Free Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

stare out beyond them into bleak continuance,
    hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they’re really
    our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one
    of the seasons of the clandestine year—; not only
    a season—: they’re site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.
    Ah, but the City of Pain: how strange its streets are:
    the false silence of sound drowning sound,
    and there—proud, brazen, effluence from the mold of emptiness—
    the gilded hubbub, the bursting monument.
    How an Angel would stamp out their market of solaces,
    set up alongside their church bought to order:
    clean and closed and woeful as a post office on Sunday.
    Outside, though, there’s always the billowing edge of the fair.
    Swings of Freedom! High-divers and Jugglers of Zeal!
    And the shooting gallery with its figures of idiot Happiness
    which jump, quiver, and fall with a tinny ring
    whenever some better marksman scores. Onward he lurches from cheers
    to chance; for booths courting each curious taste
    are drumming and barking. And then—for adults only—
    a special show: how money breeds, its anatomy, not some charade:
    money’s genitals, everything, the whole act
    from beginning to end—educational and guaranteed to make you
    virile . . . . . . . .
    .… Oh, but just beyond that,
    behind the last of the billboards, plastered with signs for “Deathless,”
    that bitter beer which tastes sweet to those drinking it
    as long as they have fresh distractions to chew…,
    just beyond those boards, just on the other side: things are real.
    Children play, lovers hold each other, off in the shadows,
    pensive, on the meager grass, while dogs obey nature.
    The youth is drawn farther on; perhaps he’s fallen in love
    with a young Lament . . . . . He pursues her, enters meadowland. She says:
    â€œIt’s a long way. We live out there…”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Where? And the youth follows.
    Something in her bearing stirs him. Her shoulders, neck—,
    perhaps she’s of noble descent. Still, he leaves her, turns around,
    glances back, waves … What’s the use? She’s a Lament.
    Only the youthful dead, in the first state
    of timeless equanimity, the phase of the unburdening,
    follow her with loving steps. The girls
    she waits for and befriends. Gently lets them see
    the things that adorn her. Pearls of grief and the delicate
    veils of suffrance. —When with young men
    she walks on in silence.
    Later, though, in the valley where they live, an older one, one of the elder Laments,
    adopts the youth when he asks questions: —Long ago,
    she says, we Laments were a powerful race. Our forefathers
    worked the mines in those giant mountains; among humans
    sometimes you’ll find a fragment of polished primeval grief,
    or, from an old volcano, a slag of petrified wrath.
    Yes, it came from here. We used to be rich.—
    And she guides him quietly through the wide landscape of Laments,
    shows him the columns of temples, or the ruins
    of those strongholds from which, long ago, Lament-Kings
    wisely governed the land. Shows him the tall
    trees of tears and the fields of flowering melancholy
    (the living know them only as tender leaves):
    shows him the animals of sorrow, grazing, —and sometimes
    a bird startles, flies low through their lifted gazes, extends
    into the distance the ancient glyph of its desolate cry.—
    At evening she leads him out to the ancestral tombs
    of the House of Lament, those of the sybils and the dire prophets.
    But as night approaches, they move more slowly, until
    suddenly, rising up moon-like, there appears: the great sepulchre
    that watches over everything. Twin