Duino Elegies

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• But listen to the voice of the wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.
• It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young.
• Didn’t their fate, whenever you stepped into a church in Naples or Rome,
• quietly come to address you?
• Or high up, some eulogy entrusted you with a mission,
• as, last year, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa.
• What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance of injustice about their death—
• which at times slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward.

• Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,
• to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
• not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future;
• no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
• to leave even one’s own first name behind,
• forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
• Strange to no longer desire one’s desires.
• Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction.
• And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.
• Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which
• they themselves have created.
• Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead.