terribly quiet than Man:
his footsteps pass so perilously soft across the sea
in marble winter,
up the stiff blue waves and every Tuesday
down he grinds the unastonishable earth
with horse and shatter.
Shatters too the cheeks of birds and traps them in his forest headlights,
salty silvers roll into his net, he weaves it just for that,
this terribly quiet customer.
He dooms
animals and mountains technically,
by yoke he makes the bull bend, the horse to its knees.
And utterance and thought as clear as complicated air and
moods that make a city moral, these he taught himself.
The snowy cold he knows to flee
and every human exigency crackles as he plugs it in:
every outlet works but
one.
Death stays dark.
Death he cannot doom.
Fabrications notwithstanding.
Evil,
good,
laws,
gods,
honest oath taking notwithstanding.
Hilarious in his high city
you see him cantering just as he please,
the lava up to here,"
Hamlet, IIii, 327-330
"Ode to Man" from Sophocles' ANTIGONE
ReplyDeleteNumberless are the world's wonders, but none More wonderful than man; the storm gray sea Yields to his prows. the huge crests bear him high; Earth, holy and inexhaustible, is graven With shining furrows where his plows have gone Year and year, the timeless labor of stallions. The lightboned birds and beasts that cling to cover, The lithe fish lighting their reaches of dim water, All are taken, tamed in the net of his mind; The lion on the hill, the wild horse windy-maned, Resign to him; and his blunt yoke has broken The sultry shoulders of the mountain bull. Words also, ant thought as rapid as air, He fashions to his good use; statecraft is his, And his the skill that deflect the arrows of snow, The spears of winter rain: from every wind He has made himself secure—from all but one: In the late wind of death he cannot stand. O clear intelligence, force beyond all measure! O fate of man, working both good and evil! When the laws are kept, how proudly his city stands! When the laws are broken, what of his city then? Never may the anarchic man find rest at my hearth, Never be it said that my thoughts are his thoughts. (Translated by Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, 1938.)