No More Learning

Listen--you never heard me sing before.

When a false world betrays your trust
And stamps upon your fire,
When what seemed blood is only rust,
Take up the lyre!

How quickly the heroic mood
Responds to its own ringing;
The scornful heart, the angry blood
Leap upward, singing!

Ah, that was how it used to be. But now,
_Du schoner Todesengel_, it is odd
How more than calm I am. Franz said it shows
Power of religion, and it does, perhaps--
Religion or morphine or poultices--God knows.
I sometimes have a sentimental lapse
And long for saviours and a physical God.
When health is all used up, when money goes,
When courage cracks and leaves a shattered will,
Then Christianity begins. For a sick Jew,
It is a very good religion . . . Still,
I fear that I will die as I have lived,
A long-nosed heathen playing with his scars,
A pagan killed by weltschmerz . . . I remember,
Once when I stood with Hegel at a window,
I, being full of bubbling youth and coffee,
Spoke in symbolic tropes about the stars.
Something I said about "those high
Abodes of all the blest" provoked his temper.
"Abodes? The stars? " He froze me with a sneer,
"A light eruption on the firmament. "
"But," cried romantic I, "is there no sphere
Where virtue is rewarded when we die? "
And Hegel mocked, "A very pleasant whim.
So you demand a bonus since you spent
One lifetime and refrained from poisoning
Your testy grandmother! " . . . How much of him
Remains in me--even when I am caught
In dreams of death and immortality.

To be eternal--what a brilliant thought!
It must have been conceived and coddled first
By some old shopkeeper in Nuremberg,
His slippers warm, his children amply nursed,
Who, with his lighted meerschaum in his hand,
His nightcap on his head, one summer night
Sat drowsing at his door. And mused, how grand
If all of this could last beyond a doubt--
This placid moon, this plump _gemuthlichkeit_;
Pipe, breath and summer never going out--
To vegetate through all eternity . . .