Conversation with Goethe

With Werther's death, you Goethe hit your stride,Young Sturm-und-Dränger come into his own;One jilted girl acts out a suicide,In grief you carve her monument in stone.Although you never wanted to betrayOld friends, you shed a few as you advance;All lovers your dramatis personae,A Faust who conjures poems from each romance."Along unsure meandering passions' pathWe're drawn again" by your exquisite lines:Dann zog uns wieder ungewisse BahnDer Leidenschaften labyrintisch an.Precise, upright and dressed up to the nines,A steel-haired, fastidious polymath.

The Empire died, Napoleon came and went;Through eighty years of Europe's arcs and loopsThe circles turn in all that's transient—I jump through each of history's hoops.With time and age I cast my stoic's eye:Beginnings like ends and lives spent in betweenMust all sich in Eins zusammenzien"Contract into one point as you rush by."I ride the storms and whims of my time's Geist,My Kant-like God both outside and within;No smokes, no bugs, no garlic and no Christ,I love and lose and take it on the chin.Though some sleep off their moods like late-night drinkMy life a whole I lived and left in ink.

Proud Goethe craving order and control,Napoleon fan, yet always hand in gloveWith fate you play your mind's heroic role,A tumbler falling in and out of love.Prometheus of overview and artYou turn from folkish ways to ancient Greece;When Germany reverts post-Bonaparte,The timeless eye sees history's capriceYour God a trace in nature's harmony,A disembodied king of things sublimeWhose distant eye refuses to engage;The braver souls you dare to come of ageAnd stand outside the silhouette of time.

"Our lot seems beautiful, our human fate"—Des Menschen Leben scheint ein herrlich Los:Der Tag wie lieblich, so die Nacht wie gross—"The day so lovely and the night so great."Detached from all the fugitive regimesMy poet's classic eye surveys the sceneI love a sense of poise and am sereneDespite the passing circus of extremes.Though I eschewed the zealot's black and white,And radicals would mock my hard-earned von;Once entered in the German pantheon,I'm then embraced by hardline left or right.Buffoon or alibi for every mess,I pay the cockshy price of timelessness.