We are all children to the past.
Here where no knowledge is sufficient
Even the wise are satisfied with shards
That add at best into an almanac,
And two treaties and a bust afford
The worst fool an hypothesis
A bee would groan all year to check.
“Historians—bad men!—come black as miners
From History; their tongues are dry with Fact;
And ah! their faces do not shine like mine.”
One judges from the armchair of a brain
Or avoids seldom, and with careful pains.
One touch of insight makes the ages kin,
And nothing helps like ignorance to apply it.

The skull one starts at, a carving
(One swims with a flashlight to the cave)
That bulks in the poor light like a senator
Are—not history, merely data,
The discrete and uninstructed facts.
But if one learns little from them, still
One emerges, sometimes, skeptical
Of a little one has known before.

Poor Glückel, mostly I was bored:
The deals all ended in a gain or anguish
Explained and disregarded with a text;
Money and God were too immediate,
The necessities that governed every act.
One marries, one has children whom one marries;
One’s husband dies; one mourns, re-marries.
The reader reads, reads, and at last, grown weary
With hearing the amount of every dowry,
He mumbles, Better to burn than marry…
Yet when I think of those progressive years,
Of Newton, Leibniz, Mandeville, and Pope,
You lend a certain body to the thought;
I am perplexed with your fat tearful ghost.
I hear you in the plague: “See, see, she plays
And eats a buttered roll, as nicely as you please…”
One can do nothing with these memories.
They are as stubborn, almost, as our lives’.

One goes along the corridor; and, outside certain years,
One hears, if one listens hard, a small
Vivacious sound, a voice that is not stilled.
It speaks as it used to speak—speaks uselessly
As a voice can speak; and if one should enter,
The room is dark, and the dark is empty.
The voice has a hollow sound, without you. Glückel,
The one thing missing in your book is you;
But how can we miss it, we who never knew you?
But we miss it, somehow; and, somehow, we knew you.
We take your place as our place will be taken.
The butter is oily on the roll, and the child plays
As nicely as you please—as nicely as we please.