Joseph Friedlander, comp. The Standard Book of Jewish Verse. 1917.
By David LeviThe Wandering Jew
S
What my name is, never crave,
God records it, Earth and Woe,
It may radiate the grave,
If at last my tears’ long flow
Should melt the stones to hear.
Refuge seek for this poor frame.
Thinking, suffering;—Man, base-born,
Spurns my right, ignores my claim—
I pass his tortures, scorn
His piety and his jeers.
Burst with fury on my brow,
Adam’s curse I bore entire,
Wretched, yet too proud to bow;
Victim ever, on the pyre
I laved in grief each sin.
Vanished lands, seas disappeared,
Crumbled all, mere dust I found,
Empires, temples, shrines revered;
But immortal lived Thought bound
My heart’s sad depths within.
Ever present to my mind,
Vast, sublime, it shone and grew,
All to it,—a setless sun.
Glory o’er the Past it threw
And o’er the Future—Light.
Moved me ever, spurs me now,
But the end has not dawned yet,
Hope unripe hangs on the bough,
Ages do I wait and fret
For that which comes not nigh.
Small the Universe appears,
Deep in thought, immersed in grief,
Weighing tyrants with men’s fears,
Sweep I Hope’s harp for relief
And raise wild terror’s cry.
Outrage, insult, struggle, pain,
Strong in sovereign thought divine,
All I challenge, all disdain.
Foes will fail—not my faith’s shrine,
No time has that uptorn.
What my name is rests in gloom,
God records it, Earth and Woe,
But ’tis hidden from the Tomb;
Torture me, contempt I show
For pity as for scorn.