W.H. Auden
Berlin-Dahlem
Hubertusbaderstrasse 43
Germany

      JOSEPH WEINHEBER
        (I892-I945)

 Reachijng my gate a narrow
 Lane from the village
 Passes on into a wood:
 When I walk that way
 It seems becoming to stop
 And look through the fence
 Of your garden where(under
 The circs they had to)
 They buried you like a loved
 Old family dog.

 Categorised enemies
 Twenty years ago,
 Now next-door neighbors,we might
 Have become good friends,
 Sharing a common ambit
 And love of the word,
 Over a golden Kremser
 Had many a long
 Language on syntax,commas,
 Versification.

 Yes,yes,it has to be said:
 Men of great damage
 And malengine took you up.
 Did they,though,ever
 Take you in,who to Goebbels'
 Offer of culture
 Countered In Ruah lassen!?
 But the crowd prefers
 A nasty stink and the young
 Condemn you unread.

 What,had you ever heard of
 Franz Jägerstätter,
 The St.Radegund peasant
 Who said his lonely
 Nein to the Aryan State
 And was beheaded,
 Would your heart,as Austrian,
 As poet,have told you?
 Good care,of course,was taken
 You should hear nothing,

 Be unprepared for a day
 That was bound to come,
 A season of dread and tears
 And dishevelment
 When,transfixed by a nightmare,
 You destroyed yourself.
 Retribution was ever
 A bungler at it:
 Dies alles ist furchtbar,hier
 Nur Schweigen gemäss.(I)

                                        (2

 Unmarked by me,unmourned for,
 The hour of your death,
 Unhailed by you the moment
 When,providence-led,
 I first beheld Kirchstetten
 On a pouring wet
 October day in a year
 That changed our Cosmos,
 The annus mirabilis
 When Parity fell.

 Already the realms that lost
 Were properly warm
 And over-eating,their crimes
 The pedestrian
 Private sort,those nuisances,
 Corpses and rubble,
 Lonfg carted away: for their raped
 The shock was fading,
 Their kidnapped physicists felt
 No longer homesick.

 To-day we smile at weddings
 Where bride and bridegroom
 Were both born since the Shadow
 Lifted,or rather
 Moved elsewhere. Never as yet
 Has Earth been without
 Her bad patch,some unplace with
 Jobs for torturers
 (In what bars are they welcome?
 What girls marry them?),

 Or her nutritive surface
 At peace all over.
 No one,so far as we know,
 Has ever been safe,
 And so in secret regions
 Good family men
 Keep eye,devoted as monks,
 On apparatus
 Inside which harmless matter
 Turns homicidal.

 Here,though,I feel as at home
 As you did: the same
 Short-lived creatures re-utter
 The same care-free songs,
 Orchards cling to the regime
 They know,from April's
 Rapid augment of color
 Till boisterous Fall
 When at each stammering gust
 Apples thump the ground.

               Looking across uour valley
               Where,hidden from view,
               Sichelbach tottles westward
               To join the Perschling,
               Humanely modest in scale
               And mild in contour,
               Conscious of grander neighbors
               To bow to,mountains
               Soaring behind me,ahead
               A noble river,

               I would respect you also,
               Neighbor and colleague,
               For even my English ear
               Gets in your German
               The workmanship and the note
               Of one who was graced
               To hear the viols playing
               On the impaled green,
               Committed thereafter den
               Abgrund zu nennen.(2)

                       ___
N  I) Quotation from W8's poem Auf das Unabwendbare.
   2) Quotation from W's poem Kammermusik.
                        __

 Kirchstetten is intending to have a ceroemony in memory of the twentieth
 anniversary of Weinheber'ws  death.  Herewith my effort to do my
 Gemeindepflicht.