Die Parke I-VII

Unstoppably the parks rise up

out of the softly crumbling decay;

heaped over with skies, overstrong

handed-down things that outlast,

and to draw themselves back in,

always with the same sovereign

lavishness, as if protected by it,

of royal greatness yet further,

rising out of themselves, returning into themselves:

gracious, resplendent, purple and pompous.

taken hold of, right and left,

following the onward going

of some beckoning,

into the being-together

of a shadowy water-basin

with four benches of stone;

time, that passes alone.

Onto damp pedestals,

on which nothing stands any more,

expectant breath;

while the silvery trickling

before the dark prow

and goes on speaking.

And you feel yourself among stones

that hear, and you do not stir.

one still keeps hidden the questioning

of the kings. They wait beneath veils,

and at any moment Monseigneur may

to soften the king's whim or sorrow

and from the marble rims again let down the

carpets with old reflections

on a green ground, with silver, pink, gray,

a granted white and lightly stirred blue

and a king and a woman

and flowers in the rippling border.

only an irresolute approximation,

took its laws from these kings,

blissful itself, to pile up, around the tapis-vert,

out of billowed green,

and to paint the evenings, after the description

by lovers, into the avenues,

that seemed to hold, glistening, a varnish-clear, dissolved

smile within it:

but one that it lent out itself,

to raise it, on a rose-filled isle of love,

into something greater.

gods never wholly believed in, that

grow old in the straight-cut walks,

at most smiled-at Dianas,

when the royal hunting-party

set out, hurried and hurrying–;

at most smiled-at, yet never

pseudonyms, under which one

hid, and bloomed or burned,–

lightly inclined, smilingly invoked

gods that still, now and then,

when the blooming of the enchanted gardens

takes their cold composure from them;

when they tremble all over with the first shadows

and give promise upon promise,

all boundless and indefinite.

paths stops and stalls;

from unhurried stairways fall,

through a mere nothing of a slope

softly lured onward,

over all the terraces

the paths, between the masses,

slowed and steered,

as far as the wide ponds,

where (as to an equal)

the rich park gives away

that with shinings and reflections

pervades its possession,

from which it, on all sides,

brings distances with it,

when it, out of closing pools,

to cloudy evening festivals

swings up into the skies.

reflections, which they no longer bathe,

lie as if drowned, sorely distorted;

the avenues are, by balustrades,

in the distance as if barred shut.

down through the air as if down steps,

every birdcall sounds as if ill-omened,

as if poisoned every nightingale.

these bushes do not believe in it;

reluctantly, dully, surviving on, there breathes its scent

the stale jasmine,

Along with you a swarm of midges moves on,

as if behind your back

everything were at once destroyed and erased.