American poet & translator (1881-1968)
Caressing reassures lovers that their love endures.
WITTER BYNNER
"Rose-Time"
A man who knows how little he knows is well,
a man who knows how much he knows is sick.
WITTER BYNNER
translation of Laozi's "The Way of Life"
This veil
Of lavender and dawn
Floats off
Invisible,
And this of purple noon
Unwinds in wisdom,
And this of evening
Twitters, undulates,
Dips, darts,
And this of night
Circles around me singing
To the very edge and presence of the young moon--
And it brushes the tip
Like lips
Three times.
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"Veils"
I am a miser of my memories of you
And will not spend them.
When they were anticipations
I spent them
And bought you with them,
But now I have exchanged you for memories,
And I will only pour them from one hand into the other
And back again.
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"I Compute", The Beloved Stranger
O, high the happy bosom heaves
When love is in the dancer!
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"Three Poplars"
And when I speak to you of common things
You receive them for a moment
With candor and with level eyes,
Acknowledging their right to be....
And then always you dismiss them,
Replacing them with the long, true splendors
Of a steely fish cutting through rings of steel,
And you run your fingers across a mountain-side
Strung like a lyre with thin waters,
And you sheath the blade of your body
In a scabbard of sea.
And the rock,
On which my hand is,
Becomes a firmament
And my head the moon
And my feet
The people of the earth
Who speak to us of common things.
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"Magic"
On we climb, keeping time
To hidden goat-bells' nibbling chime,
Feet in the dew of ferns we climb,
Souls in a sort of winding rhyme,
Up the path that turns and turns
Toward the top where morning burns.
WITTER BYNNER
"Hill-Songs"
We were dusty with our books.
Come and let us go
Out among the lyric brooks,
Where the verses grow,
Where the world is one delight
Made of many a song
Lasting till the nod of night,
Lovely all day long.
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"Hey-Day"
O joy not yet begun
But only about to be,
O sweet invisible unceasing wave
Following me, following me,
Through the sea-like grave!
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"The Wave"
For run as fast as ever I may,
My heart
Moves only with you,
Only with your blossoms,
Remembering them
Or awaiting them,
Moving when you move in the wind
And still when you are still.
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"Cherry-Blossoms"
Leaping from that other darkness
Come two circles of flame--
When the pressure of your lips
Made of my eyes
Two suns
Embracing the world with light ...
It was a darkness
As rich with strong wonder
As the depths of the sea,
And you were upon me
Like great sea-gardens
And great waves ...
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"Darkness"
The Earth is a jewel; he hangs 'mid the hair,
He gleams 'mid the teeth of my Paradise there,
Who tilts back a face that was born to beguile;
And his nights are her tresses, his days are her smile.
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"Bacchanalian"
High is the fife and low the drum,
And people lean to see,
And hats are off where heroes come,
And none is off to me.
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"The Deserter"
There is a solitide in seeing you,
Followed by your company when you are gone.
You are like heaven's veins of lightning.
I cannot see till afterward
How beautiful you are.
There is a blindness in seeing you,
Followed by the sight of you when you are gone.
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"Lightning"
Though you have sailed no farther from me
Than a quiet bay
Beyond a point of cedars,
Yet you have been as far away
As death.
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"Summons"
Is there an eye of endless light
For what we do and dare?
Or are we playing to the night
With nobody to care?
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"The Marionettes"
The most we can do is to die--contented, discontent;
With a few to wonder why, and whither our spirit went,
And what the interval meant!
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"The Interval"
But I have given your nakedness the gift of mine,
And whosoever brings, from this day forth,
Obeisances
To the hollow of your bosom,
Shall find between those hills of sun,
Beloved,
My shadow....
WITTER BYNNER
"Nakedness"
There is a chill deeper than that of death,
In the return of the beloved and not of love.
And there is no warmth for it
But the warmth of a world which needs more than the sun--
Or the warmth of lament for beauty,
Which is graven on many stones.
WITTER BYNNER
"Lament"
Only by remembering you,
O east of my west,
Can I make my lovers real to me,
And only by forgetting you
Can I find my truest solitude
Strange and unknown to me.
WITTER BYNNER
"Hemispheres"