MIDDAY of Life! Oh, season of delight! / My summer’s park! / Uneaseful joy to look, to lurk, to hark— / I peer for friends, am ready day and night,— / Where linger ye, my friends? The time is right!
Is not the glacier’s grey today for you / Rose-garlanded? / The brooklet seeks you, wind, cloud, with longing thread / And thrust themselves yet higher to the blue, / To spy for you from farthest eagle’s view.
My table was spread out for you on high— / Who dwelleth so / Star-near, so near the grisly pit below?— / My realm—what realm hath wider boundary? / My honey—who hath sipped its fragrancy?
Friends, ye are there! Woe me,—yet I am not / He whom ye seek? / Ye stare and stop—better your wrath could speak! / I am not I? Hand, gait, face, changed? And what / I am, to you my friends, now am I not?
Am I an other? Strange am I to Me? / Yet from Me sprung? / A wrestler, by himself too oft self-wrung? / Hindering too oft my own self’s potency, / Wounded and hampered by self-victory?
I sought where-so the wind blows keenest. There / I learned to dwell / Where no man dwells, on lonesome ice-lorn fell, / And unlearned Man and God and curse and prayer? / Became a ghost haunting the glaciers bare?
Ye, my old friends! Look! Ye turn pale, filled o’er / With love and fear! / Go! Yet not in wrath. Ye could ne’er live here. / Here in the farthest realm of ice and scaur, / A huntsman must one be, like chamois soar.
An evil huntsman was I? See how taut / My bow was bent! / Strongest was he by whom such bolt were sent— / Woe now! That arrow is with peril fraught, / Perilous as none.—Have yon safe home ye sought!
Ye go! Thou didst endure enough, oh, heart;— / Strong was thy hope; / Unto new friends thy portals widely ope, / Let old ones be. Bid memory depart! / Wast thou young then, now—better young thou art!
What linked us once together, one hope’s tie— / (Who now doth con / Those lines, now fading, Love once wrote thereon?)— / Is like a parchment, which the hand is shy / To touch—like crackling leaves, all seared, all dry.
Oh! Friends no more! They are—what name for those?— / Friends’ phantom-flight / Knocking at my heart’s window-pane at night, / Gazing on me, that speaks “We were” and goes,— / Oh, withered words, once fragrant as the rose!
Pinings of youth that might not understand! / For which I pined, / Which I deemed changed with me, kin of my kind: / But they grew old, and thus were doomed and banned: / None but new kith are native of my land!
Midday of life! My second youth’s delight! / My summer’s park! / Unrestful joy to long, to lurk, to hark! / I peer for friends!—am ready day and night, / For my new friends. Come! Come! The time is right!
This song is done,—the sweet sad cry of rue / Sang out its end; / A wizard wrought it, he the timely friend, / The midday-friend,—no, do not ask me who; / At midday ‘twas, when one became as two.
We keep our Feast of Feasts, sure of our bourne, / Our aims self-same: / The Guest of Guests, friend Zarathustra, came! / The world now laughs, the grisly veil was torn, / And Light and Dark were one that wedding-morn.