Watkins, Vernon Phillips, 1906-1967 : The Childhood of Hölderlin [from The Collected Poems of Vernon Watkins (1986) , Golgonooza Press ]
'Only one Summer grant, you Powerful Ones,
And one Autumn to my full-ripened song,
That my heart willingly by the tender
Harp-strings be satisfied; let me die, then.
The soul to which its godlike right when alive
Came not, down in Orcus shall find no rest;
But once the holy one that against
My heart ties close, the poem, is uttered,
Welcome, then, O peace of the world of Shades!
Content am I, even if the play of strings
Has not down-guided my footsteps; once
Lived I as gods live, and more I crave not.' 'To the Fates' ---Hölderlin
1
1 Surely the racing foal has discerned through darkness
2 The light out of which man came, and the violet-root
[Page 305 ]
3 Has sucked the fountain over which Dante bent
4 And found the river of light. Yet dust is dust.
5 Who could rebuild from this the childhood of Hölderlin?
6 Who dare look twice, who dare look once, into heaven?
7 He looked, his eyes upheld, and the aether loved him.
8 In that pure instant he knew the workings of nature.
9 He had found stillness, the calm of beautiful bodies.
10 When he looked down, his eyes were blinded to shadows.
11 Refusing change, he fashioned the shafts of the Odes,
12 A quiver of joy. Where faith from the single eye
13 Travelled, the light was immortally true; yet he
14 Suffered. A wound was in the nature of man.
15 He grieved, while Spring restored green life to the tree.
16 He thought of that ancient error, returning home.
17 Sophocles' music changed him; the chorus-endings
18 Pierced his marrow: joy had a tragic base.
19 Nothing but grief could match the joy in his heart.
20 The wound of love was his, the unhealing wound.
21 In tragic suffering he touched the heart of the god.
22 Pindar taught him majesty, Sophocles, beauty.
23 Under creation moved the myth of Empedocles.
24 Harmonious nature differed from exiled man.
25 Yet man knew God: for him the universe mourned.
2
1 He came, like love, to beseeching strings. Before birth
2 He had experienced death. He sang in the cradle.
3 He knew the tenderest fire in eyes declined
4 Where his mother leaned. Then, racing out in the fields,
5 True friends he found: the mountains were his companions.
6 At dusk the rivers returned to the edge of the eyes.
7 He touched the stars, the wind, the crowns of the reeds.
8 If he lingered late, he felt the sigh of the dew
9 Like souls found late upon Lethe. In purest darkness
10 His eyes shone with tears. He thought of the underworld.
11 He grew in stature. He felt the arms of the gods
12 About him. When people spoke, he remained confused.
13 If he touched a bud, he knew the secrets of nature.
14 The Rhine, the demi-god, thundered, a Titan in chains.
[Page 306 ]
15 At evening he would return by a wooded path
16 To his mother's house where myths of the Greeks were stored.
17 His eyes marvelled, reading the deeds of heroes.
18 At night, when his book was closed, the curtain stirred,
19 Pure gold in the rising moon; and he saw the valleys
20 Transformed with unearthly light. He acclaimed his kindred.
21 Quite still, he smiled, caught up to the plains of heaven.
22 'Holy dawn, the man who is not a hero
23 Does not see you; therefore you are not honoured,
24 Beautiful sun-god; therefore your lyre is silent,
25 Except where pious peoples watch you ascend.
26 You are too still for the eyes of men; your music
27 Rises solemn, not knowing trouble or care,
28 In perfect praise, much brighter than any dream.
29 I have known and loved you, Aether, better than men.
30 Late, when moonlight bathed the enchanted fields,
31 When the last notes of the sun-youth's lyre had faded
32 Leaving the listening mountains lost in music,
33 I have seen them walk, in airs of the gods, those genii,
34 Patient as stars. My tongue is the tomb of angels.
35 My words are silence. Orpheus plays to the Shades.'
36 Yet nearer the bone were his words on the master of tragedy,
37 After the sun-god's music, this upon Sophocles:
38 'Many attempted in vain, through joy, the most joyful to utter;
39 Here, at last, I am held: here, in the tragic, it speaks.'
3
1 Once he saw the two halves of life in a lake,
2 Swans on the lake, and above it, falling blossoms
3 Touching the surface dividing youth from age.
4 Then, where they dipped through the surface, all was shadow.
5 Had he seen the future, by walls of Winter entombed,
6 Discoursing, when Waiblinger saw him, of Zimmer's kindness,
7 A mask of deference hiding the features of youth
8 Of one the world had rejected? Who could have heard,
9 In that breath of suspended magic, the weather-vane clatter
10 Of the castle to which he was doomed?
4
1 Early, taught by Greece,
2 He sought the heroic in man. Apollo
[Page 307 ]
3 Played to him. That gold fleece
4 Moved on the water; and the host
5 Of Homer's heroes moved. A lost
6 Age compelled him. He must follow,
7 Source of Promethean fire,
8 Source of the Danube's waterfall,
9 The godlike: great desire,
10 Glorious Heracles' feet,
11 With tiger and vine in thrall
12 Where the West and Asia meet.
13 There sprang from ancient silence
14 Music of gods, the clash on rocks of seas.
15 He saw those silver islands,
16 And he heard Mnemosyne's
17 Lament for Achilles and Ajax, Ajax dead
18 In the grotto by the sea-bed.
19 His eyes beyond Greece beheld
20 At the end of the poem 'Bread and Wine'
21 The torch the Syrian held
22 Awakening through the divine
23 Love, that ancient keep
24 Where the old gods fell asleep.
25 Late, caught up by a genius,
26 Borne over streams and dawn's strange lands,
27 Their peaks flowering in Asia's flame,
28 Seeking John, the witness,
29 To Patmos, the last island,
30 He in a vision came.
31 The lightning held him.
32 He thought to have seen God's face in youth
33 As John beheld Him,
34 But saw, where ages converged, the sign
35 Single and forever,
36 Poured to the dust like wine.
37 This was the bridal feast
38 Where Greece, by Christus' lightning stripped,
39 With Asia and the East
40 Met in love's utmost wish.
41 And the Baptist's head in the dish
42 Shone like unfading script.
[Page 308 ]
43 All stood at the bridal feast
44 Changed by the downward-pointing sign.
45 The deepest joy was released
46 By the deepest shadow in death.
47 'Since Christ, like morning mist
48 Are the names of the souls of breath.'
5
1 The pine moves. Like an instrument it responds
2 To the music of Earth. It drinks the life of the underworld.
3 The pine-cone falls, rolls, rain-sodden, at rest.
4 Under the rock thunders, remorseless, the waterfall,
5 And trampled, year upon year, by confused horses,
6 The violet-root secretes the breath of the century.
7 Poet of rivers and supernatural love,
8 His crime was tenderness. Goethe was reigning in Weimar,
9 Holding, majestic, his court, like a classical sun.
10 For Hölderlin Schiller surpassed him, the last of the Hellenes,
11 An unapproachable star. Yet neither accepted
12 Their eccentric visitor, pledged to a loftier myth.
13 Acclaiming creation hung on the word of God,
14 His was the hardest task, his lot to be spurned;
15 And yet his fragments outshine their accomplished works.
16 The living universe moves in the final hymns.
17 The measure, there, is the deepest measure of thought,
18 Sprung from the purest love, for love is the measure.
19 'The beginning of riches is truly', he said, 'in the sea',
20 Springing from dissolution, the dazzling one
21 Casting up shells, out of its boisterous movement
22 Casting up Greece, the light of perfect meanings,
23 The shape of perfect statues, that are still:
24 How soon the tumultuous waters make all nothing.
25 Terrible destinies sleep in the shadow of calm.
26 The prophets of order suffer on harmony's wheel
27 The tension between their vision and that which exists.
28 Involved in the sun, the language of petals and leaves
29 His mother tongue, he saw, as one blind, by miracle
30 Given true sight, divinity's earth-born day.
31 And late, remembering the mountains and the Dordogne,
32 His eyes fixed in thought on the tumbling river,
[Page 309 ]
33 He wrote, at the end of the Andenken:
34 'Great as a sea,
35 The river goes out. The sea, though,
36 Takes and gives recollection,
37 And love, too, fastens the eyes intently.
38 What endures, however, poets create.'
6
1 He saw Dionysus clear from the forge of Vulcan,
2 Birthplace of wonders, flash of the deathless moment.
3 For who could train down with such grace the intuitive lightning
4 To the thunderous chains of his cloud? The courses of rivers
5 Remained a compelling mystery; yet when he wrote
6 Of these, he no longer watched, he
became the river.
7 So swift his thought, so close to the life he saw,
8 He knew the rose as the rose is known to herself,
9 Fell with the cataract's fall, or became that eagle
10 Of piercing sight, or learnt the time of the fig-tree,
11 Not by time, but by breast-feather and leaf.
7
1 Dawn breaks; the sunlight moves like a spirit.
2 Faint breezes play through arresting leaves. The morning
3 Moves through the sky. The divine, far-reaching blueness
4 Yields to the flight of birds.
5 Now he should come, the serene, transfiguring hero
6 Rocked in light's cradle, bearing the snake he has killed.
7 Too dark without him were Earth, and the cloistered greyness
8 Walled from sunlight and flowers.
9 What might the gift not bring to their holy light
10 Who ask love only? Sacrifice willed by the heavenly ones
11 Raises our god-pierced eyes. Our selves are nothing;
12 That which we seek is all.
13 Earth is green, is gay, but is fair no longer.
14 Wild is the sea, and white: the ships are glorious.
15 The running river looks for a vanished picture.
16 Who is at peace, what mortal?
17 Surely, below, the goddess lives, Diotima.
18 Did she not lift me, blinded, carried to godhead,
19 Resting with genius in clouds? The cataract thunders;
20 But, for the lovers, stillness.
[Page 310 ]
21 Truth, I have seen her live, here, in the body
22 Moving; not a far country. No medallion
23 Of Hellas matched her. Death has fastened her eyelids.
24 Orphaned is night, is morning.
8
1 But now it was late.
2 The sands were chill, no comfort in earth, and in air
3 The bird of night which hovered before his eyes
4 In premonition of exile, herald of fate,
5 Left him now, to return when the hour of death
6 Closed his lips on an incomprehensible prayer.
7 In the room where he passed his days his book lay open,
8 But the verses he made in age were formal and simple;
9 He scattered some on the stream from the tree of his tower,
10 Like leaves of acceptance, tranquil in thought and rhyme.
11 Long he lived there, a stranger to his own name,
12 Entranced with landscape, smiling over the Neckar,
13 Dying beyond his time.
9
1 If there could be
2 A second genesis of the first Adam,
3 His mind fixed on the all-creating God,
4 A child to the mother raised, his eyes remaining
5 Full of that first pure concord, light with light,
6 Adam redeemed, both Heaven and Earth at once
7 Mirrored in eyes, proportioning the limbs,
8 The mountains moving in their primal shape
9 In dew and worship, cities and their rivers
10 Moving in harmony with that first music,
11 Hölderlin's dream would live.
12 But now he speaks
13 In fragmentary language
14 Of castles built by the heavenly ones; man as demi-god,
15 And a world huger, torn in fragments, glory
16 Accessible only to faith, miraculous bridges,
17 Visions too great for man without the cadence
18 And broken utterance of our elected guide.
19 And still, through darkness, Nazareth, Capernaum;
20 The hymn to the Madonna;
[Page 311 ]
21 Holy vibrations of unbounded joy
22 Still sounding from the deepest hour of man,
23 Grief keeping pace with joy.
24 Still, since the great wrong and the wrong redeemed,
25 To live would be to suffer, from that hour.
26 Because his song was pure false tongues are silent.
27 Through him the dead speak, and the quick are changed.
© Copyright G. M. Watkins
Author Name: Watkins, Vernon Phillips, 1906-1967
Poem title: The Childhood of Hölderlin
Volume Title: The Collected Poems of Vernon Watkins
Place of publication (of source volume): Ipswich
Publisher: Golgonooza Press
Publication date of electronic edition: 2000
Publication date of source volume: 1986
Start page: 304
ISBN: 0903880334
Source: Literature Online
Publication note: Preliminaries and editorial matter omitted.
Place, publisher and date of online version: Cambridge, Chadwyck-Healey (a Bell & Howell Information and Learning company), 2000
Copyright statement for the source volume: © Copyright G. M. Watkins
Copyright statement for the electronic edition: Copyright © 1996-2010 ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved.
Download
Sinopsis: "Daniel" (Mark Lester) es un niño tímido a quien le cuesta hacer amigos y funcionar en los rígidos esquemas de su colegio. Aún así, hace amistad con un chico rebelde "Ornshaw" (Jack Wild), con quien recorren la ciudad hasta que Daniel conoce a "Melody"(Tracy Hyde) , una alumna de quien se enamora perdidamente. Tanto, de hecho, que surge en ambos la idea de casarse. No cuando sean grandes, sino ahora, en el presente eterno de su infancia con sus 12 años... toda una vida. 
Melody es una de esas rarezas que el cine se permite de cuando en cuando, una película protagonizada por niños pero que le habla principalmente a los adultos. Un romance ¿acaso prematuro? que llena de alegría y una historia que parte en el mundo normal pero desemboca en un delirio anárquico propio de los sueños.
El primer guión de "Alan Parker" (donde ya se perfilaba el inicio de su brillante carrera). Resultó un gran éxito en países como Japón y algunos paises Latinoamericanos. De culto para generaciones de fanáticos. Cosa rara en EEUU tuvo criticas atroces en su estreno que surtieron un efecto negativo y solo se la considero cuando en Japón y América Latina se convirtío en un boom. En Japón es proverbial la locura que desato, y claro también los millones que eso produjo para los productores de la película, los actores principales en especial "Tracy Hyde" viajaron en varias oportunidades a dicho país.
Tracy Hyde: (Melody Perkins)
Jack Wild: (Ornshaw)
