George's most passionate, most ill-fated and poetically most fruitful love affair began in 1902, when he approached a boy in a street of Munich: Max Kronberger, a 14-year-old grammar-school student, felt flattered when a man he had noted before asked his permission to sketch his 'interesting' head. On the next day George succeeded in taking a photograph of the boy, but it seems that thereupon George's courage failed him, as he did not try to meet the boy again for almost a year. At the time of their next accidental meeting in the street, Kronberger found out that George was a poet and, since his respectable parents agreed, they saw each other regularly from then on, in a relationship not always free from tension. However, Kronberger died of an acute disease on the day after his sixteenth birthday. What followed was a poetical glorification which was sometimes compared to the literary monument erected by Dante for Beatrice, but resembles rather the deification bestowed by Hadrian on Antinous, in a somewhat different way owing to the difference of times and circumstances, of course.
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Your eyes were dim with distant dreams, you tended
No more with care the holy fief and knew
in every space the breath of living ended –
Now lift your head for joy has come to you.
The cold and dragging year that was your share,
Your eyes were dim with distant dreams, you tended
No more with care the holy fief and knew
in every space the breath of living ended –
Now lift your head for joy has come to you.
The cold and dragging year that was your share,
A vernal tide of dawning wonders bore,
With blooming hand, with shimmers in his hair
A god appeared and stepped within your door.
Unite in gladness, now no longer darkened
and blushing for an age whose gold is flown:
The calling of a god you too have hearkened,
It was a god whose mouth has kissed your own.
You also were elect – no longer mourn
For all your days in unfulfilment sheathed...
Praise to your city where a god was born!
Praise to your age in which a god has breathed!
With blooming hand, with shimmers in his hair
A god appeared and stepped within your door.
Unite in gladness, now no longer darkened
and blushing for an age whose gold is flown:
The calling of a god you too have hearkened,
It was a god whose mouth has kissed your own.
You also were elect – no longer mourn
For all your days in unfulfilment sheathed...
Praise to your city where a god was born!
Praise to your age in which a god has breathed!
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