Aging & Wisdom Quote by Hugo Claus

“Go now, verses, on your light feet” opens like a blessing and lands like an accusation. Claus gives his poems legs, then immediately burdens them with history they’re trying not to feel. The “light feet” aren’t innocence so much as a guilty tactic: art tiptoeing past the massed weight of the dead. That pivot is the engine of the passage. He stages a friction between lyric grace and the ground truth of Europe’s 20th century, where soil is not pastoral but forensic.

The line about “the old earth where the graves laugh when they see their guests” is Claus at his most corrosive. Graves “laugh” because the living keep arriving; the joke is that catastrophe has become routine, an endless check-in line. “One corpse stacked on top of the other” strips away elegy and replaces it with inventory, a blunt image that echoes industrialized death and the bureaucratic logic that made it possible. Claus isn’t mourning so much as refusing the comforting aesthetics of mourning.

Then he turns the poems outward: “Go now and stagger to her whom I do not know.” After the brisk command comes a wobble. If the verses have feet, they also have limits; they can’t walk cleanly from collective horror into private desire. The “her” reads like a lover, a reader, a muse, maybe even a future generation - someone intimate and unreachable at once. The subtext is artistic insecurity sharpened by moral urgency: what does a poem do after the graves have had the last laugh? Claus’s answer is unsentimental. Send it anyway, but don’t pretend it can arrive unshaken.