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: