Now I am all
One bowl of kisses,
Such as the tall
Slim votaresses
Of Egypt filled
For a God's excesses.

I lift to you
My bowl of kisses,
And through the temple's
Blue recesses
Cry out to you
In wild caresses.

And to my lips'
Bright crimson rim
The passion slips,
And down my slim
White body drips
The shining hymn.

And still before
The altar I
Exult the bowl
Brimful, and cry
To you to stoop
And drink, Most High.

Oh drink me up
That I may be
Within your cup
Like a Mystery,
Like wine that is still
In ecstasy.

Glimmering still
In ecstasy,
Commingled wines
Of you and me
In One fulfill,...
The Mystery.

If I could have put you in my heart,  
If but I could have wrapped you in myself,  
How glad I should have been!  
And now the chart  
Of memory unrolls again to me          
The course of our journey here, before we had to part.  
  
And oh, that you had never, never been  
Some of your selves, my love, that some  
Of your several faces I had never seen!  
And still they come before me, and they go,        
And I cry aloud in the moments that intervene.  
  
And oh, my love, as I rock for you to-night,  
And have not any longer any hope  
To heal the suffering, or make requite  
For all your life of asking and despair,          
I own that some of me is dead to-night.

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamor
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

(First Movement: Erwachen heiterer Empfindungen bei der Ankunft auf dem Lande (Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country)

Leaves blow in the breeze
the music of trees
carried in the wind
to the ears who can hear
the symphony of nature.