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Oswald Spengler Watches the Sunset

By Stephen Edgar b. 1951 Stephen Edgar

The air is drenched with day, but one by one

The flowers close on cue,

Obedient to the declining sun.

Forest and grasses, bush and leaf and stem,

They cannot move (and nor, you dream, can you);

It is the wind that plays with them.

Only the little midges dancing still

Against the evening move at will.

This tiny swarm still dancing on and on

Like something in a net

Expanding and contracting, that late swan

Towing its wake, a solitary crow

Crossing the twilight in its silhouette,

The fox proceeding sly and slow:

They are small worlds of purpose which infuse

The world around with will to choose.

An animalcule in a drop of dew—

And so diminutive

That if the human eye should look clear through

That globe there would be nothing there to see—

Although it only has a blink to live,

Yet in the face of this is free;

The oak, in whose vast foliage this dot

Hangs from a single leaf, is not.

NOTES: Drawn from the opening pararaphs of the first chapter of VOLUME II of The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2010).

Biography

Stephen Edgar was born in Sydney, Australia. He studied classics and English at the University of Tasmania and has worked as an editor and a librarian. He is the author of the poetry collections Queuing for the Mudd Club (1985), Ancient Music (1988), Corrupted Treasures (1995), Where the Trees Were (1999), Lost in the Foreground (2003), Other Summers (2006), and History of the Day (2009). A lyric formalist, Edgar probes the . . .

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