Olmutz, Moravia: Wittgenstein
is walking side by side
with Engelmann, who lived to write
after his friend had died,
‘I sought, between the world that is
and the world that ought to be,
in my own troubled self the source
of the discrepancy,
‘and in his lonely mind this touched
a sympathetic chord.
I offered friendship, and was given
his friendship, a reward
‘no gift of mine could match.’ They walk
as friends do, late at night,
two men of cultivated taste
talking, in reason’s light,
of music (Wittgenstein had learned
to play the clarinet;
could whistle, too, in perfect pitch,
one part from a quartet)
and of the pure veracity
Wittgenstein prized in art.
‘Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn’, Uhland’s poem,
profoundly touched his heart:
Felicitous, simple: Eberhard
rode by a hawthorn spray,
and in his iron helmet placed
a tender sprig of may,
which, preserved through the wars, he brought
home from his pilgrimage.
It grew into a branching tree
to shelter his old age.
Above his dreams a flowering arch
by whispering breezes fanned
recalled the far time when he was
young, in the Holy Land.
One day when Wittgenstein was ill
and could not leave his bed,
Engelmann’s mother sent her son
with gruel to see him fed.
Engelmann climbing up the stairs
slipped with the saucepan full,
and steaming oatmeal porridge splashed
his coat of threadbare wool.
‘You are showering me with kindnesses,’
said grateful Wittgenstein,
and Engelmann, ‘I am showering,
it seems, this coat of mine.’
– He was mightily amused. The stiff
unfunny joke survives
through solemn reminiscences
to illuminate two lives.
Philosopher and architect
walk through the flaking town,
Wittgenstein in his uniform
of red and chocolate brown,
formal and courteous they talk
of the Count’s hawthorn flower;
how nature and our thought conform
through words’ mysterious power;
how propositions cannot state
what they make manifest;
of the ethical and mystical
that cannot be expressed;
how the world is on one side of us,
and on the other hand
language, the mirror of the world;
and God is, how things stand.
Europe lies sick in its foul war.
Armies choke in clay.
But these friends keep their discourse clear
as the white hawthorn spray,
one a great genius, and both
humble enough to seek
the simple sources of that truth
whereof one cannot speak.