Hermann Georg Scheffauer

Hermann Georg Scheffauer Poems

Hermann Georg Scheffauer Biography

Herman George Scheffauer (born February 3, 1878 in San Francisco, US; died October 7, 1927 in Berlin), was a German-American poet, architect, writer, dramatist and translator. Herman George Scheffauer was born in San Francisco, California in 1878. A poet and playwright of local importance, he was a protégé of Ambrose Bierce and was associated with George Sterling and other Bohemian Grove writers and artists. He married the English poet Ethel Talbot, with whom he had a daughter, Fiona. In 1910, Scheffauer moved to Germany to become a translator and journalist. He committed suicide in 1927. Scheffauer's published poetry and drama includes Of Both Worlds (1903), Looms of Life (1908), The Sons of Baldur (1908), Drake in California (1912), The Hollow Head of Mars (1915), and The Infant in the News-Sheet (1921). His published translations from the German, many of them posthumous, include Atta Troll (1913), by Heinrich Heine; Bashan and I (1923), Children and Fools (1928), Early Sorrow (1930), and A Man and His Dog (1930), all by Thomas Mann; Gas (1924), by Georg Kaiser; and Peter the Czar (1925), by Klabund.)

The Best Poem Of Hermann Georg Scheffauer

Atlantis

Westward the pillars slender
Of Hercules it lay-
The land whose pride and splendor
Once burned beneath the day.
No more the sun shall warm it;
No more man's footfall be
In Atlantis, old Atlantis,
Atlantis in the sea.

Above her fanes of glory
The iron vessel steamed,-
The city shrined in story
Such as no poet dreamed.
I knew the marble towers,
The cold, white majesty
Of Atlantis, old Atlantis,
Atlantis in the sea.

An hundred fathoms to mine eyes,
Through molten blue and green,
The sun that toward in the skies
Drew up the deeps serene.
Snow-like the roofs and temples,
The streets with pearls strewn free
In Atlantis, old Atlantis,
Atlantis in the sea.

Silence in dead Atlantis bode;
Quenched lay her pride and wealth;
The scarlet sea-flags streamed and flowed;
The serpents slipped in stealth.
Pale blooms and shells bedecked her floor,
And the starred anemone
In Atlantis, old Atlantis,
Atlantis in the sea.

An hundred fathoms to my ken
Rose white with closen eyes
A face- so to the sight of men
The lost, loved women rise.
It smiled and shone and brightened
With strange, wild witchery
From Atlantis, old Atlantis,
Atlantis in the sea.

Deep down my heart lay hidden
Where coral-forests bloomed;
Deep down my arms were bidden
To clasp the city doomed.
There, twice a thousand years agone,
O Love, I dwelt with thee
In Atlantis, old Atlantis,
Atlantis in the sea.

Beneath the sunbeams and the ships,
One hundred fathoms deep,
Upon thy sea-cold eyes and lips
Roll tides of endless sleep.
Would that we twain were lying,
With thy hair flung over me,
In Atlantis, old Atlantis,
Atlantis in the sea.

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