The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  Not even the children … But sometimes one,

  oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.

  (In memoriam Egon von Rilke)

  II, 13

  Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were

  behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.

  For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter

  that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

  Be forever dead in Eurydice—more gladly arise

  into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.

  Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,

  be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

  Be—and yet know the great void where all things begin,

  the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,

  so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

  To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb

  creatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums,

  joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

  II, 14

  Look at the flowers, so faithful to what is earthly,

  to whom we lend fate from the very border of fate.

  And if they are sad about how they must wither and die,

  perhaps it is our vocation to be their regret.

  All Things want to fly. Only we are weighed down by desire,

  caught in ourselves and enthralled with our heaviness.

  Oh what consuming, negative teachers we are

  for them, while eternal childhood fills them with grace.

  If someone were to fall into intimate slumber, and slept

  deeply with Things—: how easily he would come

  to a different day, out of the mutual depth.

  Or perhaps he would stay there; and they would blossom and praise

  their newest convert, who now is like one of them,

  all those silent companions in the wind of the meadows.

  II, 23

  Call me to the one among your moments

  that stands against you, ineluctably:

  intimate as a dog’s imploring glance

  but, again, forever, turned away

  when you think you’ve captured it at last.

  What seems so far from you is most your own.

  We are already free, and were dismissed

  where we thought we soon would be at home.

  Anxious, we keep longing for a foothold—

  we, at times too young for what is old

  and too old for what has never been;

  doing justice only where we praise,

  because we are the branch, the iron blade,

  and sweet danger, ripening from within.

  II, 24

  Oh the delight, ever new, out of loosened soil!

  The ones who first dared were almost without any help.

  Nonetheless, at fortunate harbors, cities sprang up,

  and pitchers were nonetheless filled with water and oil.

  Gods: we project them first in the boldest of sketches,

  which sullen Fate keeps crumpling and tossing away.

  But for all that, the gods are immortal. Surely we may

  hear out the one who, in the end, will hear us.

  We, one generation through thousands of lifetimes: women

  and men, who are more and more filled with the child we will bear,

  so that through it we may someday be shattered and overtaken.

  We, the endlessly dared—how far we have come!

  And only taciturn Death can know what we are

  and how he must always profit when he lends us time.

  II, 28

  Oh come and go. You, almost still a child—

  for just a moment fill out the dance-figure

  into the constellation of those bold

  dances in which dull, obsessive Nature

  is fleetingly surpassed. For she was stirred

  to total hearing just when Orpheus sang.

  You were still moved by those primeval words

  and a bit surprised if any tree took long

  to step with you into the listening ear.

  You knew the place where once the lyre arose

  resounding: the unheard, unheard-of center.

  For its sake you tried out your lovely motion

  and hoped that you would one day turn your friend’s

  body toward the perfect celebration.

  II, 29

  Silent friend of many distances, feel

  how your breath enlarges all of space.

  Let your presence ring out like a bell

  into the night. What feeds upon your face

  grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.

  Move through transformation, out and in.

  What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?

  If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

  In this immeasurable darkness, be the power

  that rounds your senses in their magic ring,

  the sense of their mysterious encounter.

  And if the earthly no longer knows your name,

  whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.

  To the flashing water say: I am.

  UNCOLLECTED POEMS

  1923–1926

  Notes

  IMAGINARY CAREER

  At first a childhood, limitless and free

  of any goals. Ah sweet unconsciousness.

  Then sudden terror, schoolrooms, slavery,

  the plunge into temptation and deep loss.

  Defiance. The child bent becomes the bender,

  inflicts on others what he once went through.

  Loved, feared, rescuer, wrestler, victor,

  he takes his vengeance, blow by blow.

  And now in vast, cold, empty space, alone.

  Yet hidden deep within the grown-up heart,

  a longing for the first world, the ancient one …

  Then, from His place of ambush, God leapt out.

  [As once the wingèd energy of delight]

  As once the wingèd energy of delight

  carried you over childhood’s dark abysses,

  now beyond your own life build the great

  arch of unimagined bridges.

  Wonders happen if we can succeed

  in passing through the harshest danger;

  but only in a bright and purely granted

  achievement can we realize the wonder.

  To work with Things in the indescribable

  relationship is not too hard for us;

  the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,

  and being swept along is not enough.

  Take your practiced powers and stretch them out

  until they span the chasm between two

  contradictions … For the god

  wants to know himself in you.

  [What birds plunge through is not the intimate space]

  What birds plunge through is not the intimate space

  in which you see all forms intensified.

  (Out in the Open, you would be denied

  your self, would disappear into that vastness.)

  Space reaches from us and construes the world:

  to know a tree, in its true element,

  throw inner space around it, from that pure

  abundance in you. Surround it with restraint.

  It has no limits. Not till it is held

  in your renouncing is it truly there.

  DURATION OF CHILDHOOD

  (For E.M.)

  Long afternoons of childhood.…, not yet really

  life; still only growing-time

  that drags at the knees—, time of defenseless waiting.

  And between what we will perhaps become

  and this edgeless existence—: deaths,

  uncountable. Love, the possessive, surrounds

  the child forever betrayed in secret
>
  and promises him to the future; which is not his own.

  Afternoons that he spent by himself, staring

  from mirror to mirror; puzzling himself with the riddle

  of his own name: Who? Who?—But the others

  come home again, overwhelm him.

  What the window or path

  or the mouldy smell of a drawer

  confided to him yesterday: they drown it out and destroy it.

  Once more he belongs to them.

  As tendrils sometimes fling themselves out from the thicker

  bushes, his desire will fling itself out

  from the tangle of family and hang there, swaying in the light.

  But daily they blunt his glance upon their inhabited

  walls—that wide innocent glance which lets dogs in

  and holds the tall flowers,

  still almost face to face.

  Oh how far it is

  from this watched-over creature to everything that will someday

  be his wonder or his destruction.

  His immature strength

  learns cunning among the traps.

  But the constellation

  of his future love has long

  been moving among the stars. What terror

  will tear his heart out of the track of its fleeing

  to place it in perfect submission, under the calm

  influence of the heavens?

  [World was in the face of the beloved]

  World was in the face of the beloved—,

  but suddenly it poured out and was gone:

  world is outside, world can not be grasped.

  Why didn’t I, from the full, beloved face

  as I raised it to my lips, why didn’t I drink

  world, so near that I could almost taste it?

  Ah, I drank. Insatiably I drank.

  But I was filled up also, with too much

  world, and, drinking, I myself ran over.

  PALM

  Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk

  only on feelings. That faces upward

  and in its mirror

  receives heavenly roads, which travel

  along themselves.

  That has learned to walk upon water

  when it scoops,

  that walks upon wells,

  transfiguring every path.

  That steps into other hands,

  changes those that are like it

  into a landscape:

  wanders and arrives within them,

  fills them with arrival.

  GRAVITY

  Center, how from all beings

  you pull yourself, even from those that fly

  winning yourself back, irresistible center.

  He who stands: as a drink through thirst

  gravity plunges down through him.

  But from the sleeper falls

  (as though from a motionless cloud)

  the abundant rain of the heavy.

  O LACRIMOSA

  (trilogy for future music of Ernst Křenek)

  I

  Oh tear-filled figure who, like a sky held back,

  grows heavy above the landscape of her sorrow.

  And when she weeps, the gentle raindrops fall,

  slanting upon the sand-bed of her heart.

  Oh heavy with weeping. Scale to weigh all tears.

  Who felt herself not sky, since she was shining

  and sky exists only for clouds to form in.

  How clear it is, how close, your land of sorrow,

  beneath the stern sky’s oneness. Like a face

  that lies there, slowly waking up and thinking

  horizontally, into endless depths.

  II

  It is nothing but a breath, the void.

  And that green fulfillment

  of blossoming trees: a breath.

  We, who are still the breathed-upon,

  today still the breathed-upon, count

  this slow breathing of earth,

  whose hurry we are.

  III

  Ah, but the winters! The earth’s mysterious

  turning-within. Where around the dead

  in the pure receding of sap,

  boldness is gathered,

  the boldness of future springtimes.

  Where imagination occurs

  beneath what is rigid; where all the green

  worn thin by the vast summers

  again turns into a new

  insight and the mirror of intuition;

  where the flowers’ color

  wholly forgets that lingering of our eyes.

  [Now it is time that gods came walking out]

  Now it is time that gods came walking out

  of lived-in Things …

  Time that they came and knocked down every wall

  inside my house. New page. Only the wind

  from such a turning could be strong enough

  to toss the air as a shovel tosses dirt:

  a fresh-turned field of breath. O gods, gods!

  who used to come so often and are still

  asleep in the Things around us, who serenely

  rise and at wells that we can only guess at

  splash icy water on your necks and faces,

  and lightly add your restedness to what seems

  already filled to bursting: our full lives.

  Once again let it be your morning, gods.

  We keep repeating. You alone are source.

  With you the world arises, and your dawn

  gleams on each crack and crevice of our failure …

  [Rose, oh pure contradiction]

  Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy

  of being No-one’s sleep under so many

  lids.

  IDOL

  God or goddess of the sleep of cats,

  savoring godhead that in the dark

  vat of the mouth crushes eye-berries, ripe,

  into the sweet-grown nectar of vision,

  eternal light in the palate’s crypt.

  Not a lullaby,—Gong! Gong!

  What casts a spell over other gods

  lets this most cunning god escape

  into his ever-receding power.

  GONG

  No longer for ears … : sound

  which, like a deeper ear,

  hears us, who only seem

  to be hearing. Reversal of spaces.

  Projection of innermost worlds

  into the Open …, temple

  before their birth, solution

  saturated with gods

  that are almost insoluble … : Gong!

  Sum of all silence, which

  acknowledges itself to itself,

  thunderous turning-within

  of what is struck dumb in itself,

  duration pressed from time passing,

  star re-liquefied … : Gong!

  You whom one never forgets,

  who gave birth to herself in loss,

  festival no longer grasped,

  wine on invisible lips,

  storm in the pillar that upholds,

  wanderer’s plunge on the path,

  our treason, to everything … : Gong!

  [FOUR SKETCHES]

  To Monique:

  a small reflection of my gratitude

  Teatime

  Drinking from this cup inscribed with signs in an unknown language, perhaps a message of blessing and joy, I hold it in this hand full of its own indecipherable lines. Do the two messages agree? And since they are alone with each other and forever hidden beneath the dome of my gaze, will they talk to each other in their own way and be reconciled, these two ancient texts brought together by the gesture of a man drinking tea?

  Rustic Chapel

  How calm the house is: listen! But up there, in the white chapel, where does that greater silence come from?—From all those who, for more than a century, have come in so as not to be out in the cold and, kneeling down, have been f
rightened at their own noise? From the money that lost its voice falling into the collection box and will speak in just a small cricket-chirp when it is taken out? Or from the sweet absence of Saint Anne, the sanctuary’s patron, who doesn’t dare to come closer, lest she damage that pure distance which a call implies?

  “Farfallettina”

  Shaking all over, she arrives near the lamp, and her dizziness grants her one last vague reprieve before she goes up in flames. She has fallen onto the green tablecloth, and upon that advantageous background she stretches out for a moment (for a unit of her own time which we have no way of measuring) the profusion of her inconceivable splendor. She looks like a miniature lady who is having a heart attack on the way to the theater. She will never arrive. Besides, where is there a theater for such fragile spectators? … Her wings, with their tiny golden threads, are moving like a double fan in front of no face; and between them is this thin body, a bilboquet onto which two eyes like emerald balls have fallen back …

  It is in you, my dear, that God has exhausted himself. He tosses you into the fire so that he can recover a bit of his strength. (Like a little boy breaking into his piggy bank.)

  The Tangerine-eater

  Oh what foresight! This rabbit of the fruit-world! Imagine: thirty-seven little pits in a single specimen, ready to fall every-which-way and create offspring. We had to correct that. She could have populated the whole earth—this little headstrong Tangerine, wearing a dress too big for herself, as if she intended to keep on growing. In short: badly dressed; more concerned with reproduction than with style. Show her the pomegranate, in her armor of Cordova leather: she is bursting with future, holds herself back, condescends.… And, letting us catch just a glimpse of her possible progeny, she smothers them in a dark-red cradle. She thinks earth is too evasive to sign a pact of abundance.