One thing to sing the beloved, another, alas!
that hidden guilty river-god of the blood.
Him she discerns from afar, her lover, what does he know
of that Lord of Pleasure, who often, out of his lonely heart,
before she’d soothed him, often as though she didn’t exist,
streaming from, oh, what unknowable depths, would uplift
his god-head, uprousing the night to infinite uproar?
Oh, the Neptune within our blood, oh, his terrible trident!
Oh, the gloomy blast of his breast from the twisted shell!
Hark, how the night grows fluted and hollowed. You stars,
is it not from you that the lover’s delight in the loved one’s
face arises? Does not his intimate insight
into her purest face come from the purest star?
It wasn’t you, alas! it wasn’t his mother
that bent his brows into such an expectant arch.
Not to meet yours, girl feeling him, not to meet yours
did his lips begin to assume that more fruitful curve.
Do you really suppose your gentle approach could have so
convulsed him, you, that wander like wind at dawn?
You terrified his heart, indeed; but more ancient terrors
rushed into him in that instant of shattering touch.
Call him … you can’t quite call him away from sombre consorting.
He certainly wants to, he does escape; disburdeningly settles
into your intimate heart, takes up and begins himself there.
Did he even begin himself, though?
Mother, you make him small, it was you that began him;
for you he was new, you arched over those new eyes
the friendly world, averting the one that was strange.
Where, oh, where, are the years when you barred the way
for him, with your slender form, to the surging abyss?
You hid so much from him then; made the nightly-suspected room
harmless, and out of your heart full of refuge
mingled more human space, with that night-space of his.
Not in the darkess, no, but within your far nearer presence
you placed the light, and it shone as though out of friendship.
Nowhere a creak you could not explain with a smile,
as though you had long known when the floor would behave itself thus …
And he listened to you and was soothed. So much it availed,
gently, your rising: his tall cloaked destiny stepped
behind the wardrobe then, and his restless future,
that easily got out of place, conformed to the folds of the curtain.
And he himself as he lay there in such relief,
dissolving, under his drowsy eyelids, the sweetness
of your light shaping into the sleep he had tasted,
seemed to be under the protection … Within, though: who could avert,
divert, the floods of origin flowing within him?
Alas! there was no caution within that sleeper; sleeping,
yes, but dreaming, yes, but feverish: what he embarked on!
He, so new, so timorous, how he got tangled
in ever-encroaching creepers of inner event,
twisted to primitive patterns, to throttling growths, to bestial
preying forms! How he gave himself up to it! Loved.
Loved his interior world, his interior jungle,
that primal forest within, on whose mute overthrownness,
light-green, his heart stood. Loved. Left it, continued
out through his own roots into violent beginning
where his tiny birth was already outlived. Descended,
lovingly, into the older blood, the ravines
where Frightfulness lurked, still gorged with his fathers. And every
terror new him, winked, was as though it were waiting.
Yes, Horror smiled at him … Seldom
did you, Mother, smile so tenderly. How could he help
loving what smiled at him? Long before you
he loved it, for even while you bore him
it was there, dissolved in the water that lightens the seed.
Look, we don’t love like flowers, with only a single
season behind us; immemorial sap
mounts in our arms when we love. Oh, maid,
this: that we’ve loved, within us, not one, still to come, but all
the innumerable fermentation; not just a single child,
but the fathers, resting like mountain-ruins
within our depths; – but the dry river-bed
of former mothers; – yes, and the whole of that
soundless landscape under its cloudy or
cloudless destiny: – this got the start of you, maid.
And you yourself, how can you tell, – you have conjured up
prehistoric time in your lover. What feelings
whelmed up from beings gone by! What women
hated you in him! What sinister men
you roused in his youthful veins! Dead children
were trying to reach you … Oh, gently, gently
show him daily an honest, confident task done, – guide him
close to the garden, give him preponderance
over his nights ……