Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes

That was the souls' strange mine.

Like silent veins of silver ore they went

as veins through its darkness. Between roots

the blood sprang up that goes off to mankind,

and heavy as porphyry it looked in the dark.

Otherwise there was nothing red.

and bodiless forests. Bridges over the void

and that great, grey, blind pool

that hung above its distant bed

like rain-sky over a landscape.

And between meadows, soft and full of patience,

appeared the one path's pale strip

laid down like a long bleaching-cloth.

who looked mutely and impatiently ahead.

Without chewing, his stride devoured the path

in great bites; his hands hung

heavy and closed from the fall of the folds

and no longer knew of the light lyre,

that had grown into the left hand

like rose-tendrils into the olive tree's branch.

And his senses were as if split in two:

turned back, came, and again and again stood far off

and waiting at the next bend,—

his hearing stayed behind like a smell.

Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached

as far as the walking of those two others,

who were to follow this whole ascent.

Then again it was only the echo of his own climbing

and the wind of his cloak, what was behind him.

But he told himself they were coming after all;

said it aloud and heard himself fade away.

They were coming after all, only it was two of them,

who walked dreadfully softly. If he were allowed

to turn around just once (were the looking-back

not the undoing of this whole work,

that is only now being accomplished), he would have to see them,

the two quiet ones, who follow him in silence:

the travelling-hood above bright eyes,

carrying the slender staff before his body

and beating wings at his ankles;

and given to his left hand: she.

The so-beloved, that out of one lyre

more lament came than ever from mourning-women;

that a world arose out of lament, in which

everything was there once more: wood and valley

and path and village, field and river and beast;

and that around this lament-world, just as

as around the other earth, a sun

and a starred, silent sky went round,

a lament-sky with disfigured stars—:

this so-beloved one.

her step hemmed in by long grave-bands,

uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

She was within herself as in a high hope

and did not think of the man who walked ahead,

nor of the path that climbed up into life.

She was within herself. And her being-dead

filled her like fullness.

Like a fruit of sweetness and dark,

so was she full of her great death,

which was so new that she grasped nothing.

and untouchable; her sex was closed

like a young flower toward evening,

and her hands were so weaned

from wedlock that even the light god's

infinitely soft guiding touch

wounded her like too much familiarity.

who sometimes sounded in the poet's songs,

no longer the scent and island of the wide bed

and that man's property no longer.

She was already loosened like long hair

and given away like fallen rain

and parcelled out like a hundredfold store.

And when, suddenly, abruptly,

the god stopped her and with pain in his cry

spoke the words: He has turned around

she grasped nothing and said softly: Who?

stood someone or other, whose face

could not be made out. He stood and saw

how, on the strip of a meadow-path,

with sorrowful gaze the god of the message

turned in silence, to follow the figure

who was already going back along this same path,

her step hemmed in by long grave-bands,

uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.