Hyperion to Diotima
We’ve now had three successive victories in small skirmishes, but where the fighting men crisscrossed each other like lightning and
everything was one consuming flame. Navarin is ours and now we stand before the fortress of Mistra, the remains of ancient Sparta. The flag I snatched from an Albanian horde I’ve planted on a ruin that lies before the city, I’ve flung for joy my Turkish turban into the Eurotas and have been wearing the Greek helmet ever since.
And now I’d like to see you, O maiden! Id like to see you and take your hands and press them to my heart, for which the joy perhaps may soon be too great! soon! in a week perhaps it will be freed, the ancient, noble, holy Peloponnese.
O then, my dearest! teach me piety! then teach my overflowing heart a prayer! I should stay silent, for what have I done? and even had I done anything to speak of, yet how much still remains to do? But how can I help it if my thought is swifter than time? I’d much rather have it the other way round, with time and deed outflying thought, and winged victory overtaking hope itself.
My Alabanda blossoms like a bridegroom. From his every glance the coming world smiles out at me, and with that I can as yet just about still my impatience.
Diotima! I wouldn’t swap this budding bliss for the finest heyday of ancient Greece, and the smallest of our victories means more to me than Marathon and Thermopylae and Plataea. Is it not true? Is not the convalescing life dearer to the heart than the untouched one that is yet to know sickness? Only when youth is gone do we love it, and only when lost youth comes again does it then gladden all the depths of the soul.
My tent stands by the Eurotas, and when I wake after midnight the ancient river-god murmurs reproachfully past me, and smiling I take the flowers of the bank and strew them on his glancing waves and say to him: “Take this as a sign, you lonely one! Soon the life of old will blossom around you again.’