The Young Maid


Dedicated to Ludwig von Ficker


Often at the well when it dawns
One sees her standing spellbound
Scooping water when it dawns.
Buckets go up and down.
In the beeches jackdaws flutter
And she resembles a shadow.
Her yellow hair flutters
And rats scream in the yard.
And enticed by decay
She lowers her inflamed eyelids.
Parched grass in decay
Bends down to her feet.


Silently she works in the chamber
And the yard lies long desolate.
In the elder trees by the chamber
A blackbird flutes pitifully.
Silverly her image in the mirror
Looks at her strangely in the twilight-glow
And dusks sickly in the mirror
And she shudders before its purity.
Dreamlike a farm boy sings in the dark
And she stares shaken with pain.
Redness trickles through the dark.
Suddenly at the gate the south wind shakes.


Nightly over the bare meadow
She totters in feverish dreams.
A morose wind whines in the meadow
And the moon listens from the trees.
Soon all around the stars pale
And exhausted from complaints
Her waxen cheeks pale.
Putrefaction is scented from the earth.
Sadly the reeds rustle by the pond
And cowering she freezes.
Far away a cock crows. Above the pond
Morning shivers hard and grey.


In the smithy clangs the hammer
And she scurries past the gate.
In red glow the farm boy swings the hammer
And deathlike she looks over there.
As in dream she's struck by his laughter;
And she tumbles into the smithy,
Shyly cringing before his laughter,
Like the hammer hard and coarse.
And falls dazed to the earth.


Lankily sprawled out on the bed
She wakes filled with sweet tremblings
And she sees her soiled bed
Hidden by a golden light,
Mignonettes there at the window
And the bluish brightness of sky.
Sometimes the wind carries to the window
A bell's hesitant to toll.
Shadows glide over the pillow,
Noon strikes slowly
And she breathes heavily on the pillow
And her mouth is like a wound.


In the evening bloody linens float,
Clouds over silent forests,
Sparrows fuss in the fields.
Dreamlike in the brown hamlet
A sound of dance and fiddles echoes,
And she lies completely white in darkness.

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