In Secret We Thirst

In Secret We Thirst - meaning Summary

Yearning Beneath Graceful Detachment

The poem contrasts an outwardly graceful, airy existence with a concealed hunger for concrete reality. Life is likened to fairies spinning around nothingness — elegant, aimless, and sacrificial of the present — while beneath that surface a secret thirst grows. The speaker describes a longing for intensity, for birth, sorrow, and death, implying that true being requires confronting pain and physicality rather than remaining in delicate detachment.

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Graceful, spiritual, with the gentleness of arabesques our life is similar to the existence of fairies that spin in soft cadence around nothingness to which we sacrifice the here and now Dreams of beauty, youthful joy like a breath in pure harmony with the depth of your young surface where sparkles the longing for the night for blood and barbarity In the emptiness, spinning, without aims or needs dance free our lives always ready for the game yet, secretly, we thirst for reality for the conceiving, for the birth we are thirst for sorrows and death

This is one of the poems by Hermann Hesse that we can find in his last novel The Glass Bead Game. With that novel he won the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1946.