To the Soul That Embraced Mine for a While... Then Flew Away!

These are the sighs of a young girl who knew love only once, and whom implacable fate willed to rob of it...

In the night, O Death, you stole like a thief into my beloved's chamber!

In the night, O robber, you snatched my precious jewel from between my hands!

Through what crevice did you enter, O beardless tyrant? And what door opened before you? I saw you standing near his bed, and I took you for a faithful friend; you were glancing about in bewilderment at the corners of his room — what were you searching for, O cheating deceiver? Yes, I followed you with my gaze, and behold, with your dry, cruel hand you pressed my eyelids shut, and with your other hand you drew out my love's last breaths and hid them away!...

You did not linger long after that, for I heard you dragging your feet along, trying to flee; and when I opened my eyes you were soaring far from me, your hands clasping something that lay crouched upon your breast! I rubbed my eyes to remove the black blindfold you had cast over them, but... what did I see? Oh, your cruel deed, begun and finished in the darkness of night — how did you not think of the next day's dawn, and of the consequence of your hideous act? Woe to you, oppressor — how did you dare silence the breaths of my love, to leave him before me a corpse without motion?...

★

Yesterday, only yesterday, I stood with him on this hilltop whose rocks I lie upon alone now! Here, in the shade of this oak, we took refuge from the heat of the sun; and there, in another spot, we sang with the sparrows the anthems of immortal love. Where can you be now?... My love, where are you, that you do not hear my crying, when only yesterday you answered my silent whispers? Where are you? Answer me. Do you stretch along the ropes of the sun, or wrap yourself in the moon's rays? Do you shine among the stars? Or do you dwell in the infinity of space? Where are you, O soul torn from the core of my being? Do you soar through space on wings of ether, or do you nestle up there on the mountain peaks and in the eagles' eyries? Are you descending the slopes of the hills, singing their airs with the brooks, or do the raging winds carry you, sweeping with them across the universe, threatening and wrathful? My love, are you on the bank of a river, shaded by a tree with dew-moist boughs, or out there beyond those clamorous waves, in the boundlessness of the oceans?

Wandering among the fields, lost upon the hills, crying out through the white of my day and the black of night, calling — and my call scarcely passes the thresholds of my hollow soul, shrunk in upon its pains and its burnings, yet forever gazing toward a horizon barely to be discerned; there it beholds you, a mass of light soaring, rising, then vanishing!... And behold, it repeats, in its killing despair and in the silence of its buried hopes, a song cut short by sorrows, its melodies blotted out by the weight of afflictions:

Soar, O soul, and ascend!...
Ascend, O soul, and rise!...
To the heights, to what lies beyond all things visible, take flight — to the infinity of space... and hover!

Beat, O wings — perhaps you will make me forget this one beating between my ribs. And you, you dusky clouds, whither? Whither do you rise with the scattered fragments of my soul strewn among your folds?? You carry today no drop of dew, no water of the rain-cloud. You clouds are nothing but smoke breathed out by volcanoes seething in my burning breast, which the winds have caught up and now scatter in every direction.

Go, go in peace, O soul, though I cannot bear your absence for a moment... and be drunk with your freedom wherever you go, and remain... You move on, and I stand watching you; you soar... you rise ever upward until you become a point of light in the far-off world, and you vanish from my eyes in a flood of streaming tears, abundant, so very abundant — for what?... and why?... You know!...