PARTING

What, ask you for a token and thus remember you ?

'Tis you I want, but you are to your own self untrue.

No, not the withered flower that decks your flaxen hair !

Do me this only favour: forget me, please, for e'er.

Why does not cruel awareness of blisses gone away

Fly off like them and vanish, why should it stay and stay ?

The waves are ever changing that purl in the same stream;

Why should regrets and sorrows keep steady in their place,

When through this world of ours we have been doomed to race

Like mere dreams of shadow, like shadows of a dream ?

Why care for me, why worry if I am loved or fed,

Why measure years and decades that flit over the dead ?

No matter if death takes me tomorrow or today,

I just wish everybody my mem'ry wiped away,

I wish you waived for ever the dreams we dreamt, the flow

Of your imagination could all those years forgo.

Black be the night when duly I pay my mortal debt,

As though in this existence we two have ever met,

As though the years were barren that boasted love and glee-

For loving you so dearly, say, will you ever pardon me ?

So, leave me among strangers to face blind walls and night,

Let freeze under the eyelids my eyes' pulsating light.

And when, as is but natural, earth does return to earth,

Will anyone remember my death, my life, my birth ?

Woe-laden songs resounding throughout the frozen crypt

Will beg eternal quiet for me, the nondescript...

And yet I wish that near me a human being came

And over my closed eyelids would whisper your dear name.

Then, if they will so, let them throw me into a slough,

There I shall feel much better then I am feeling now.

May on the far horizon a flight of ravens rise

To darken all the heavens before my blinded eyes,

May from the earth's far limits a dreadful tempest start

To give to dust my ashes and to the winds my heart.

And you, o may you florish like April blossoms mild,

With eyes so large and misty, with smiles as of a child,

And though so young, for ever may you still younger grow

And know me not, since even myself I shall know.