Original by Ranier Maria Rilke - Translated by Lore Confino
THE SIXTH ELEGY
Fig tree: when did you first show me how, almost, you forgo to
flower, and urge your close secret, unsung into the early-
determined fruit?
As through the pipes of a fountain, your arched branches
press the sap downwards, then up; and scarcely awaking, it springs
straight from sleep into the delight of sweetest achievement. See:
the God into the Swan!
Yet, we linger...find praise, alas, in our own flowering,
then enter, betrayed, our own late-ripened fruit.
Few there are, whose urge of action drives them, at once, to stand
ready and glow in their fullness of heart, when the seduction to
flower touches their youthful, eager lips, fans their young
eyelids, like soothing night air. Heroes, perhaps, and those
summoned to early death, whose veins have been laid out in
different paths by Gardener Death. They rush on, ahead of their
own Smile; as, in the low-relief scenes at Karnac, teamed horses
and chariot pull ahead of the conquering king.
Strangely close is the Hero to those who die young! He is not
touched by permanence. His rising is being. Steadily, he sets
forth into the changed starscape of his constant danger. Not many
would find him there. Yet Fate, sternly keeping us in the dark -
suddenly, jubilant Fate sings him into the storm of his onrushing
world. I hear none like him. All at once, caught in the air, his
shrouded call penetrates me in gusts of wind.
Then, how gladly I would hide from longing: oh, if only I were a
boy, still intent on becoming, I could sit propped in the arms of
the future and read stories of Samson, whose mother bore nothing
at first and later bore all.
Was he not, from the first, the Hero within you, his Mother? Did
not his masterful choice have beginning inside you? Thousands
swarmed in the womb, wanting to become him.
Yet see: he took up, he let go, chose, and was able to do it. And
when he tore down pillars, it was to break out of the world of
your body, into the narrower World, in which he continued to
choose, and to act. O Mothers of Heroes! O you sources of rushing
torrents! O you chasms, into which high from heart's edge, maidens
have flung themselves, lamenting, destined for sacrifice to the
son!
For the Hero storms on, through the stations of love,
carried beyond, ever further, by each heart beat for him...
all left behind, he stands at the end of the Smiles: become other.