90 North

Selected Poems (1955)

At home, in my flannel gown, like a bear to its floe,I clambered to bed; up the globe’s impossible sidesI sailed all nightÑtill at last, with my black beard,My furs and my dogs, I stood at the northern pole.

There in the childish night my companions lay frozen,The stiff fur knocked at my starveling throat,And I gave my great sigh: the flakes came huddling,Were they really my end? In the darkness I turned to my rest.

ÑHere, the flag snaps in the glare and silenceOf the unbroken ice. I stand here,The dogs bark, my beard is black, and I stareAt the North Pole …And now what? Why, go back.

Turn as I please, my step is to the south.The worldÑmy world spins on this final pointOf cold and wretchedness: all lines, all windsEnd in this whirlpool I at last discover.

And it is meaningless. In the child’s bedAfter the night’s voyage, in that warm worldWhere people work and suffer for the endThat crowns the painÑin that Cloud-Cuckoo-Land

I reached my North and it had meaning.Here the actual pole of my existence,Where all that I have done is meaningless,Where I die or live by accident aloneÑ

Where, living or dying, I am still alone;Here where North, the night, the berg of deathCrowd me out of the ignorant darkness,I see at last that all the knowledge

I wrung from the darknessÑthat the darkness flung meÑIs worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darknessAnd we call it wisdom. It is pain.

Children Selecting Books in a Library

With beasts and gods, above, the wall is bright.The child’s head, bent to the book-colored shelves,Is slow and sidelong and food-gathering,Moving in blind grace … yet from the mural, CareThe grey-eyed one, fishing the morning mist,Seizes the baby hero by the hairAnd whispers, in the tongue of gods and children,Words of a doom as ecumenical as dawnBut blanched like dawn, with dew.The children’s criesAre to men the cries of crickets, dense with warmth- But dip a finger into Fafnir1, taste it,And all their words are plain as chance and pain.Their tales are full of sorcerers and ogresBecause their lives are: the capricious infiniteThat, like parents, no one has yet escapedExcept by luck or magic; and since strengthAnd wit are useless, be kind or stupid, waitSome power’s gratitude, the tide of things.Read meanwhile … hunt among the shelves, as dogs do, grasses,And find one cure for Everychild’s diseasesBeginning: Once upon a time there wasA wolf that fed, a mouse that warned, a bear that rodeA boy. Us men, alas! wolves, mice, bears bore.And yet wolves, mice, bears, children, gods and menIn slow preambulation up and down the shelvesOf the universe are seeking … who knows except themselves?What some escape to, some escape: if we find Swann’sWay better than our own, and trudge on at the backOf the north wind to Ð to Ð somewhere eastOf the sun, west of the moon, it is because we liveBy trading another’s sorrow for our own; another’sImpossibilities, still unbelieved in, for our own …”I am myself still?” For a little while, forget:The world’s selves cure that short disease, myself,And we see bending to us, dewy-eyed, the greatCHANGE, dear to all things not to themselves endeared.

The World Is Everything that Is the Case. Selected Poems (1955)

1In Norse mythology Fafnir or Favnir was a son of the dwarf king Hreidmar and brother of Regin and Otr. In the Volsunga Saga, Fafnir was a dwarf gifted with a powerful arm and fearless soul. He wore the Aegis helmet and guarded his father’s house of glittering gold and flashing gems. He was the strongest and most aggressive of the three brothers. After Otr was killed by Loki, Hreidmar received the cursed gold of Andvari’s as repayment for the loss of his son. Fafnir and Regin then killed their father to get the gold, but Fafnir decided he wanted it all, turning into a dragon (symbol of greed). Regin then sent his foster-son, Sigurd, to kill the dragon. Sigurd succeeded, but then killed Regin too, upon learning that he had planned to kill him once he had recovered the gold. As Fafner, he is featured in Richard Wagner’s Der Ring Des Nibelungen, although he began life as a giant rather than a dwarf, before once again turning into a dragon to better guard the gold.Fafnir also is an Aachen-based company, producer of cars and engines.