Mara Carlyle / ‘June 15’
The Magic Lantern
Tagged
a cappella
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
Morton Feldman / Only (1947)
performed by Joan La Barbara
Words by R.M. Rilke
Sonnets to Orpheus Part I, No. 23 (Feb. 1922),
based on the translation by J.B. Leishman (from Feldman’s manuscript)
Only when flight shall soar
not for its own sake only
up into heaven’s lonely
silence, and be no more
merely the lightly profiling,
proudly successful tool,
playmate of winds, beguiling
time there, careless and cool:
only when some pure Whither
outweighs boyish insistence
on the achieved machine
will who has journeyed thither
be, in that fading distance,
all that his flight has been.
