Jan Schreiber ~ Brookline Poet Laureate 2015-17
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  • Shakespeare et al.
    • Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
    • Fulke Greville (1554-1628)
    • William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
    • Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
    • John Donne (1572-1631)
    • George Herbert (1593-1633)
  • 20th Century Poems
    • William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
    • Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
    • Robert Frost (1874-1963)
    • Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
    • T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
    • Louise Bogan (1897-1970)
    • Stevie Smith (1902-1971)
    • W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
    • Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
    • Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
    • Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
    • Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
    • Robert Creeley (1926-2005)
  • Poems in Translation
    • Bai Juyi (772–846)
    • J. W. von Goethe (1749-1832)
    • Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)
    • Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)
    • Paul Valéry (1871-1945)
    • Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
    • Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969)
    • Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
  • Poems by Jan Schreiber
    • Acoustics
    • Now Winter Nights Enlarge
    • A Little Patter
    • The Inventory
    • Cormorants
    • The Road to Nowhere
    • The Birds
  • Contact
Picture
G I A C O M O   L E O P A R D I  (1798-1837)

The Infinite
 
This lonely hill was always dear to me.
So is the hedge that, rising in my view,
keeps me from seeing much of the far horizon.
But sitting here surveying those endless spaces,
absorbing the surrounding silences,
the deepest quiet spreading through my mind,
I find my heart is almost overwhelmed.
And when I hear the wind, the speaking wind
that whispers through the trees, I hear in it
infinite silence. That is when I know
the sound of eternity, the long-dead years,
the living present, and the sound of that.
My thoughts are drowning in immensity
and it is sweet to shipwreck in this sea.
 
  
                                     Translated by Jan Schreiber

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