1

FROM “BURNING CITY” TO “DEATH’S CREVICE”:

MODERNISM IN T.S. ELIOT’S THE WASTE LAND (1922) AND N.P. VAN
WYK LOUW’S “GREAT ODE” (1962)
I
Forty years after the European event modernism was introduced into Afrikaans poetry with Van
Wyk Louw’s Tristia (1962). Ironically this collection was the result of a lengthy stay in
Amsterdam from 1950 to 1958 – having “transversed the continental boundaries” between Africa
and Europe. The marginal poet from the old colonies came to reside in the civilised “old world”
metropolis, in self-imposed exile from a South Africa in the increasingly vicious grip of
Verwoerdian apartheid politics.
The title and cover design identifies Ovid’s exile collection from the Black Sea, Tristia (12 B.C.),
as intertext:
But when grim winter has thrust forth his squalid face, and the earth is marble-white with
frost, while Boreas and the snow prevent life under the Great Bear, then ‘tis clear that
these tribes are hard pressed by the shivering pole (Tristia. Ex Ponto III, X:9-12,1924:137.
Transl. A.L. Wheeler)

However, the “barbaric tribes” and inhospitability of Pontus stands in stark contrast to the ecstatic
experience of Europe which Louw implies in another Tristia poem:
my country, my dry, deserted country
something longs for olives to grow in you
becoming somehow, Latin and small,
and building little churches, white as chalk
(“H. Petrus”/”Saint Peter”, second stanza)

Louw’s Tristia ends with “Groot ode” (“Great ode”- see addendum at end of the article for
translation), an enigmatic modernist poem of high complexity, which still challenges even the
most adept and well-read literary critic. What strikes the reader today, is the remarkable
intertextuality with The Waste Land (1922), which has hardly been commented upon, yet points
clearly to the advent four decades later than in Europe, of modernism in Afrikaans poetry.

Peter Ackroyd has remarked how

The Waste land provided a scaffold on which others might erect their own theories; so it is
that it has been variously interpreted as personal autobiography, an account of a collapsing
society, an allegory of the Grail and spiritual rebirth, a Buddhist meditation (1984:127)

In the reception of “Groot ode”/(”Great ode”) there is evidence of the same tendency – utilising
the lengthy, difficult poem as a “scaffold”. Since 1979, there has been a lengthy theological,
Christian interpretation (Pretorius, 1979), the biography of the poet has been brought to bear upon
the interpretation in search of unity in the poem (Van Vuuren, 1989), a book length “close
reading” was published as recently as 1993 (Lindenberg), the poem was analysed as the “ars
poetica” of Louw, rejecting symbolism in favour of semiotic signs (Liebenberg, 1991), and most
recently it has been suggested that a Jungian psychoanalytical reading might be a propitious
approach – that in essence “Groot ode” deals with the individuation process (Hambidge, 1997).

The position of Louw (1906-1970) was comparable to that of Eliot (1888-1965) in many
instances. Louw was in self-willed exile in the metropolis of Amsterdam (1950- 1958), in the
“old world”, with Dutch society the much older civilisation, the “motherland” to the Afrikaans
poet from the “new world” of South Africa. Louw spent his childhood in a small rural village,
Sutherland in the Karoo (the earlier habitat of the first indigenous peoples, the San/Bushman,
whose Pleistocene rock art is strewn around Southern Africa, and the Khoikhoi, from whose
 2

descendants, the farm labourers, Louw heard drinking songs and marihuana rhymes, later worked
into his concrete, orally derived folk poems, “Klipwerk” or “Songs from Stone”). Eliot was born
in St Louis, Missouri, in his father’s time “still a ‘frontier town’ between white and Indian
Americans, close to that border with the savage and primitive which was to be one of his son’s
own preoccupations” as Ackroyd formulated it in 1984 (19). Eliot became naturalised as a British
citizen in his adopted country, England, in 1927 (39 years old), the same year in which he was
accepted as a member of the Anglican Church. (Ackroyd:165). Van Wyk Louw toyed with the
idea of adopting the Roman Catholic faith, but although the Tristia collection shows a
preoccupation with the Roman Catholic Church (especially some of its infamous church leaders
through the centuries), he later abandoned the idea.

In a sense, Louw in Amsterdam, like Eliot in London, was an exile in an adopted country. Both
came from a fatherland with multicultural societies, with indigenous peoples and their
prehistories rubbing up against the “imported” literary histories and modes from the “old
countries”. Louw, with Dutch forefathers, returned to the “old country”, much like Eliot with his
British ancestors returned to England. (Both poets were well-educated, well read in many
literatures and polyglots. Louw was trained, like Eliot, in philosophy, the classics, modern
literature, specialising in German.)

II
Both as a literary critic and poet Louw had from early on been preoccupied with Eliot’s poetry
and critical work. In his own critical essays, he engaged with Eliot’s views. Some idea of Louw’s
own elitist “ars poetica” can easily be deduced by glancing at the titles of his collected essays:
“Aristocratic art and the nation” , “The aristocratic ideal” (both from 1939), “The immortality of
art”, “The idea of great art”(1939), “On ‘deep’ literature” and “Always more difficult poetry?”
(1958). In 1958 he also published “Living from a tradition” and “Marginal Notes to a Great
Critic” on the work of Eliot. As poet-philosopher Louw saw himself as an “aristocratic”
individual, outside the common mass of humanity, striving towards immortal, ‘great’ art. In his
poetry, his ideal was to rid Afrikaans of its provinciality. Both poets expressed an intense aversion
to “psychologism” (Louw’s term) or biographical readings of their work (cf. Miller 1978:p.ix and
Olivier, 1992:181). Louw subscribed to Eliot’s perspective that
a poem (…) has its own life; that its parts form something quite different from a body of
neatly ordered biographical data; that the feeling, or emotion or vision, resulting from the
poem is something different from the feeling or emotion or vision in the mind of the poet
(1986: 316).

In 1956 he published the hugely influential Die ‘mens’ agter die boek/The ‘ human being’ behind
the book. This essay had a taboo effect on decades of literary critical activity, especially in the
critical engagement with Louw’s own oeuvre.

The Afrikaans poet criticised Eliot’s concept of relativism, arguing for a struggle against
relativism “through the careful use of impersonal rationality” (Olivier, 1992:180),a concept
which today sounds strangely anachronistic. Yet this seems to be precisely the poetical project
which he embarked upon in “Great ode” – striving to express poetically the illusionary
‘impersonal rationality’. In “Great ode”, two of Eliot’s three “voices of poetry” are present (the
third voice, of the dramatic persona, is absent). The second voice, the poet addressing an
audience, is styled as a contemplative voice in the plural (“us” representing the community of
aristocratic thinkers, the poet-philosophers), surveying intellectually the nature of eternity and
central epistemological questions about the nature of God or gods. Underlying “Great ode” as it
does the more complex poems in Tristia, is also Louw’s main philosophical obsession:
 3

“Does humankind evolve in an upward spiral of steadily growing more refined artistic
and technological products of civilisation, or is regression and devolution unavoidable?”

Added to this, also: the problematic of body and mind/spirit, and the questionable place of the
soul. The contemplative voice of ‘impersonal rationality’ is interrupted throughout “Great ode”
by a more personal voice in the singular, an “I” who expresses personal suffering (“pain” and
“bitterness”). This causes the elevated metaphysical project, contemplation of an “impersonal
rational” kind, to be undermined throughout the poem by the voice of the suffering self. The
answer “Great ode” suggests for the future of civilisation seems to be regression into an
apocalyptic ‘new cave age’ (lines 118-132). “Great ode” thus shares the cultural pessimism so
starkly present in The Waste Land (“hordes swarming/Over endless plains”, l.369, in the intertext
from Herman Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos of 1920).

III
The obvious intertextual links with The Waste Land are numerous. Firstly there are the Sybil’s
words from The Satyricon in Eliot’s motto: “I long to die”. Louw’s poem opens with the words
Far lovelier it is
to go into death’s crevice
- inquisitive explorer –
with all desire abandoned,
creeping furtively, hand on the rock wall
- even becoming a hand in a glove –
than to roam around in this
burning city
(l.1-8).

The opening forms an ellipsis – “Far lovelier it is to X (than to Y)”. This suggests a conscious
choice: it is a better option to explore the metaphysical unchartered terrain of eternity and
‘death’s crevice” and the prehistory of humankind in the cave, than to be a participating, active
citizen of this ‘burning city’ (an intertextual link to Virgil’s tale of Dido and Aneas and the
burning pyre built by Dido on the coast after the lover’s retreat on board ship). Louw’s opening
lines constitute a metatextual choice against the major project of The Waste Land, where the
London metropole, its inhabitants with their neuroses and deprived sexuality are poetically in the
focus as representative of Eliot’s view of la condition humaine in the twentieth century.

“Great ode” has a strong death motif, as does The Waste Land (compare the oft-repeated refrain
“those are pearls that were his eyes” in Eliot’s poem). The modernist topos of the “unreal city”
and the motif of “burning” (equated to sin in St Augustine’s Confessions) in Eliot’s poem are
contracted in “Great ode” into “this burning city”. “Great ode” has elements of metalingual
scepsis (the poem ends with the line “other names still slumber”) and metatextual consciousness
(“loose are the threads of thought” l.134, “words release: have end;/thus are no end” l.29-30, l6:
"embalmed in…words acquired later", l.177: "I know that my word fails!").

Unlike Eliot, Louw does not focus his poetical attention so intently on the abhorred collective
human life in the city (“tons of human flesh”, l.13)). The monstrous corporality of mass humanity
is portrayed briefly ( see lines 9-16: “this/burning city/where tens of thousand tons of/ potatoes,
cabbages and grain…is digested into tons of human flesh/ which will…say that they love;/even
demand love!”).
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Remarkable is the depersonalisation of humanity implied by the pronoun “which” following

“tons of human flesh”. This short description then makes way for an extended metaphysical
journey in a spiritual search for meaning (“We do not know how painful we/lie in God’s hand”,
l.22). The speaker, identifiable as a philosopher-poet, aligns himself with the druids of Celtic
origin, who represent archetypal figures: philosophers, poets, and priests, working through the
medium of words. Both poems also describe an exploration of various religious beliefs or
mythologies.

IV
In a recent essay (Research in African Literatures, vol. 27,1996:1-18) on Edward Brathwaite’s
The Arrivants. A New World Trilogy (1967-1969) Ten Kortenaar discusses the intertextuality
between The Waste Land and The Arrivants. Brathwaite explicitly acknowledged Eliot as a
precursor. Ten Kortenaar writes persuasively about The Waste Land’s “architectural” influence
on The Arrivants, and how Brathwaite’s response to Eliot reminds us of a poet who was not (just)
“the snob and anti-Semitic Anglo-Catholic high priest of the European literary tradition”
(1996:4):
Long after his trilogy was published, Brathwaite explained that the West Indian poets who
made the breakthrough from standard English to “nation language,” an African-based
language closer to the folk and to West Indian musical rhythms, “were influenced
basically… by T. S. Eliot” (“History of the Voice” 286). In Eliot’s recorded voice, with its
“dry deadpan delivery,” young West Indians who were listening to Bird, Dizzy, and Klook
could hear “the <<riddims>> of St. Louis” (282-34). In other words, what the West Indian
poet heard in the classic modernist was the Euro-American’s own creolization…This is
the poet of whom David Chinitz observes, “Eliot’s patented cadences…were learned
from, or discovered in, the sound of popular music. Every moment that he sounds ‘like
Eliot’, Eliot is alluding to jazz”(…) (1996:4-5; my italics).

In discussing the “transgressing of continental boundaries” the Brathwaite-Eliot case implies

what Ten Kortenaar sees as a “symbiotic relationship” between Europe and Africa:
As Brathwaite’s acknowledged debt to Eliot reminds us, however, modernism, as well
as being the European pole in a creolized identity, already presumes the African-
based folk forms implied by jazz. Modernism and creolization fold into one another.
No one is more responsible for the creolization model of West Indian culture than
Brathwaite himself. He has defined creolization as the process of interculturation whereby
Europe and Africa “set up a symbiotic relationship with each other; so that
conquerors are conquered and the colonized colonize” (“World-Order Models” 63).
Brathwaite’s Caribbean is always already the result of interculturation, so that
neither Europe nor Africa has been left untouched by the other. (1996:5)

V
Thus the pertinent question to ask about the intertextuality between The Waste Land and “Great
Ode”, once the similarities of modernism have been established, is what are the differences? In
what way is Louw’s complex poem of 1962 different from Eliot’s 1922 so-called “pinnacle of
modernism”? Is their evidence of what Ten Kortenaar calls “interculturation”?

“Great ode”, originally entitled “Cave”, was written after a visit to the Altamira caves in Spain
with its rich rock art heritage from the Pleistocene era. The central image of the cave is linked
 5

intertextually with Eliot’s “rock” passages, present in “The Burial of the Dead”, but developed
extensively in “What the Thunder Said”. It is of this section of The Waste Land that Eliot wrote
later to Ford Madox Ford: “it is not only the best part, but the only part that justifies the whole”
(Miller 1978:118):
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think…(lines 331-394)

This litany on a desert-like, rocky landscape is what fired the Afrikaans poet’s imagination,
suggesting a primordial, probably African setting. Compare the South African novelist, J. M.
Coetzee’s perspective on South Africa in William Kentridge (1999:84):
Seen from above – from a plane, for instance – South Africa is a dry and empty land: rock
and stunted bush, grey and khaki. The landscape art and literature of South Africa’s white
settlers, harped-on the barrenness of their new home, and on its indifference to whether
they starved or prospered, lived or died.
This vision of an inhumanely empty landscape is not to be found in William Kentridge’s
work.

The “dry, deserted country” which Louw laments in “H. Petrus” or “Saint Peter” (1962:14 )
bears close resemblance to The Waste Land milieu “where the sun beats,/And the dead tree gives
no shelter, the cricket no relief,/And the dry stone no sound of water” (“The Burial of the Dead”,
lines 23-24), expanded extensively in “What the Thunder Said”.

Louw even encompasses in his later poem a parallel form of hallucination to that found in The
Waste Land. What in Eliot’s ‘rock’ section (“What the Thunder Said”) was the enigmatic “third
who walks always beside you” (line 359) has a parallel in Louw’s text in “The nature of white is
such/that one veers left/ and always walks in circles to the left” (l.104-106). Louw also inserts a
“bat” passage like Eliot, and sets this in his primordial cave, representing both the cell of the
thinker-poet, the origin of prehistoric man, as well as “death’s crevice”. Pleistocene caves filled
with rock art, like those at Altamira, are part of the archaeological heritage of Southern Africa.
This link to his fatherland, suggesting the “cradle of humankind” has strong African associations.
Yet the cave image also signifies the ideas of the earliest philosopher, Plato, and introduces the
strong philosophical understructure of “Great ode”.

VI
It is significant that the “interculturation” between The Waste Land and “Great ode” is found not
in the cityscapes of London and its citizens, but in the African-like desert descriptions of the rock
litany in “What the Thunder Said”. In the intertextuality between Louw’s text and that of Eliot:
Europe and Africa “set up a symbiotic relationship with each other” (Ten Kortenaar
1996:5).

Thus the poet of the periphery residing in Europe wrote his philosophical contemplation of
civilisation’s outcome and man’s destiny in a different mode – one might call it or modernism of
the archaeological landscape. Louw found his creative spark in the “rock litany” of Eliot.

Louw brought into sharp focus the African elements in the English poem. And this tension
between Europe and Africa is a central preoccupation in Tristia. Although Louw’s main focus is
 6

Europe and western civilisation, the imagery is quintessentially southern African, he writes in
Afrikaans, a language grown out of Dutch an the hybrid mixture of South African languages and
its peoples. The open ending of “Great ode” suggest the poet’s departure from the “burning city”
of Amsterdam - to his death? Or to South Africa?:
The white ship walks into the water
- traced by hundreds of eyes
like searchlights
fingering –
out, out of the clanging harbour,
in against the wind which
freer than flags
or the gray cruiser
is a shining racer
above the water

Man is nausea
and hates the sign.
Or shuns it, negates it.

a bird calls into the night:

not nightingale but unrest,
crying out to that which from him differs;
- the sacred and the whole -
other names still slumber.
(1962:123-33. transl. Helize van Vuuren)

Although Louw only died in 1970, Tristia was his last collection. “Great ode” remains his final
tour de force. In a way his return to the fatherland signalled a creative death – without the
vibrancy of the European context and the tension of exile between Europe and Africa, his
creative powers faltered.

Modernism as a critical project probably failed in Afrikaans poetry, due to the inability of
literary critics to satisfyingly and competently interpret this enigmatic poem, and others in
Tristia. (The oeuvre of Wilma Stockenström suffered a very similar fate.) The taboo which Louw
placed on the interpretation of his work through his vehement attack on the ‘deadly sin’ of
“psychologism” played a role in the critical failure, similar to the reception of The Waste Land.
Eliot’s outspoken aversion to “psychologism” perhaps also explains why James E Miller’s
persuasive study, T.S.Eliot’s Personal Waste Land. Exorcism of the Demons (1978) was not more
influential.

To this very day autobiographical readings of “Great ode” (cf. Van Vuuren, 1989, or Hambidge,
1997) seem to meet with resistance. Thus the strongly influential literary critic in Louw
undermined the understanding of his own ‘difficult’ poetry. The challenge of “Great ode”
remains probably the ultimate creative and intellectual peak in Afrikaans literature.

Helize van Vuuren

Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (previously University of Port Elizabeth)

References
Ackroyd, Peter. 1984. T.S. Eliot. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Brathwaite, Edward. The Arrivants. A New World Trilogy (1967-1969). London Faber & Faber.
 7

Coetzee, J. M., et.al. 1999. William Kentridge. London: Phaidon Press.

Eliot, T.S. 1981 (1922). The Waste Land and Other Poems. London: Faber & Faber.
Hambidge, Joan. 1997. “Groot ode”: ‘n ander perspektief. Tydskrif vir letterkunde. Vol. XXXV
(2):49-56.
Liebenberg, Wilhelm. 1991. Die begrip “teken” in Tristia van N.P. van Wyk Louw. Unpublished
D.Phil. dissertation. University of the Witwatersrand. 1991.
Lindenberg, Ernst. 1993. Groot ode. ‘n Leesverslag. Kaapstad: Human & Rousseau.
Louw. N.P. van Wyk. 1986. Versamelde prosa, 1& 2. Kaapstad: Human & Rousseau.
1962.Tristia en ander verse, voorspele en vlugte 1950-1957. Kaapstad: Human &
Rousseau.
Miller, James E. 1978 (1977). T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land. Exorcism of the Demons.
University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Olivier, Gerrit. 1992. N.P. van Wyk Louw: Literatuur, filosofie, politiek. Kaapstad: Human &
Rousseau.
Ovid. 1959 (12 B.C). Tristia. Ex Ponto. (trans. A.L. Wheeler). London: Heinemann.
Pretorius, Réna. 1979. Benaderend maar nooit bereikend –‘n voorlopige begryp van “Groot ode”
(N.P. van Wyk Louw). Standpunte 32(6):2-30.
Ten Kortenaar , Neil. 1996. Where the Atlantic meets the Caribbean: Kamau Brathwaite’s The
Arrivants and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Research in African Literatures, vol.
27,1996:1-18.
Van Vuuren, Helize. 1989. Tristia in perspektief. Kaapstad: Vlaeberg.
***
Addendum

GREAT ODE

1 Far lovelier it is
to go into death’s crevice
- inquisitive explorer –
with all desire abandoned,
creeping furtively, hand on the rock wall
- even becoming a hand in a glove –
than to roam around in this
burning city

9 where tens of thousand tons of

potatoes, cabbages and grain
from cranes, shovels, spoons,
by chemical metamorphosis
is digested into tons of human flesh
which will again buy grain and cabbage
and say: that they love;
even demand love! With what right?
Without end. It proceeds.
Is a star – one of the cold ones! –
not suddenly going to thunder down with ‘No!’!
Aloofness is vast
and an answer.

22 We do not know how painful we

lie in God’s hand;
the rock not of his lying or his
lying askew; and earth also not
of heaviness or of pain:
our pain finds no answer.
Why desire an answer:
words release: have end;
 8

thus are no end.

31 We do not know we do not know

how deep love lies
those who say it know not
those who know it say not

35 Let it be wrapped in white:

snow, slumber, or illusion
of Being, or virginity:
pure is no one, or everything;
and virgins, they are not pure:
are full of biological tricks
play, yes, even erotically with God.

43 Those who know, who have been known,

they are without the veil, leave the expectation,
travel in a ship, a definite one,
and yet will not be defined themselves.
No crane can hoist the bitterness, and
no ship can cart it away.

49 We like firm cities – we do not like ships:

Of solid ships then – not yet of water;
and then of water water on which to float,
and then of diving in water, but we still cling
to the oxygen, to the prerequisites of the lungs:
dare not, will not dare to bend asymptomatically
to a bent-away surface and
never to touch, to be pure-yet-knowing,
to be thus. This is our human condition.
People can have the knowledge: that is mathematics.
But: not us: we want something else.

60 The gravity of what is said:

that we do not see; yet something of “gravity”, “terror”.
- two almost familiar concepts
that are played with
- and which is a game of the heart.
We also know of “play”:
it is all embalmed, and contained
in words acquired later.
Shutt-off by mica-thick spectacles
we sometimes dare to see the universe flicker
for a moment. No more.

71 Bats hang
like figs
on a branch
before this eye,
stir against the roof,
start to swell

break
open up

fall with a curve

through the night
away from me
(that was light!)
nothing has weight
in the stone room
 9

nothing falls after me:

I am the no-desire
(the holy love
is thoroughly avenged)

and I, yes, this I:

I become an eye
a single eye,
and mediaevally
pure intellect.

94 This turned life is mine, therefore,

and must be lived. Untouchable
am I: insulated in sin,
or by the first dam that was built
before people – perhaps it is the same.

99 I have heard: of ice ages, successively.

100 Let the new joy be heard then!

Ice is glorious: the red fox turns white,
the eider duck turns clear white
and snow birds walk on the white ice
with only the yellow eyes showing. The nature of white is such
that one veers left
and always walks in circles to the left. Rabbits
are white. Seals conceitedly black.

108 But this is our ice, I have heard, further:

that ice is our constant guardian angel,
and that all the great cities through this attention
lie under ice caps; and that already
it happened and happened yesterday: Rome, Persepolis,
are after-wash, flotsam, moraine, stone heap
of spite and retreating ice;
and Christ came to die last night:
after-wash of God on earth.
Severe this is, and lovely.

118 And lovely things remain lovely,

would in the new cave still be lovely:
bisons and arrow and spear;
and something we will keep of “fire”
god of the ice caves.

What will be Love’s sign

in the new caves, bear rooms?
She: the eternal: - spear? or bison?
Forma, or signum? Her hieroglyph?

What about our thinking? What that was given

of sanctified lives? Knowledge of saintliness?
Francis? Simeon the Stylite?

We will build barricades, we: the Spirit:

the Rovers around our earth:
and we shall never be snowed under.

133 But other, other ice clamours for attention

- loose are the strains of thought –
unlit, green-paved layers,
 10

unpierced through these splits or cracks

will not be pushed back out of the world
gather gather sunlight into his crust
joy falls into this abyss
holds in the cold kernel his own nature
together with fellow sufferers and sharers of his destiny
those who were world and could accept ice
do not shine, will not, never! be known
besiege, besiege him constantly lower
wants everything equalised to his nature.

146 Thus far, then, of ice.

147 Dying itself is actually only a system;

therefore: apparently an action,
but still all system.
Much we do know: much which lies outside
the grasping of vision,
or of thinking. Thought is sly:
smeared over the cartilage for mucosa.

154 Oh bitter heart: another heart is bitter,

and bitter not through own doing: but through you:
this pain can fold closely round your grief!
Look, Glass face!: another cheek is whiter.

And don’t sit calling on the road:

- look you here: Where is a grief like unto mine!
one knows your pain: you are ignorant of His:
Onto Him was forced all our pain’s attention.

162 Somewhere it bellows and bellows over the earth

fills the basins between the mountains
radial waves from bassoons and through this pain
the Himalayas and the Pamirs are submerged
Heracles becomes pus and putrefaction
all the many, newly-born gods
seek original and own destructions.

169 a god who does not have pain: that is rejectable

or Greek. Even if I could think him,
even if he exists! – I would look upon his calm omnipotence
without power, enraged, but with a proud neck:
- and not only on account of my pain -:
eternal expanse of water without ripple
smug with self-inspection
gazer, lover, in eternal mirrors –
(I know that my word fails! –
But even a bourgeois miss with white-golden crown
of white paper, from beauty contests
she has more Being than this.) And allowing to think
is Flame: Living is Being or Blaze.

182 We dare not worship other gods before This Face

or: allow to be worshipped.
That, that at least, we know – we continue knowing
He is a finger, hand, or hand gesture,
or sleight of hand. These are my words.
His words cause super-novae to erupt, beam,
beam and shine through rings and light-hours.
But the shining is seen by us:
otherwise never and never known as shining.
 11

191 The eruption and bursting forth, then – perhaps even from love -
without caring about knowing or being known of:
that is His. Ours is this: existing (no matter how small), keep existing
with: precision; a little pride; and ample love;
and endless forgiveness for everything:
nobody finds harmony with the universe;
rightly we should learn to live ironically:
and: within irony still keep love.

199 And hereby we return along the circular stairway

and the spirals down to other years:
become druids of our fullest knowledge,
become – masked – chisellers on stones,
turners of stones to something less
- yes! – than pyramids: yet certainly
guardians of the first knowledge of “gods”.

206 Ever more silent will it grow

Heart, my heart, you fear so much
that the world will never flow
along the paths you desire so

never soluble in synthesis

heart, my heart, we suspect it all;
this adamic embarrassment
was in apples at the fall

silent, still more silent will it grow

- each silence yet more pleasing now –
still: not to listen;
still, and inaudibly sweet.

218 The white ship walks into the water

- traced by hundreds of eyes
like searchlights
fingering –
out, out of the clanging harbour,
in against the wind which
freer than flags
or the gray cruiser
is a shining racer
above the water

227 Man is nausea

and hates the sign.
Or shuns it, negates it.

a bird calls into the night:

not nightingale but unrest,
crying out to that which from him differs;
- the sacred and the whole -
other names still slumber.

N.P.van Wyk Louw .(From: Tristia, 1962:123-133.

Transl. Helize van Vuuren)