Once true love´s scented veil about my head you cast
Then every gesture of your hands,
Each tender movement of your limbs,
Does leave my soul bereft of sense.
Can you catch it when it flutters?
When each tiny gentle movement
Traces deep down in my heart it marks.
When morning makes its bells to ring
The gardener walks through his garden realm
Walking on tiptoe on the earth he owns
And every flower awakes and wondering stares
Up at that shining, tranquil face.
Who was it, then, that wove around your feet
That veil whose touch we feel like gossamer?
Is the wind´s breeze, too, at your beck and call?
Is it the spider´s, or the silkworm´s work?
L. Wittgenstein: Nachlass
Translation: Anthony Kenny
The poem is not easy to interpret, without knowledge of the original circumstances of its composition and presentation. Clearly, however, the principal theme is the veil that love casts over the relationship between a lover and a beloved. The poem ends with the question whether that veil is an adornment (the work of the silkworm) or a trap (the work of the spider)? ... I conjecture that the passage may be intended to invite us to recall the twentieth chapter of the fourth gospel in which Mary Magdalen encounters the risen Jesus early on the morning of the first day of the week. ... The reference in Wittgenstein´s poem to the early morning, to the church bells, to the gardener with supernatural powers all fit this association: they call up an image of many a renessance Noli me Tangere.
Anthony Kenny: The Unknown God, p. 214-216
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