This poem is a lament for a departed friend who was an artist. It describes how the friend was open to life like a dawning day and suffered through love and art. The friend began both tasks of love and transforming work through art but fame distorted their work after death. The speaker asks for the friend's help to continue advancing in their own work and not fall back without meaning to, as dreams can overtake us. They ask for insight so great works don't become worthless from failing to sustain the effort and intensity, caught as in an old enmity between life and great works. The speaker hopes the dead friend can still help from within, as what is farthest sometimes provides insight, without distracting from the friend
This poem is a lament for a departed friend who was an artist. It describes how the friend was open to life like a dawning day and suffered through love and art. The friend began both tasks of love and transforming work through art but fame distorted their work after death. The speaker asks for the friend's help to continue advancing in their own work and not fall back without meaning to, as dreams can overtake us. They ask for insight so great works don't become worthless from failing to sustain the effort and intensity, caught as in an old enmity between life and great works. The speaker hopes the dead friend can still help from within, as what is farthest sometimes provides insight, without distracting from the friend
This poem is a lament for a departed friend who was an artist. It describes how the friend was open to life like a dawning day and suffered through love and art. The friend began both tasks of love and transforming work through art but fame distorted their work after death. The speaker asks for the friend's help to continue advancing in their own work and not fall back without meaning to, as dreams can overtake us. They ask for insight so great works don't become worthless from failing to sustain the effort and intensity, caught as in an old enmity between life and great works. The speaker hopes the dead friend can still help from within, as what is farthest sometimes provides insight, without distracting from the friend
You who knew so much about all these things, and were so able, as you proceeded through life, open to everything, like a dawning day. Women suffer: to love means being alone, and artists sometimes intuit in their work that when they love, they must transform. You began both tasks, we see it in all that which fame now distorts and takes from you. Ah, you were far beyond any fame. You were inconspicuous, and quietly gathered your beauty into yourself, as one takes in a flag on a gray workday morning, And wanted nothing but a long-term work, — which remains undone: ever undone. If you’re still nearby, if somewhere in this darkness there’s a place where your spirit resonates with the shallow sound-waves a solitary voice can stir alone at night in the currents of a high-ceilinged room: Then hear me: Help me. You see, we slip back, without knowing it, from our advance, into something we didn’t intend; where we can become caught up, as in a dream, and where we could die without waking. No one went further. It can happen to any of us who raise our blood to an extended work, that we can’t hold it at that level, and it falls of its own weight, worthless. for somewhere an old enmity exists between our life and the great works we do. So that I may have insight into it and say it: help me. Don’t come back. If you can bear it, stay dead among the dead. The dead have their tasks. Then help me in some way that won’t distract you, as what is farthest sometimes helps me: within me.