Know’st thou not the olden tune,
Which begins with elegiac
Crying, humming like a kettle
That upon the hearth is boiling?
Long has it been boiling in me,
Thousand years. A gloomy anguish
And my wounds are lick’d by time,
As Job’s boils by dogs were lickèd.
Thank thee, dog, for thy saliva,—
Though it can but cool and soften—
Death alone can ever heal me,
But, alas, I am immortal!
Years come round and years then vanish—
Busily the spool is humming
As it in the loom is moving,—
What it weaves, no weaver knoweth.
Years come round and years then vanish,
Human tears are dripping, running
On the earth, and then the earth
Sucks them in with eager silence.
Seething mad! The cover leaps up—
“Happy he whose daring hand
“Taketh up thy little ones,
“Dashing them against the stones.”
God be praised! the seething slowly
In the pot evaporates,
Then is mute. My spleen is soften’d,
My west-eastern darksome spleen.
And my Pegasus is neighing
Once more gaily, and the nightmare
Seems to shake with vigour off him,
And his wise eyes thus are asking:
Are we riding back to Spain,
To the little Talmudist there,
Who was such a first-rate poet,—
To Jehuda ben Halevy?
Yes, he was a first-rate poet,
In the realm of dreams sole ruler
With the spirit-monarch’s crown,
By the grace of God a poet,