dying | Roland's Ragbag

In Vino Veritas

Truth … 
In wine?
Pull the other one.
Stick it on me, babe
I’ll believe it when I feel it

Next you’ll be persuading me
Love is blind
When everyone knows
However fickle
It’s in the beholder’s ken
The plaything of their whim
Their only hope for the future

Then
You’ll be saying
Time flies
When we all know 
It sinks and swims
Runs and stutters
Can’t make its mind up
Whether to be patient
Or restive
Anxious or unhurried

And as for
Life being for living
Non sequiturs
Don’t come better than that
Its for laughing
For crying
But….
Above all it’s for dying
For returning to the earth which spawned us
For calling time on the pain of living

For … 
And this we must remember … 
As the old song goes
You can’t have one without the other.

Sic transit gloria mundi

(No.66 of my favourite short poems)

‘The Swan’ – WHB Pen & Wash – 2017

The Swan

This labouring of ours with all that remains undone,
as if still bound to it,
is like the lumbering gait of the swan.

And then our dying—releasing ourselves
from the very ground on which we stood—
is like the way he hesitantly lowers himself

into the water. It gently receives him,
and, gladly yielding, flows back beneath him,
as wave follows wave,
while he, now wholly serene and sure,
with regal composure,
allows himself to glide.

By RAINER MARIA RILKE
… Translation from the German by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows

I have previously commented on one of Rilke’s poem ‘The Panther’ (q.v.). In this poem, The Swan’, Rilke connects the awkward way the swan has of moving on land with its smooth, gliding motions as soon as it enters the water. It is then, with forthright simile, he references the move for the swan, as for we human beings, from the uncertainties and incomplete nature of our lives to a calm acceptance of death. This seems to me to present a positive view of what death can bring, with the release from earthly tensions into the calm and sure serenity of the after life.