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RAINER
MARIA RILKE
"You are not my favorite
poet. That implies comparison. You are poetry
itself." -- letter from Marina Tsvetaeva
to Rilke (the last poem here was one she
wrote to him upon his death)
Lament
You Who Never Arrived
Archaic Torso of Apollo
The Apple Orchard
[As Once the Winged Energy of Delight]
Autumn
Before Summer Rain
Black Cat
Childhood
Child in Red
Extinguish Thou my Eyes
Duino Elegies: The Tenth Elegy
Death
New Year (for Rilke upon death)
Rainer Maria Rilke,
"Lament"
Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.
A clock has stopped striking in the house
across the road...
When did it start?...
I would like to step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is -
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city...
(translated by Stephen Mitchell)
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Rainer Maria Rilke,
"You Who Never Arrived"
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me - the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods -
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are
all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...
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Rainer Maria Rilke,
"Archaic Torso of Apollo"
We cannot know his legendary
head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power.
Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone
would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all
the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
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Rainer Maria Rilke,
"The Apple Orchard"
Come let us watch the sun
go down
and walk in twilight through the orchard's green.
Does it not seem as if we had for long
collected, saved and harbored within us
old memories? To find releases and seek
new hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys,
mingled with darkness coming from within,
as we randomly voice our thoughts aloud
wandering beneath these harvest-laden trees
reminiscent of Durer woodcuts, branches
which, bent under the fully ripened fruit,
wait patiently, trying to outlast, to
serve another season's hundred days of toil,
straining, uncomplaining, by not breaking
but succeeding, even though the burden
should at times seem almost past endurance.
Not to falter! Not to be found wanting!
Thus must it be, when willingly you strive
throughout a long and uncomplaining life,
committed to one goal: to give yourself!
And silently to grow and to bear fruit.
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Rainer Maria Rilke,
"[As Once the Winged Energy of Delight]"
As once the winged 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.
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Rainer Maria Rilke,
"Autumn"
The leaves are falling,
falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.
Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."
And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all other stars in the loneliness.
We're all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It's in them all.
And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.
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Rainer Maria Rilke,
"Before Summer Rain"
Suddenly, from all the green
around you,
something-you don't know what-has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood
you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
reminding you of someone's Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour
will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide
away from us, cautiously, as though
they weren't supposed to hear what we are saying.
And reflected on the faded tapestries now;
the chill, uncertain sunlight of those long
childhood hours when you were so afraid.
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Rainer Maria Rilke,
"Black Cat"
A ghost, though invisible,
still is like a place
your sight can knock on, echoing; but here
within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze
will be absorbed and utterly disappear:
just as a raving madman, when nothing else
can ease him, charges into his dark night
howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels
the rage being taken in and pacified.
She seems to hide all looks that have ever fallen
into her, so that, like an audience,
she can look them over, menacing and sullen,
and curl to sleep with them. But all at once
as if awakened, she turns her face to yours;
and with a shock, you see yourself, tiny,
inside the golden amber of her eyeballs
suspended, like a prehistoric fly.
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Rainer Maria Rilke,
"Childhood"
It would be good to give
much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely -and why?
We're still reminded-: sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on
as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.
And became as lonely as a sheperd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.
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Rainer Maria Rilke,
"Child in Red"
Sometimes she walks through
the village in her
little red dress
all absorbed in restraining herself,
and yet, despite herself, she seems to move
according to the rhythm of her life to come.
She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,
half-turns around...
and, all while dreaming, shakes her head
for or against.
Then she dances a few steps
that she invents and forgets,
no doubt finding out that life
moves on too fast.
It's not so much that she steps out
of the small body enclosing her,
but that all she carries in herself
frolics and ferments.
It's this dress that she'll remember
later in a sweet surrender;
when her whole life is full of risks,
the little red dress will always seem right.
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Rainer Maria Rilke,
"Extinguish Thou My Eyes"
Extinguish Thou my eyes:I
still can see Thee,
deprive my ears of sound:I still can hear Thee,
and without feet I still can come to Thee,
and without voice I still can call to Thee.
Sever my arms from me, I still will hold Thee
with all my heart as with a single hand,
arrest my heart, my brain will keep on beating,
and Should Thy fire at last my brain consume,
the flowing of my blood will carry Thee.
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Rainer Maria Rilke,
"Duino Elegies: 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.
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Rainer Maria Rilke,
"Death"
Come thou, thou last one,
whom I recognize,
unbearable pain throughout this body's fabric:
as I in my spirit burned, see, I now burn in thee:
the wood that long resisted the advancing flames
which thou kept flaring, I now am nourishinig
and burn in thee.
My gentle and mild being through thy ruthless fury
has turned into a raging hell that is not from here.
Quite pure, quite free of future planning, I mounted
the tangled funeral pyre built for my suffering,
so sure of nothing more to buy for future needs,
while in my heart the stored reserves kept silent.
Is it still I, who there past all recognition burn?
Memories I do not seize and bring inside.
O life! O living! O to be outside!
And I in flames. And no one here who knows me.
This poem was the last in Rilke's notebook,
written less than two weeks before his death
in 1926 at the age of 51. Back
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Marina Tsvetaeva,
"New Year Letter"
(for Rilke upon his death)
My friend, do not forget
The following: If the Russian alphabet
Has pushed the German characters away
It's not because now all's one, as they
say,
And dead men (beggars) swallow anything,
Don't bat an eyelid! -- But because it's
plain
-- Thirteen, in Novodevichiy, this dawned
--
The next world isn't tongueless, but all-tongued.
Not without sadness now I ask, implore:
Don't you want to know the Russian for
Nest? The only rhyme for all nests (gnyozdy)
Is one that covers all of them: stars (zyvozdy).
Did I stray from the point?
That can't be true.
There's no such thing as one that strays from you.
(translated
by David McDuff)
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