A philosopher’s agony - Augusto dos Anjos

I read the Phtah-Hotep, I read the obsolete

Rig-Veda. Yet  nothing gives me rest…

The Unconscious haunts me and I swirl possessed,

Restless harmattan in aeolian rage!

I’m witness here to an insect’s death!…

Alas! Now all phenomena of earth

From pole to pole seem to make real

Anaximander of Miletus’s ideal!

Atop the heterogeneous hieratic aeropaus

Of Ideas I wander, a lost magus,

From Haeckel’s soul to souls of Cenobites!...

The thick veiling of secret worlds I tear;

And just like Goethe, I catch the sight:

Of universal substance ruling there!

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Augusto dos Anjos (1884 - 1914) Brazil

Translated by Odile Cisneros

Source: Sibila

• Phtah-Hotep was an Egyptian philosopher from the 3rd century BC, who wrote didactic sebayt wisdom literature. Sebayt  means the way of living truly.
• The Rig-Veda are ancient Indian Vedic Sanskrit hymns (2nd century BC) that deal with subjects like the origin of life and other cosmological issues.
• Anaximander of Miletus was arguably the first Greek philosopher of science (5th century BC) and was possibly the teacher of Pythagoras. He created a map of the world that contributed greatly to the advancement of geography, hence the allusion in this poem. 
• The Cenobites, also mentioned here, were followers of Pythagoras and developed into a monastic tradition that favoured community life in the 4th century, replacing the earlier hermits.
• Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (turn of the 19th/20th centuries) was a follower of Darwin and wrote on many biological subjects; he also, unfortunately, believed in the idea of scientific racism which is a kind of antithesis to the Cenobite idea with which the poem contrasts him.
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832) is generally reckoned to be he greatest German literary figure of the modern era. He was also a scientist and wrote a treatise on the Theory of Colours which this poem refers to.