A TEAR ON THE IRON
I groan and cough and press, and think
My eye grows damp, a tear falls; the iron is hot,
My little tear it seethes and seethes and will not dry up.
I feel no strength, it is all used up; the iron falls from my hand, and yet the tear, the silent tear, the tear, the tear boils more and more.
My head whirls, my heart breaks. I ask in woe: “Oh, tell me, my friend in adversity and pain, O tear, why not dry up in seething.”
“Are you perhaps a messenger and announce that other tears are coming? I should like to know it; say, when will the great woe be ended?”
I should have asked more of the turbulent tear; but suddenly there began to flow more tears, tears without measure, and I at once understood that the river of tears is very deep.
In a mood of mingled longing and hate, he writes the Flowers of Autumn, whose splendor is only for the well-to-do—
Therefore I do not care if I see you dying now.
There is more virility, though nothing really purposeful in the Garden of the Dead, where the dead worker rises up to claim the flowers on the rich man’s grave:
Not only the flowers are mine, nay, even the boards of the coffin are mine!
And not only the boards of the coffin—you shrouds, you, too, are mine! He has it all through my work, my poor work—oh, all and all is mine!
Then the dead one passed away in the air with cries:
“You will pay for it yet! And he clenched his fist and threatened the world.”
The poet’s love for nature, the human longing of the worker imprisoned in the city for the country, which he has known but which is now beyond his reach, is expressed in the nightingale’s challenge to the laborer:
“Summer is here, summer is here! I shall not sing to you eternally, for finally my hour too will strike—a dark crow will occupy my branch, the holy song will cease. How long must I sing to you from the tree of the golden dream of freedom and love? Rise and let me not urge you any longer! The heaven will not remain eternally blue! Summer is here, summer is here! Now one can pass a merry time, for just like you who are fading at your machine, everything will in the end wither and be carried away.”
The Nightingale illustrates, as Professor Wiener points out, the poet’s command over poetic form as well as poetic thought. Even in the English prose translation we can feel the repetition of notes, the intricate weaving of melody in the bird’s song.
Another poem which is an example of the same power of combining matter and manner is that drama of the garment worker’s lift, The Sweatshop, which deserves to be quoted in full: