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Showing posts with label Hofmannsthal. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hofmannsthal. Show all posts

Friday, August 12, 2011

Do You See the Town?


Today we begin something new.

Each Friday we will provide the link to the blogger who is hosting a weekly celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. There you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books. It’s also a great way to explore the internet.

Enjoy the festivities!

Today’s host is Karen Edmisten. You can visit her here.


(I and the Village by Marc Chagall, 1887-1985,
Russian-French artist)

“Men, even when they do not require one another’s help, desire to live together,” said Aristotle (384-322 B. C.) in Politics, “and are in fact brought together by their common interests in proportion as they severally attain to any measure of well-being. This is certainly the chief end, both of individuals and of states.”

The good life, then, is at one and the same time the chief end or goal, both of each person and of the true civil society.


DO YOU SEE THE TOWN?

Do you see the town, how it rests over there,
whispering, it nestles in the cloak of night?
The moon pours her silvery silken stream
down upon it in magical splendor.

The gentle night wind wafts its breath from there,
so ghostly, a dying, gentle sound:
It cries in dreams, it breathes deeply and heavily,
it whispers, mysterious, alluringly frightened . . .

The dark town, it sleeps in my heart
with brilliance and fire, with painfully colored splendor:
But its reflection floats around you, flatters you,
Hushed to a whisper, gliding, through the night.

~ Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), Austrian poet