I groan and cough and press, and think
My eye grows damp, a tear falls; the iron is hot,
My little tear it seethes and seethes and will not dry up.
I feel no strength, it is all used up; the iron falls from my
hand, and yet the tear, the silent tear, the tear, the tear
boils more and more.
My head whirls, my heart breaks. I ask in woe: “Oh, tell me, my
friend in adversity and pain, O tear, why not dry up in
seething.”
“Are you perhaps a messenger and announce that other tears are
coming? I should like to know it; say, when will the great woe
be ended?”
I should have asked more of the turbulent tear; but suddenly
there began to flow more tears, tears without measure, and I at
once understood that the river of tears is very deep.
In a mood of mingled longing and hate, he writes the Flowers of
Autumn, whose splendor is only for the well-to-do—
Therefore I do not care if I see you dying now.
There is more virility, though nothing really purposeful in the
Garden of the Dead, where the dead worker rises up to claim the
flowers on the rich man’s grave:
Not only the flowers are mine, nay, even the boards of the
coffin are mine!
And not only the boards of the coffin—you shrouds, you, too, are
mine! He has it all through my work, my poor work—oh, all and
all is mine!
Then the dead one passed away in the air with cries:
“You will pay for it yet! And he clenched his fist and
threatened the world.”
The poet’s love for nature, the human longing of the worker
imprisoned in the city for the country, which he has known but
which is now beyond his reach, is expressed in the nightingale’s
challenge to the laborer:
“Summer is here, summer is here! I shall not sing to you
eternally, for finally my hour too will strike—a dark crow will
occupy my branch, the holy song will cease. How long must I sing
to you from the tree of the golden dream of freedom and love?
Rise and let me not urge you any longer! The heaven will not
remain eternally blue! Summer is here, summer is here! Now one
can pass a merry time, for just like you who are fading at your
machine, everything will in the end wither and be carried away.”
The Nightingale illustrates, as Professor Wiener points out, the
poet’s command over poetic form as well as poetic thought. Even in
the English prose translation we can feel the repetition of notes,
the intricate weaving of melody in the bird’s song.
Another poem which is an example of the same power of combining
matter and manner is that drama of the garment worker’s lift, The
Sweatshop, which deserves to be quoted in full: