all that was once so interconnectedĭrifting in space. Strange, not to go on wishing one’s wishes. To stop being what one was in endlessly anxious hands,Īnd ignore even one’s own name like a broken toy. Not to give roses and other things of such promise To cease observing customs barely learned, Granted, it’s strange to dwell on earth no more, Hinders a little their spirits’ pure movement. Or an inscription echoed deep within you,Īs, not long ago, that tablet in Santa Maria Formosa. When you entered a church in Rome or Naples, It’s rustling toward you now from all the youthful dead.

The unbroken news that takes shape out of silence. Lifted them from the ground while they kept on kneelingĪnd noticed nothing, those impossible ones: Only saints have listened till now, as that vast call The way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string Of a woman’s heart to cry out: Let me be as she was!Īt last bore fruit? Time we tenderly detached ourselvesįrom the loved one, and trembling, stood free: Will be moved by this heightened instance Intently enough that any girl left by her lover Was only a pretext for attained existence: his ultimate birth.īut nature, exhausted, takes women in loveīack into herself, as though she lacked strength Remember: the hero lives on, even his downfall

So much deeper in love than those whom love allayed. The abandoned ones you almost envy, since you found them Their prodigious feeling still lacks an undying fame. No, in the grip of longing sing women who loved Going and coming and sometimes staying all night?) With all those big strange thoughts in you Presaged a beloved’s coming? (But where would you keep her, All that was your charge.īut were you strong enough? Weren’t you always distractedīy expectation, as though each such moment Out of the past, or as you walked by the open window Many a star was waitingįor your eyes only. Will feel the increase of air with more passionate flight. Out into the spaces we breathe perhaps the birds You still don’t see? Fling the emptiness in your arms It is easier on lovers?Īh, they only use each other to mask their fates. Gnaws at our faces-, for whom won’t the night be there,ĭesired, softly disappointing, setting hard tasksįor the single heart. O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace That liked it here, lingered, and never left. Some tree on a slope, to which our eyes returnedĭay after day leaves us yesterday’s street Every Angel is terrifying.Īnd so I grip myself and choke down that call note For beauty is nothingīut the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,Īnd while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains Orders? and even if one of them pressed me Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’

The duino elegies