In honor of the German holiday, Three Kings Day, we present this work from one of the nation’s most legendary poets.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe German 1749 – 1832
Now I leave the little cottage
Of my dearest; through the dark,
Secret, in a dreary silence,
Wander through the wooded park.
Luna peers through bush and oak tree
Birches bow, they strew a fragrance
On the winds of midnight blown.
What a pleasure in the coolness
Of so rich a summer’s night!
What a hush! The feeling spirit
Revels in untold delight.
Rapture I can hardly cope with,
Nights of secrecy astir,
Yet, I’d trade them, by the thousand,
For a single night with her.
In a slave-cultured isle, on the verge of the main,
Sable Zimeo’s form was reclined;
He wept his dark destiny, gazed on his chain,
And mingled his sighs with the wind.
“O ye Gods!” he exclaimed, “whose beneficent care
Shields the innocent suff’rer from woe;
Permit me no longer these shackles to bear,
Some gleam of soft pity bestow!
“In the dawn of my youth, dear companions! with you,
When I rambled in Afric’s green shade.
When my hours, ‘mid your smiles, so delightfully flew,
I dreamed not they ever would fade.
“On the lip of my Ninda, when panting with love,
With what exstacy heaved my fond heart!
When we vowed by those pow’rs in the mansions above,
That we never—no, never, would part.
‘The bright sun of prosperity glistened awhile,
Diffusing ephemeral rays;
I basked ‘neath the phantom’s encouraging smile,
And bliss was the badge of my days!
“ ‘Till a little black cloud, wing’d by demons of air,
And urged by the fates from below,
Interposed ‘tween my sight and that sun’s cheering glare,
And hurled me from bliss into woe.
“Inured to the arts of seduction and wile,
White merchants arrived in our bay,
Allured us on board, unsuspicious of guile,
And bore us in triumph away.
“On that accurst day all my happiness fled,
My Ninda—my country—my home;
Here slavery’s ignoble fetters are spread,
Here liberty never will come!
“O, never!—what horrors compose that dread word,
But this weary pilgrimage o’er,
I go where the sound of sweet mercy is heard,
Where mis’ry’s remember’d no more.
“See, bright from elysium, a seraph appears,
And smiling she calls me away;
“ ‘My Zimeo, quit this dull region of tears!
Lo, thy Ninda!’ “—”Loved shade, I obey.”
Oblivion shed her dark veil o’er his woes;
Young Hope soothed the horrors of death;
From the cliff where he pondered, undaunted he rose,
And plunged in the billows beneath.
Sometimes I see, caught in a snare,
One with a foolish lovely face,
Who stands with scattered moon-struck air
Alone, in a wild woody place
She was entrapped there long ago.
Yet fowler none has come to see
His prize; though all the tree-trunks show
A front of silent treachery.
And there she waits, while in her flesh
Small joyless teeth fret without rest.
But she stands smiling in the mesh,
The while she is duped and dispossest.
I know her name; for it is told
That Beauty is a prisoner,
And that her gaoler, bleak and bold,
Scores her fine flesh, and murders her.
He slays her with invisible hands,
And inly wastes her flesh away,
And strangles her with stealthy bands;
Melts her as snow day after day.
Within his thicket life decays
And slow is changed by hidden guile;
And nothing now of Beauty stays,
Save her divine and witless smile.
For still she smiles, and does not know
Her feet are in the snaring lime.
He who entrapped her long ago,
And kills her, is unpitying Time.
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Poets Corner 