The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  wisely ruled the land. Shows him the tall

  trees of tears and the fields of blossoming grief

  (the living know it just as a mild green shrub);

  shows him the herds of sorrow, grazing,—and sometimes

  a startled bird, flying low through their upward gaze,

  far away traces the image of its solitary cry.—

  In the twilight she leads him out to the graves of the elders

  who gave warning to the race of Laments, the sibyls and prophets.

  But as night approaches, they move more softly, and soon

  the sepulchre rises up

  like a moon, watching over everything. Brother to the one on the Nile,

  the lofty Sphinx—: the taciturn chamber’s

  countenance.

  And they look in wonder at the regal head that has silently

  lifted the human face

  to the scale of the stars, forever.

  Still dizzy from recent death, his sight

  cannot grasp it. But her gaze

  frightens an owl from behind the rim of the crown. And the bird,

  with slow downstrokes, brushes along the cheek,

  the one with the fuller curve,

  and faintly, in the dead youth’s new

  sense of hearing, as upon a double

  unfolded page, it sketches the indescribable outline.

  And higher, the stars. The new stars of the land of grief.

  Slowly the Lament names them:—Look, there:

  the Rider, the Staff, and the larger constellation

  called Garland of Fruit. Then, farther up toward the Pole:

  Cradle; Path; The Burning Book; Puppet; Window.

  But there, in the southern sky, pure as the lines

  on the palm of a blessed hand, the clear sparkling M

  that stands for Mothers …… —

  But the dead youth must go on by himself, and silently the elder Lament

  takes him as far as the ravine,

  where shimmering in the moonlight

  is the fountainhead of joy. With reverence

  she names it and says: —Among men

  it is a mighty stream.—

  They stand at the foot of the mountain-range.

  And she embraces him, weeping.

  Alone, he climbs on, up the mountains of primal grief.

  And not once do his footsteps echo from the soundless path.

  *

  But if the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us,

  perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the bare

  branches of the hazel-trees, or

  would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in springtime.—

  And we, who have always thought

  of happiness as rising, would feel

  the emotion that almost overwhelms us

  whenever a happy thing falls.

  APPENDIX TO

  DUINO ELEGIES

  Notes

  [FRAGMENT OF AN ELEGY]

  Now shall I praise the cities, those long-surviving

  (I watched them in awe) great constellations of earth.

  For only in praising is my heart still mine, so violently

  do I know the world. And even my lament

  turns into a paean before my disconsolate heart.

  Let no one say that I don’t love life, the eternal

  presence: I pulsate in her; she bears me, she gives me

  the spaciousness of this day, the primeval workday

  for me to make use of, and over my existence flings,

  in her magnanimity, nights that have never been.

  Her strong hand is above me, and if she should hold me under,

  submerged in fate, I would have to learn how to breathe

  down there. Even her most lightly-entrusted mission

  would fill me with songs of her; although I suspect

  that all she wants is for me to be vibrant as she is.

  Once poets resounded over the battlefield; what voice

  can outshout the rattle of this metallic age

  that is struggling on toward its careening future?

  And indeed it hardly requires the call, its own battle-din

  roars into song. So let me stand for a while

  in front of the transient: not accusing, but once again

  admiring, marveling. And if perhaps something founders

  before my eyes and stirs me into lament,

  it is not a reproach. Why shouldn’t more youthful nations

  rush past the graveyard of cultures long ago rotten?

  How pitiful it would be if greatness needed the slightest

  indulgence. Let him whose soul is no longer startled

  and transformed by palaces, by gardens’ boldness, by the rising

  and falling of ancient fountains, by everything held back

  in paintings or by the infinite thereness of statues—

  let such a person go out to his daily work, where

  greatness is lying in ambush and someday, at some turn,

  will leap upon him and force him to fight for his life.

  [ORIGINAL VERSION OF THE TENTH ELEGY]

  [Fragmentary]

  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 an ill-tempered 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

  seasons of us, our winter-

  enduring foliage, ponds, meadows, our inborn landscape,

  where birds and reed-dwelling creatures are at home.

  High overhead, isn’t half of the night sky standing

  above the sorrow in us, the disquieted garden?

  Imagine that you no longer walked through your grief grown wild,

  no longer looked at the stars through the jagged leaves

  of the dark tree of pain, and the enlarging moonlight

  no longer exalted fate’s ruins so high

  that among them you felt like the last of some ancient race.

  Nor would smiles any longer exist, the consuming smiles

  of those you lost over there—with so little violence,

  once they were past, did they purely enter your grief.

  (Almost like the girl who has just said yes to the lover

  who begged her, so many weeks, and she brings him astonished

  to the garden gate and, reluctant, he walks away,

  giddy with joy; and then, amid this new parting,

  a step disturbs her; she waits; and her glance in its fullness

  sinks totally into a stranger’s: her virgin glance

  that endlessly comprehends him, the outsider, who was meant for her;

  the wandering other, who eternally was meant for her.

  Echoing, he walks by.) That is how, always, you lost:

  never as one who possesses, but like someone dying

  who, bending into the moist breeze of an evening in March,

  loses the springtime, alas, in the throats of the birds.

  Far too much you belong to grief. If you could forget her—

  even the least of these figures so infinitely pained—

  you would call down, shout down, hoping they might still be curious,

  one of the angels (those beings unmighty in grief)

  who, as his face darkened, would try again and again

  to describ
e the way you kept sobbing, long ago, for her.

  Angel, what was it like? And he would imitate you and never

  understand that it was pain, as after a calling bird

  one tries to repeat the innocent voice it is filled with.

  ANTISTROPHES

  Ah, Women, that you should be moving

  here, among us, grief-filled,

  no more protected than we, and nevertheless

  able to bless like the blessed.

  From what realm,

  when your beloved appears,

  do you take the future?

  More than will ever be.

  One who knows distances

  out to the outermost star

  is astonished when he discovers

  the magnificent space in your hearts.

  How, in the crowd, can you spare it?

  You, full of sources and night.

  Are you really the same

  as those children who

  on the way to school were rudely

  shoved by an older brother?

  Unharmed by it.

  While we, even as children,

  disfigured ourselves forever,

  you were like bread on the altar

  before it is changed.

  The breaking away of childhood

  left you intact. In a moment,

  you stood there, as if completed

  in a miracle, all at once.

  We, as if broken from crags,

  even as boys, too sharp

  at the edges, although perhaps

  sometimes skillfully cut;

  we, like pieces of rock

  that have fallen on flowers.

  Flowers of the deeper soil,

  loved by all roots,

  you, Eurydice’s sisters,

  full of holy return

  behind the ascending man.

  We, afflicted by ourselves,

  gladly afflicting, gladly

  needing to be afflicted.

  We, who sleep with our anger

  laid beside us like a knife.

  You, who are almost protection

  where no one protects. The thought of you

  is a shade-giving tree of sleep for the restless

  creatures of a solitary man.

  FROM

  THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS

  (1923)

  Notes

  Written as a monument for Vera Ouckama Knoop

  Château de Muzot, February 1922

  I, I

  A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!

  Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!

  And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence

  a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

  Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright

  unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;

  and it was not from any dullness, not

  from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,

  but from simply listening. Bellow, roar, shriek

  seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been

  just a makeshift hut to receive the music,

  a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,

  with an entryway that shuddered in the wind—

  you built a temple deep inside their hearing.

  I, 2

  And it was almost a girl who, stepping from

  this single harmony of song and lyre,

  appeared to me through her diaphanous form

  and made herself a bed inside my ear.

  And slept in me. Her sleep was everything:

  the awesome trees, the distances I had felt

  so deeply that I could touch them, meadows in spring:

  all wonders that had ever seized my heart.

  She slept the world. Singing god, how was that first

  sleep so perfect that she had no desire

  ever to wake? See: she arose and slept.

  Where is her death now? Ah, will you discover

  this theme before your song consumes itself?—

  Where is she vanishing? … A girl, almost.…

  I, 3

  A god can do it. But will you tell me how

  a man can penetrate through the lyre’s strings?

  Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing

  of heart-roads, there is no temple for Apollo.

  Song, as you have taught it, is not desire,

  not wooing any grace that can be achieved;

  song is reality. Simple, for a god.

  But when can we be real? When does he pour

  the earth, the stars, into us? Young man,

  it is not your loving, even if your mouth

  was forced wide open by your own voice—learn

  to forget that passionate music. It will end.

  True singing is a different breath, about

  nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.

  I, 5

  Erect no gravestone to his memory; just

  let the rose blossom each year for his sake.

  For it is Orpheus. Wherever he has passed

  through this or that. We do not need to look

  for other names. When there is poetry,

  it is Orpheus singing. He lightly comes and goes.

  Isn’t it enough if sometimes he can stay

  with us a few days longer than a rose?

  Though he himself is afraid to disappear,

  he has to vanish: don’t you understand?

  The moment his word steps out beyond our life here,

  he moves where you will never find his trace.

  The lyre’s strings do not constrict his hands.

  And it is in overstepping that he obeys.

  I, 7

  Praising is what matters! He was summoned for that,

  and came to us like the ore from a stone’s

  silence. His mortal heart presses out

  a deathless, inexhaustible wine.

  Whenever he feels the god’s paradigm grip

  his throat, the voice does not die in his mouth.

  All becomes vineyard, all becomes grape,

  ripened on the hills of his sensuous South.

  Neither decay in the sepulchre of kings

  nor any shadow that has fallen from the gods

  can ever detract from his glorious praising.

  For he is a herald who is with us always,

  holding far into the doors of the dead

  a bowl with ripe fruit worthy of praise.

  I, 8

  Only in the realm of Praising should Lament

  walk, the naiad of the wept-for fountain,

  watching over the stream of our complaint,

  that it be clear upon the very stone

  that bears the arch of triumph and the altar.—

  Look: around her shoulders dawns the bright

  sense that she may be the youngest sister

  among the deities hidden in our heart.

  Joy knows, and Longing has accepted,—

  only Lament still learns; upon her beads,

  night after night, she counts the ancient curse.

  Yet awkward as she is, she suddenly

  lifts a constellation of our voice,

  glittering, into the pure nocturnal sky.

  I, 25

  But you now, dear girl, whom I loved like a flower whose name

  I didn’t know, you who so early were taken away:

  I will once more call up your image and show it to them,

  beautiful companion of the unsubduable cry.

  Dancer whose body filled with your hesitant fate,

  pausing, as though your young flesh had been cast in bronze;

  grieving and listening—. Then, from the high dominions,

  unearthly music fell into your altered heart.

  Already possessed by shadows, with illness near,

  your blood flowed darkly; yet though for a moment suspicious,

  it burst out i
nto the natural pulses of spring.

  Again and again interrupted by downfall and darkness,

  earthly, it gleamed. Till, after a terrible pounding,

  it entered the inconsolably open door.

  II, 4

  Oh this is the animal that never was.

  They hadn’t seen one; but just the same, they loved

  its graceful movements, and the way it stood

  looking at them calmly, with clear eyes.

  It had not been. But for them, it appeared

  in all its purity. They left space enough.

  And in the space hollowed out by their love

  it stood up all at once and didn’t need

  existence. They nourished it, not with grain,

  but with the mere possibility of being.

  And finally this gave it so much power

  that from its forehead a horn grew. One horn.

  It drew near to a virgin, white, gleaming—

  and was, inside the mirror and in her.

  II, 8

  You playmates of mine in the scattered parks of the city,

  small friends from a childhood of long ago:

  how we found and liked one another, hesitantly,

  and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,

  spoke with our silence. When we were filled with joy

  it belonged to no one: it was simply there.

  And how it dissolved among all the adults who passed by

  and in the fears of the endless year.

  Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the carriages;

  houses surrounded us, solid but untrue—and none

  of them ever knew us. What in that world was real?

  Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.