Elegaic Mode

The Elegaic Mode

The Poetic Modes

The poetic modes include the lyric, meditative, elegiac, epistolary (letter writing)

and ekphrastic (writing in response to a work of art). These “modes”

involve considerations of form, structure and tone.

The Elegiac Mode

Constantine Cavafy (C.P. Cavafy)

The God Forsakes Antony

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.


Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Body, Remember

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,

not only the beds you lay on,

but also those desires that glowed openly

in eyes that looked at you,

trembled for you in the voices—

only some chance obstacle frustrated them.

Now that it’s all finally in the past,

it seems almost as if you gave yourself

to those desires too—how they glowed,

remember, in eyes that looked at you,

remember, body, how they trembled for you in those voices.

Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

 The City

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried as though it were something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I happen to look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you. You will walk
the same streets, grow old in the same neighborhoods,
will turn gray in these same houses.
You will always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere else in the world.

Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

Rainer Maria Rilke

The Ninth Elegy

Why, when this span of life might be fleeted away

as laurel, a little darker than all

the surrounding green, with tiny waves on the border

of every leaf (like the smile of a wind) :—oh,why

have to be human, and, shunning Destiny,

long for Destiny . . .

Not because happiness-really‑

exists, that precipitate profit of imminent loss.

Not out of curiosity, not just to practice the heart,^-

 that could still be there in laurel . . .

But because being here is' much, and because all^- this

 that's here, so fleeting, seems-to require us and strangely

concerns us. Us the most fleeting of all. Just once,

everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we,

too,

once. And never again. But this

having been once, though only once,

having been once on earth—can it ever be cancelled ?

And so we keep pressing on and trying to perform it,

trying to contain it within our simple hands,

in the more and more crowded gaze, in the speechless

heart.

Trying to become it. To give it to whom? We'd rather

hold on to it all for ever . . . But into the other relation,

what, alas! do we carry across? Not the beholding we've

here

²slowly acquired, and no here occurrence. Not one.

Sufferings, then. Above all, the hardness of life,

the long experience of love; in fact,

purely untellable things. But later,

under the stars, what use ? the more deeply untellable

stars ?

Yet the wanderer too doesn't bring from mountain to valley

a handful of earth, of for all untellable earth, but only

a word he has won, pure, the yellow and blue

gentian. Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House.

Bridge, Fountain, Gate, jug, 'Fruit tree, Window,--

possibly: Pillar, Tower ? . . . but for saying, remember,

oh, for such saying as never the things themselves

hoped so intensely to be. Is not the secret purpose

of this sly Earth, in urging a pair of lovers,

just to make everything leap with ecstasy in them ?

Threshold : what does it mean

to a pair of lovers, that they should be wearing their own

worn threshold a little, they too, after the many before,

before the many to come, . . . as a matter of course!

Here is the time for the Tellable, here is its home.

Speak and proclaim. More than ever

things we can live with are falling away, for that

which is oustingly taking their place is an imageless act.

Act under crusts, that will readily split as soon

as the doing within outgrows them and takes a new outline.

Between the hammers lives on

our heart, as between the teeth

the tongue, which, in spite of ail,

still continues to praise.

Praise this world to the Angel, not the untellable: you

can't impress him with the splendour you've felt;  in the

cosmos

where he more feelingly feels you're only a novice. So show

him

some simple thing, refashioned by age after age,

till it lives in our hands and eyes as a part of ourselves.

Tell him things. He'll stand more astonished: as you did

beside the roper in Rome or the potter in Egypt.

Show him how happy a thing can be, how guileless and

ours;

how even the moaning of grief purely determines on

form,

serves as a thing, or dies into a thing,—to escape

to a bliss beyond the- fiddle.   These things that live on

departure

understand when you praise them: fleeting, they look

for rescue through something in us, the most fleeting of all.

Want us to change them entirely, within our invisible

hearts,

into—oh, endlessly—into ourselves! Whosoever we are.

Earth, is it not just this that you want : to arise

invisibly in us ?  Is not your dream

to be one day invisible ? Earth! invisible!

What   is   your   urgent   command, if not   transforma-

tion ?

Earth, you darling, I will! Oh, believe me, you need

no more of your spring-times to win me over : a single one,

ah, one, is already more than my blood can endure.

Beyond all names I am yours, and have been for ages.

You were always right, and your holiest inspiration

is Death, that friendly Death.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor

            Future

are growing less. . . . . Supernumerous existence

wells up in my heart.

Translated from the German by Stephen Spender and J. B. Leishman