Light within the Shade: Eight Hundred Years of Hungarian Poetry

Mankind

30 | Light within the Shade Mankind 1. Listen. For the singing must be still: Now the world speaks plain. Hot wings of the rainstorm turn to chill, Frozen the wind and rain— The rain is tears, is sorrow’s smart, The wind sighed by the human heart: It makes no difference—spirit, virtue, sin: All hope is vain! 2. You have heard the story: humankind Born of their fathers’ breath, Reaped what their fathers sowed and as they sinned, Inheritance of death: And the survivors howl for Law, And law in turn kills many more, The best have failed, the worst’s plots reign: All hope is vain! 3. Then the heroes came, and they bestrode The law with their bright blaze. Work began: steel cut its bloody road! Mankind gloried in self-praise. And when its heroes died, again It mauled itself in its great pain. The news? Lightning upon a darkling plain: All hope is vain! 4. There is a long peace, and humankind Teems grossly to beget, So the plague perhaps may one day find m i h á ly vörösm a rt y | 31 A grander banquet set. With greedy eyes it scans the sky: Earth’s not its own, that’s why, The Earth’s as hard as grave-ground for this strain: All hope is vain! 5. How fertile is the earth, and human hands Make it more fertile still, Yet poverty stalks over all the lands And bondage stamps its will. Must it be so? Or if not, why Must ancient times repeat the cry? What’s lacking? Is it virtue? power? Again All hope is vain! 6. A godless contract binds you in its bans, Reason and evil will! You nourish with the rage of ignorance Your armies to the kill. Reason or rage, devil or beast, Whoever wins, men die at least: This mud run mad, this god-faced knot of pain! All hope is vain! 7. Beneath Mankind the good earth groans, and now War years and peace years burn. The curse of brother-hate blooms on its brow: You’d think that it would learn, But then it spawns some greater sin. Humans are dragon-teeth, the strain Of Man’s the dragon-toothed, the race of Cain: All hope is vain! All hope is vain! 1846 ...