Smoke, shadows and dust
Life is such a waiting game; one evening
Here by the crossroads, sitting alone
On an empty bench under a solitary tree -
The sole and extant witness
Of this street's days and ways.
Here, with me, the tree commiserates:
Lonely traveler, emitting sordid smoke,
Trust not the barrenness of the past,
The eternity of the present's travails,
Emit sans care the fire that burns
Thy heart, thy limbs and thy very being!
Know that life is but shadows and dust
What pretense do thee put up in love?
Thou art but shadows and dust,
Shadows and dust; alone thou art -
And then for the grave earmarked.
Prescient tree.
Does it not emit anathemic vapours,
Desolate itself after every sundown?
I feel dizzy, quiet but restless inside;
Gazing at the stream of eternity
Rolling past; quite fast - immanent
In its constancy, but delicate in its steps.
The music that plays, Sibelius, soothes
The noises without, perhaps for good;
Within, this noxious silence, this failure -
This tree, have long killed my vitality.
Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of 7 symphonies and other music including violin concertos, choral symphonies, tone poems, incidental music for plays, chamber music, an opera, music for Masonic rituals, and over 100 songs for voice and piano. In 1895, the year Swedish poet Viktor Rydberg died, Sibelius composed the tone poem "Skogsrået: ballade pour l'orchestre" based on Rydberg's 1882 poem about a young man's seduction by a skogsrå (wood nymph). From the 1880s until the 1920s he wrote prolifically but spent his last 30 years mainly in silence. In 1945, 12 years before his death, he burned much of his work.
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