So, we'll go no more a roving
    So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
    And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
    And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
    And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
    And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
    By the light of the moon.

Whoever you are, I fear you are walking the walks of dreams,

I fear these supposed realities are to melt from under your feet and hands

Even now your features, joys, speech, house, trade, manners, troubles, follies, costume, crimes, dissipate away from you,

Your true soul and body appear before me,

They stand forth out of affairs, out of commerce, shops, work, farms, clothes, the house, buying, selling, eating, drinking, suffering, dying.

Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem,

I whisper with my lips close to your ear,

I have loved many women and men, but I love none better than you.

O I have been dilatory and dumb,

I should have made my way straight to you long ago, 

I should have blabb'd nothing but you, I should have chanted nothing but you.

I will leave all and come and make the hymns of you,

None has understood you, but I understand you, 

None has done justice to you, you have not done justice to yourself

None but has found you imperfect, I only find no imperfection in you,

None but would subordinate you, I only am he who will never consent to subordinate you,

I only am he who places over you no master, owner, better, God, beyond what waits intrinsically in yourself.

   

Painters have painted their swarming groups and the centre-figure of all,

From the head of the centre-figure spreading a nimbus of gold-color'd light,

But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without its nimbus of gold-color'd light,

From my hand from the brain of every man and woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever.

O I could sing such grandeurs and glories about you!

You have not known what you are, you have slumber'd upon yourself all your life,

Your eyelids have been the same as closed most of the time,

What you have done returns already in mockeries, 

Your thrift, knowledge, prayers, if they do not return in mockeries, what is their return?)

The mockeries are not you,

Underneath them and within them I see you lurk,

I pursue you where none else has pursued you,

Silence, the desk, the flippant expression, the night, the accustom'd routine, if these conceal you from others or from yourself, they do not conceal you from me,

The shaved face, the unsteady eye, the impure complexion, if these balk others they do not balk me,

The pert apparel, the deform'd attitude, drunkenness, greed, premature death, all these I part aside

There is no endowment in man or woman that is not tallied in you,

There is no virtue, no beauty in man or woman, but as good is in you,

No pluck, no endurance in others, but as good is in you,

No pleasure waiting for others, but an equal pleasure waits for you.

As for me, I give nothing to any one except I give the like carefully to you,

I sing the songs of the glory of none, not God, sooner than I sing the songs of the glory of you.

Whoever you are! claim your own at any hazard! 

These shows of the East and West are tame compared to you, 

These immense meadows, these interminable rivers, you are immense and interminable as they,

These furies, elements, storms, motions of Nature, throes of apparent dissolution, you are he or she who is master or mistress over them,

Master or mistress in your own right over Nature, elements, pain, passion, dissolution.

The hopples fall from your ankles, you find an unfailing sufficiency,

Old or young, male or female, rude, low, rejected by the rest, whatever you are promulges itself,

Through birth, life, death, burial, the means are provided, nothing is scanted,

Through angers, losses, ambition, ignorance, ennui, what you are picks its way.

                                 I.
We live and die, and what we reap
Is merely chaff from life’s storehouse;
For devil’s grain we barter souls 
And in his wine our bodies souse;
We build to Pleasure monuments;
But Pleasure always passes by.
The grave! —The grave! our only hope, 
The grave where dust grimed failures lie.

                                 II. 
We ask for life, men give us wine, 
We ask for rest, men give us death;
We long for Pan and Phoebus harp. 
But Bacchus blows on us his breath. 
O Harlem, weary are thy sons 
Of living that they never chose;
Give not to them the lotus leaf,
But Mary’s wreath and England’s rose.

^{translated from the German by Jessie Lamont}

Oh! All things are long passed away and far.
A light is shining but the distant star
From which it still comes to me has been dead
A thousand years . . . In the dim phantom boat
That glided past some ghastly thing was said.
A clock just struck within some house remote.
Which house?—I long to still my beating heart.
Beneath the sky’s vast dome I long to pray . . .
Of all the stars there must be far away
A single star which still exists apart.
And I believe that I should know the one
Which has alone endured and which alone
Like a white City that all space commands
At the ray’s end in the high heaven stands.

but in this poem nothing dies.

Alone in the poem, I make myself
brave. No—I show brave 
to my body, take both to the ocean. 

Come hurricane, come rip current, 
come toxic algal bloom. 

In March, I drift past the estuary
to watch an eight-foot dolphin 
lap the Mill River 

like a cat pacing a bathtub, 
sick and disoriented. 

Biologists will unspool her empty intestines, 
weigh her gray cerebellum.
She swam a great distance to die 

alone. I’m sorry—I lied. I can’t control 
what lives or dies. I need a place

to stow my brain. To hold 
each moment close as a sand flea
caught in my knuckle hairs.
  
Please, someone—
tell me a poem can coax 

oil from a sea bird’s throat. 
Tell me what to do
with my hands—my hands—

what can my hands do now?