Why do we labor at the poem
Age after Age---even an age like
This one, when the living rock
No longer lives and the cut stone perishes?----
Holderlin's question. Why be poet
Now when the meanings do not mean?----
When the stone shape is shaped stone?----
Durftiger Zeit?---time without inwardness?
Why lie upon our beds at night
Holding a mouthful of words, exhausted
Most by the absence of the adversary?
Why be poet? Why be man!
Far out in the uttermost Andes
Mortised enormous stones are piled.
What is man? Who founds a poem
In the rubble of wild world---wilderness.
The acropolis of eternity that crumbles
Time and again is mine---my task.
The heart's necessity compels me:
Man I am: poet must be.
The labor of order has no rest;
To impose on the confused, fortuitous
Flowing away of the world, Form----
Still, cool, clean, obdurate,
Lasting forever, or at least
Lasting: a precarious monument
Promising immortality, for the wing
Moves and in the moving balances.
Generations of the dying
Fix the sea's dissolving salts
In stone, still trees, their branches immovable,
Meaning
the movement of the sea.