Hyperion to Bellarmin
Do you ask how I felt at this time? Like someone who’s lost everything to gain everything.
It’s true I often came from Diotima’s trees like one drunk with triumph, often I’d have to rush away from her lest I betray any of my thoughts; so raged the joy in me, and the pride, the all-inspiring faith of being loved by Diotima.
Then Id search out the highest mountains and their winds, and like an eagle whose bleeding wing has healed, my spirit stirred in the boundless air and spread itself out over the visible world as if this were its own; oh, wonder! I often felt as if the things of the earth were purified
and fused together in my fire like gold, and a thing divine became of them and me, so raged in me the joy; and how I lifted up the children and pressed them to my throbbing heart, how I greeted the plants and the trees! I could have wished for a magic charm to gather the timid deer and all the wild birds of the forest like a family of little folk around my liberal hands, in such blissful folly did I love all things!
But not for long, then that was all extinguished in me like a light, and I'd sit there mute and mournful as a shade and sought my vanished life. I had no use for lamentation, nor did I want consolation. Hope I cast away, like a cripple whose crutch is hateful to him; I was ashamed to weep; I felt ashamed for existing at all. Yet in the end my pride broke out in tears, the pain I’d gladly have denied became dear to me, and I laid it like a child to my breast.
‘No,’ cried my heart, ‘no, my Diotima! it doesn’t hurt. Preserve your peace for yourself and let me go my way. Don’t let your tranquillity be disturbed, you lovely star! when below you there’s ferment and turbidness.
‘Oh, don’t let your rose fade, you blissful youth of the gods! Don’t let your beauty age in the troubles of the earth. For this is my joy, sweet life! that you bear within you carefree heaven. You shall not suffer want, no, no! you shall not see within yourself the penury of love.’
And when I then went down to her again — Id have liked to ask the breeze and read in the drift of the clouds how it would be with me in an hour! and how delighted I was when some friendly face met me on the way and, so long as it wasn’t too dryly, called out to me his ‘Good day!’
When a little girl came out of the woods and held out a bunch of strawberries for me to buy, with a look as though she’d rather make a gift of them, or when a peasant, sitting picking cherries in his tree, called down from the branches as I passed and asked if I’d not care to try a handful: these were good omens for my superstitious heart!
To top it all, if facing the path down which I came, one of Diotima’s windows was standing open, how good that could make me feel!
Perhaps she’d looked out not long before.
And now I stood before her, breathless and unsteady, pressing my crossed arms against my heart so as not to feel its trembling, and like the swimmer from rushing waters, my spirit struggled and strove not to go under in endless love.
‘What are we talking about just now?’ I could cry, ‘it’s often so hard, you can’t find the matter to hold fast your thoughts.’
‘Are they taking off into the air again?’ replied my Diotima. ‘You'll have to bind lead to their wings, or Ill tie them to a string, like the boy his flying dragon, so they can’t get away from us.’
The dear girl was trying with a jest to help herself and me, but it was to little avail.
‘Yes, yes!’ I cried, ‘as you like, as you think best — shall I read to you? Your lute will still be tuned from yesterday — I don’t have anything to read to you right now —’
‘You've promised more than once,’ she said, ‘to tell me how you lived before we met, won’t you tell me now?’
‘That’s true,’ I replied; my heart gladly pounced on this, and so then I told her, as I’ve told you, of Adamas and my lonely days in Smyrna, of Alabanda and how I was parted from him, and of the baffling sickness of my being before I came over to Calauria — ‘now you know it all,’ I told her calmly when I'd finished, ‘now you will find in me less cause for offence; now you will say,’ I added with a smile, ‘don’t mock this Vulcan if he limps, for twice he’s been hurled from heaven to earth by the gods.’
‘Hush,’ she cried in a choking voice and hid her tears in her handkerchief, ‘oh hush, and don’t make fun of your fate, of your heart! for I understand it, and better than you.
‘Dear — dear Hyperion! there’s no helping you, I fear.
‘Do you really know,’ she continued with heightened voice, ‘do you really know what it is you're starving for, the one thing that you lack, what you're searching for like Alpheus his Arethusa, what you’ve been grieving for in all your grief? It didn’t depart just years ago, one can’t say precisely when it was there, when it went away, but it was, it is, in you it is! It’s a better age you're seeking, a more beautiful world. It was only that world you embraced in your friends, with them you were that world.
‘In Adamas it had dawned for you; it had also departed with him. In Alabanda its light appeared to you a second time, only more fierce and fervid, and that’s why it was like midnight for your soul when he left your life.
‘And do you see now why the smallest doubt about Alabanda was bound to become despair in you? why you only cast him off because he wasn’t quite a god?
‘You didn’t want human beings, believe me, you wanted a world. The loss of all the golden centuries, as you felt them, compressed into a single happy moment, the spirit of all the spirits of better times, the energy of all the energies of the heroes, all this was to be made good for you by a single mere man! — Do you see now how poor, how rich you are? why you should be so proud and also so cast down? why for you joy and grief alternate so terribly?
‘It’s because you have everything and nothing, because the phantom of the golden days which are to come is yours and yet isn’t there, because you're a citizen in the regions of justice and beauty, a god amongst gods in the beautiful dreams that steal upon you by day, and awake to find yourself standing on modern Greek soil.
‘Twice, you said? oh, you're hurled from heaven to earth seventy times in a single day. Shall I say it? I fear for you, you'll scarce be able to bear the fate of these times. There are diverse things you'll still try, you'll —
‘Oh God! and your final refuge will be a grave.’
‘No, Diotima,’ I cried, ‘no, by heaven, no! As long as one melody still sounds for me, Ill not fear the deathly stillness of the wilderness beneath the stars; as long as the sun only shines and Diotima, there is for me no night.
‘Let the death knell toll for all the virtues! it’s you I hear, you, your heart’s song, my love! and find immortal life while all else burns out and withers.’
‘O Hyperion,’ she cried, ‘what are you saying?”
‘I speak as I must. I can’t, I can’t any longer hide all the bliss and fear and care — Diotima! — Yes, you know it, must know it, have long since seen it, that I shall go under unless you give me your hand.’
She was taken aback, confounded.
‘And to me,’ she cried, ‘to me Hyperion would cling? well then I wish, for the first time now I wish to be more than a mere mortal maiden. But I'll be for you what I can.’
‘Oh then you’re everything for me!’ I cried.
‘Everything? you wicked hypocrite! and what of mankind that’s in the end your only love?’
‘Mankind?’ I said. ‘I would that mankind made its watchword Diotima and painted your image on its banners, and proclaimed: “Today the divine shall triumph!” Angel of heaven! what a day that would be!’
‘Go,’ she cried, ‘go and show your glory to heaven! it must not be so close to me.
‘You will go, won’t you, dear Hyperion?’
I obeyed. Who would not have done? I went. Never had I gone from her like this before. O Bellarmin! that was joy, stillness of life, peace of the gods, heavenly, wonderful, unknowable joy.
Words are useless here, and whoever seeks a likeness for it has never felt it. The only thing that could express such joy was Diotima’s song, floating in golden mean between high and low.
O you willow banks of Lethe! you sunset paths in forests of Elysium! you lilies by the valley’s streams! you rose-wreaths of the hill! I believe in you, in this friendly hour, and speak to my heart: ‘there you shall find her again, and all the joy you have lost.’