It is blissful in the days of spring
To take up the walking staff
And, a nosegay upon one's hat,
To roam through God's garden.

Above the white clouds travel,
Below the blue streams flow,
Beautifully resplendent in their new clothes
Are the forested heights and the flat meadows.

To the bleaching meadow the maiden brings
That which her diligence during the winter has spun,
And the merle tells the grove,
What it silently pondered when [the world was covered] in snow.

Even if they are the old tones,
The well-known, long familiar ones,
Still the bleaching maidens hearken
Gladly to the sweet, beloved sounds.

Gladly to the sweet, beloved sounds,
That ring out in mountain and valley;
Shepherd lad and charcoal-burner boy
Listen up, in order to sing along;

To sing along fresh and merry
After the long pains of winter;
All the half-forgotten songs
Awaken in the hearts of mankind.

Half-forgotten, old songs
Awaken within my soul:
If only I had your voice, wild merle,
In order to sing them fully!-

[To sing] what the linden tree told me,
What the tips of the oaks soughed,
When in the evening I listened
To the secret conversations of their leaves;

What the merry brooks told
Hastily in their running down the mountain,
Wild lads, who cannot stop talking
And cannot sit quietly;

[To sing] the secrets the dwarves told me,
Who in distant forested ground,
Quietly in crevices and chasms
Run their little households.

[To sing] what upon the green, suffused with moonlight,
I heard the elves whisper;
What the inscription, greenly wreathed with moss,
Upon the greyed rocks taught me:

This and what I read in dusty
Leatherbound volumes and in old
Half-faded parchments,
I wish to fashion into a song.

Fog formations rise dimly
From the dark days of former times;
I hear their voices whispering,
Sounds of happiness, rage, lamentations;

Men who a thousand summer ago
Strode through the district around the Nethe River,
Heathens, Christians,
How they lived, how they suffered;

The battles of a youth of Saxony
With the enemies of his land, the Franks,
And within my own breast, the most difficult
[Battles] with my own thoughts.

The quiet weeping of a virgin,
The dark grumblings of an old woman,
The singing of runes and shouts of revenge,
That rang out from the mouths of women;

The quiet working of pious monks
In the convent of the Thirteen Lindens,
Through love and teaching gently endeavouring
To overcome defiance and delusion;

Their hymns, full of God's joy,
Which rang out by day and by night,
Which sang jubilantly out into the mountains
Of the victory of the Cross of Christianity;

And chiming in, the soughing of the forest,
And as well the moaning of the surf:
Everything wishes to sound together
In a song, muted and bright.

So be it, and so be it sung to you,
Who live on the rivers Ems and Lippe,
Ruhr and Diemel, Nethe and Ambriuna:
You are all of a noble tribe;

You all speak one language,
The worthy sons of a pious mother,
Whether [this language] sounds roughly in the forested hills,
[Or] gently in the sand and on the heath.

You children of the counties of Saxony,
Take the best I have:
Given gladly, even the gift of a less exalted man
Is above scorn.

Imagine that I offer you flowers from the heath,
A handful that I picked
When Osning already garlanded himself
With the yellow leaves of autumn.

Do not animadvert when I paint
The hero in the colour of his homeland;
Even if you sometimes reckon him a dreamer,
Well, he was after all a Westfalian:

Dogged, yet plastic; bitter, but honest,
Wholly like you and your kind,
Wholly of the iron of your mountains,
Wholly of the wood of your oaks.

Like nowhere else, among you one still
Finds the customs and manners of your ancestors;
Therefore may it be sung in your honour,
This song of the thirteen linden trees.

But the owl mutters objections:
"The sounds of your song are rough,
And the spring of the Nethe, the dark one,
Does not seem to me to be a Hippocrene.

Leave off your droning, leave off your strumming!
Oh, it creates little for you that is lovely;
Better jingling, the best jingling
Seems to me to be the jingling of gold.

And to look out for one's own skin,
That is the first priority above all others;
Cultivate your turnips in the garden,
Cultivate your barley in the fields.

Let the mouldy old books
Quickly go up in smoke under the kettle:
It is coals that we need,
It is steam that we use!

All the jumble of paper dreams,
Treasures from pits that crumble away --
So that they finally be of some use,
Let them blaze away under the kettle.

Only the multiplication table shall remain valid,
Lever, cylinder, wheel and hammer;
Everything else, dull rubbish,
Shall flare in the fire-chamber.

May it flare, may it flame,
That the waters spray and hiss
And the world's torn-apart clans
Be hastily mixed together;

For the great goal of the great
Future is sameness,
The most boundless movement
Is the true freedom of the people.

Leave off your strumming, leave off your droning!
Who takes pleasure in such clanging?
Better ringing, the best ringing
Is the ringing of metal." --

Jaundiced envious one, old owl,
I understand your meaning well:
You are the negation of the world with joy in its soul,
[The world] that was saved by God.

Oh first you wish in a morter
To grind [the world] into dust,
And then in crucible and retort
Drive its spirit out.

Oh you would gladly cast [the world] into the arms
Of the Moloch of our time,
That it go up completely in smoke,
According to the prophecy of the sibyl and myth!

Old owl, jaundiced envious one,
Even if it angers and annoys you:
In spite of it all a rich garden greens,
[A garden] in which the roses of humanity burgeon;

In spite of it all the white lily blooms,
And in the sanctuary of the grotto,
In the most distant valley of the forest
The quiet blue flower dreams.

In spite of it all there is a ringing from out the air,
From out the twilights of the grove,
And it shall be a long time before
The merle sings its last song.

And the nightingale within the breast [of humanity]
Shall rejoice, shall lament
Every spring, as long as roses glow
And hearts beat on earth.