Hyperion to Bellarmin
There’s a forgetting of all existence, a silencing of our being, when we feel we’ve found everything.
There’s a silencing, a forgetting of all existence, when we feel we’ve lost everything, a night of the soul, when no shimmer of a star, when not even a rotting log can give us light.
Id now become calm. Now nothing roused me any more at midnight. Now I no longer singed myself in my own flame.
Lone and still I now looked straight before me, no roving with my eye in past and future. Now things far and near no longer jostled in my mind; unless men forced me to, I didn’t see them.
Once this age would often lie before my mind like the eternally empty vessel of the Danaids, and with prodigal love my soul poured itself out to fill up the holes; now Isaw no more holes, now life’s tedium bore down on me no more.
Now never more did I say to the flower, ‘you’re my sister!’ nor to the springs, ‘we're of a kind!’ Now, like an echo, I faithfully gave to every thing its name.
Like a stream past arid banks, where no willow-leaf mirrors in the water, the world untouched by beauty passed me by.