The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  around the patterned treetops, so strong, so intense.

  Not only the reverence of all these unfolded powers,

  not only the pathways, not only the meadows at sunset,

  not only, after a late storm, the deep-breathing freshness,

  not only approaching sleep, and a premonition …

  but also the nights! But also the lofty summer

  nights, and the stars as well, the stars of the earth.

  Oh to be dead at last and know them endlessly,

  all the stars: for how, how could we ever forget them!

  Look, I was calling for my lover. But not just she

  would come … Out of their fragile graves

  girls would arise and gather … For how could I limit

  the call, once I called it? These unripe spirits keep seeking

  the earth.—Children, one earthly Thing

  truly experienced, even once, is enough for a lifetime.

  Don’t think that fate is more than the density of childhood;

  how often you outdistanced the man you loved, breathing, breathing

  after the blissful chase, and passed on into freedom.

  Truly being here is glorious. Even you knew it,

  you girls who seemed to be lost, to go under—, in the filthiest

  streets of the city, festering there, or wide open

  for garbage. For each of you had an hour, or perhaps

  not even an hour, a barely measurable time

  between two moments—, when you were granted a sense

  of being. Everything. Your veins flowed with being.

  But we can so easily forget what our laughing neighbor

  neither confirms nor envies. We want to display it,

  to make it visible, though even the most visible happiness

  can’t reveal itself to us until we transform it, within.

  Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us. Our life

  passes in transformation. And the external

  shrinks into less and less. Where once an enduring house was,

  now a cerebral structure crosses our path, completely

  belonging to the realm of concepts, as though it still stood in the brain.

  Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power,

  formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.

  Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up

  these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still survives,

  a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before—

  just as it is, it passes into the invisible world.

  Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance

  to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues: greater.

  Each torpid turn of the world has such disinherited ones,

  to whom neither the past belongs, nor yet what has nearly arrived.

  For even the nearest moment is far from mankind. Though we

  should not be confused by this, but strengthened in our task of preserving

  the still-recognizable form.— This once stood among mankind,

  in the midst of Fate the annihilator, in the midst

  of Not-Knowing-Whither, it stood as if enduring, and bent

  stars down to it from their safeguarded heavens. Angel,

  to you I will show it, there! in your endless vision

  it shall stand, now finally upright, rescued at last.

  Pillars, pylons, the Sphinx, the striving thrust

  of the cathedral, gray, from a fading or alien city.

  Wasn’t all this a miracle? Be astonished, Angel, for we

  are this, O Great One; proclaim that we could achieve this, my breath

  is too short for such praise. So, after all, we have not

  failed to make use of these generous spaces, these

  spaces of ours. (How frighteningly great they must be,

  since thousands of years have not made them overflow with our feelings.)

  But a tower was great, wasn’t it? Oh Angel, it was—

  even when placed beside you? Chartres was great—, and music

  reached still higher and passed far beyond us. But even

  a woman in love—, oh alone at night by her window.…

  didn’t she reach your knee—?

  Don’t think that I’m wooing.

  Angel, and even if I were, you would not come. For my call

  is always filled with departure; against such a powerful

  current you cannot move. Like an outstretched arm

  is my call. And its hand, held open and reaching up

  to seize, remains in front of you, open

  as if in defense and warning,

  Ungraspable One, far above.

  THE EIGHTH ELEGY

  Dedicated to Rudolf Kassner

  With all its eyes the natural world looks out

  into the Open. Only our eyes are turned

  backward, and surround plant, animal, child

  like traps, as they emerge into their freedom.

  We know what is really out there only from

  the animal’s gaze; for we take the very young

  child and force it around, so that it sees

  objects—not the Open, which is so

  deep in animals’ faces. Free from death.

  We, only, can see death; the free animal

  has its decline in back of it, forever,

  and God in front, and when it moves, it moves

  already in eternity, like a fountain.

  Never, not for a single day, do we have

  before us that pure space into which flowers

  endlessly open. Always there is World

  and never Nowhere without the No: that pure

  unseparated element which one breathes

  without desire and endlessly knows. A child

  may wander there for hours, through the timeless

  stillness, may get lost in it and be

  shaken back. Or someone dies and is it.

  For, nearing death, one doesn’t see death; but stares

  beyond, perhaps with an animal’s vast gaze.

  Lovers, if the beloved were not there

  blocking the view, are close to it, and marvel …

  As if by some mistake, it opens for them

  behind each other … But neither can move past

  the other, and it changes back to World.

  Forever turned toward objects, we see in them

  the mere reflection of the realm of freedom,

  which we have dimmed. Or when some animal

  mutely, serenely, looks us through and through.

  That is what fate means: to be opposite,

  to be opposite and nothing else, forever.

  If the animal moving toward us so securely

  in a different direction had our kind of

  consciousness—, it would wrench us around and drag us

  along its path. But it feels its life as boundless,

  unfathomable, and without regard

  to its own condition: pure, like its outward gaze.

  And where we see the future, it sees all time

  and itself within all time, forever healed.

  Yet in the alert, warm animal there lies

  the pain and burden of an enormous sadness.

  For it too feels the presence of what often

  overwhelms us: a memory, as if

  the element we keep pressing toward was once

  more intimate, more true, and our communion

  infinitely tender. Here all is distance;

  there it was breath. After that first home,

  the second seems ambiguous and drafty.

  Oh bliss of the tiny creature which remains

  forever inside the womb that was its shelter;

  joy of the gnat which, still within, leaps up

  even at its marriage: for everything is womb.

  And look at
the half-assurance of the bird,

  which knows both inner and outer, from its source,

  as if it were the soul of an Etruscan,

  flown out of a dead man received inside a space,

  but with his reclining image as the lid.

  And how bewildered is any womb-born creature

  that has to fly. As if terrified and fleeing

  from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way

  a crack runs through a teacup. So the bat

  quivers across the porcelain of evening.

  And we: spectators, always, everywhere,

  turned toward the world of objects, never outward.

  It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down.

  We rearrange it, then break down ourselves.

  Who has twisted us around like this, so that

  no matter what we do, we are in the posture

  of someone going away? Just as, upon

  the farthest hill, which shows him his whole valley

  one last time, he turns, stops, lingers—,

  so we live here, forever taking leave.

  THE NINTH ELEGY

  Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely

  in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all

  other green, with tiny waves on the edges

  of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)—: why then

  have to be human—and, escaping from fate,

  keep longing for fate? …

  Oh not because happiness exists,

  that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

  Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which

  would exist in the laurel too.…

  But because truly being here is so much; because everything here

  apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

  keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

  Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,

  just once. And never again. But to have been

  this once, completely, even if only once:

  to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

  And so we keep pressing on, trying to achieve it,

  trying to hold it firmly in our simple hands,

  in our overcrowded gaze, in our speechless heart.

  Trying to become it.—Whom can we give it to? We would

  hold on to it all, forever … Ah, but what can we take along

  into that other realm? Not the art of looking,

  which is learned so slowly, and nothing that happened here. Nothing.

  The sufferings, then. And, above all, the heaviness,

  and the long experience of love,— just what is wholly

  unsayable. But later, among the stars,

  what good is it—they are better as they are: unsayable.

  For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,

  he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead

  some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue

  gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,

  bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window—

  at most: column, tower.… But to say them, you must understand,

  oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves

  ever dreamed of existing. Isn’t the secret intent

  of this taciturn earth, when it forces lovers together,

  that inside their boundless emotion all things may shudder with joy?

  Threshold: what it means for two lovers

  to be wearing down, imperceptibly, the ancient threshold of their door—

  they too, after the many who came before them

  and before those to come.…, lightly.

  Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.

  Speak and bear witness. More than ever

  the Things that we might experience are vanishing, for

  what crowds them out and replaces them is an imageless act.

  An act under a shell, which easily cracks open as soon as

  the business inside outgrows it and seeks new limits.

  Between the hammers our heart

  endures, just as the tongue does

  between the teeth and, despite that,

  still is able to praise.

  Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,

  you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe

  where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him

  something simple which, formed over generations,

  lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze.

  Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood

  by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile.

  Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours,

  how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form,

  serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing—, and blissfully

  escapes far beyond the violin.—And these Things,

  which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient,

  they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all.

  They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart,

  within—oh endlessly—within us! Whoever we may be at last.

  Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,

  invisible? Isn’t it your dream

  to be wholly invisible someday?—O Earth: invisible!

  What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?

  Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer

  need your springtimes to win me over—one of them,

  ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.

  Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.

  You were always right, and your holiest inspiration

  is our intimate companion, Death.

  Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future

  grows any smaller ….. Superabundant being

  wells up in my heart.

  THE TENTH ELEGY

  Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,

  let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.

  Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart

  fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,

  or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face

  make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise

  and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights

  of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you,

  inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering, lose myself

  in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.

  How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration

  to see if they have an end. Though they are really

  our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen,

  one season in our inner year—, not only a season

  in time—, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.

  But how alien, alas, are the streets of the city of grief,

  where, in the false silence formed of continual uproar,

  the figure cast from the mold of emptiness stoutly

  swaggers: the gilded noise, the bursting memorial.

  Oh how completely an angel would stamp out their market of solace,

  bounded by the church with its ready-made consolations:

  clean and disenchanted and shut as a post-office on Sunday.

  Farther out, though, the city’s edges are curling with carnival.

  Swings of freedom! Divers and jugglers of zeal!

  And the shooting-gallery’s targets of prettified happiness,

  which jump and kick back with a tinny sound

  when hit by some better marksman. From cheers to chance

>   he goes staggering on, as booths with all sorts of attractions

  are wooing, drumming, and bawling. For adults only

  there is something special to see: how money multiplies, naked,

  right there on stage, money’s genitals, nothing concealed,

  the whole action—, educational, and guaranteed

  to increase your potency ………

  …… Oh, but a little farther,

  beyond the last of the billboards, plastered with signs for “Deathless,”

  that bitter beer which seems so sweet to its drinkers

  as long as they chew fresh distractions in between sips …,

  just in back of the billboard, just behind, the view becomes real.

  Children are playing, and lovers are holding hands, to the side,

  solemnly in the meager grass, and dogs are doing what is natural.

  The young man is drawn on, farther; perhaps he is in love with a young

  Lament …… He comes out behind her, into the meadows. She says:

  —It’s a long walk. We live way out there.…

  Where? And the youth

  follows. He is touched by her manner. Her shoulders, her neck—, perhaps

  she is of noble descent. But he leaves her, turns around,

  looks back, waves … What’s the use? She is a Lament.

  Only those who died young, in their first condition

  of timeless equanimity, while they are being weaned,

  follow her lovingly. She waits

  for girls and befriends them. Shows them, gently,

  what she is wearing. Pearls of grief and the fine-spun

  veils of patience.—With young men she walks

  in silence.

  But there, in the valley, where they live, one of the elder Laments

  answers the youth when he questions her:—Long ago,

  she says, we Laments were a powerful race. Our forefathers worked

  the mines, up there in the mountain-range; sometimes even

  among men you can find a polished nugget of primal grief

  or a chunk of petrified rage from the slag of an ancient volcano.

  Yes, that came from up there. We used to be rich.—

  And gently she guides him through the vast landscape of Lament,

  shows him the pillars of the temples, and the ruined walls

  of those castles from which, long ago, the princes of Lament