Primal Words. Orphic (1817-18)

 

ΔAIMΩN, Daemon

 

As stood the sun to the salute of planets

Upon the day that gave you to the earth,

You grew forthwith, and prospered, in your growing

Heeded the law presiding at your birth.

Sibyls and prophets told it: You must be

None but yourself, from self you cannot flee.

No time there is, no power, can decompose

The minted form that lives and living grows.

 

TYXH, Chance

 

Strict the limit, yet a drifting, pleasant,

Moves around it, with us, circling us;

You are not long alone, you learn decorum,

And likely act as any manjack does:

It comes and goes, in life, you lose or win,

It is a trinket, toyed with, wearing thin.

Full circle come the years, the end is sighted,

The lamp awaits the flame, to be ignited.

 

EPΩΣ, Love

 

Love is not absent! Down from heaven swooping,

Whither from ancient emptiness he flew,

This way he flutters, borne by airy feathers,

Round heart and head the day of Springtime through,

Apparently escapes, returns anon,

So sweet and nervous, pain to pleasure gone.

Some hearts away in general loving float,

The noblest, yet, their all to one devote.

 

ANAΓKH, Necessity

 

Then back it comes, what in the stars was written;

Law and circumstance; each will is tried,

All willing simply forced, by obligation:

In. face of it, the free will's tongue is tied.

Man's heart forswears what most was loved by him,

To iron "Must" comply both will and whim.

It only seems we're free, years hem us in,

Constraining more than at our origin.

 

EAПІΣ, Hope

 

Yet the repulsive gate can be unbolted

Within such bounds, their adamantine wall,

Though it may stand, that gate, like rock for ever;

One being moves, unchecked, ethereal:

From heavy cloud, from fog, from squall of rain

She lifts us to herself, we're winged again,

You know her well, to nowhere she's confined­ –

A wingbeat – aeons vanish far behind.

 

 

Translated by Christopher Middleton