Encounter In The Chestnut Avenue by Rainer Maria Rilke
Encounter In The Chestnut Avenue by Rainer Maria Rilke He felt the entrance’s green darkness wrapped cooly round him like a silken cloak that he was still accepting and arranging; when at the opposite transparent end, far off, through green sunlight, as through green window panes, whitely a solitary shape flared up, long remaining distant […]
Duino Elegies: The Tenth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino Elegies: The Tenth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke That some day, emerging at last from the terrifying vision I may burst into jubilant praise to assenting angels! That of the clear-struck keys of the heart not one may fail to sound because of a loose, doubtful or broken string! That my streaming countenance may […]
Duino Elegies: The Fourth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino Elegies: The Fourth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke O trees of life, oh, what when winter comes? We are not of one mind. Are not like birds in unison migrating. And overtaken, overdue, we thrust ourselves into the wind and fall to earth into indifferent ponds. Blossoming and withering we comprehend as one. And […]
Eve by Rainer Maria Rilke
Eve by Rainer Maria Rilke Look how she stands, high on the steep facade of the cathedral, near the window-rose, simply, holding in her hand the apple, judged for all time as the guiltless-guilty for the growing fruit her body held which she gave birth to after parting from the circle of eternities. She left […]
Dedication To M… by Rainer Maria Rilke
Dedication To M… by Rainer Maria Rilke Swing of the heart. O firmly hung, fastened on what invisible branch. Who, who gave you the push, that you swung with me into the leaves? How near I was to the exquisite fruits. But not-staying is the essence of this motion. Only the nearness, only toward the […]
Early Spring by Rainer Maria Rilke
Early Spring by Rainer Maria Rilke Harshness vanished. A sudden softness has replaced the meadows’ wintry grey. Little rivulets of water changed their singing accents. Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth from space, and country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees. ————— The End And that’s the […]
Exposed On The Cliffs Of The Heart by Rainer Maria Rilke
Exposed On The Cliffs Of The Heart by Rainer Maria Rilke Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there, look: the last village of words and, higher, (but how tiny) still one last farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it? Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground under your hands. […]
Extinguish Thou My Eyes by Rainer Maria Rilke
Extinguish Thou My Eyes by Rainer Maria Rilke 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 […]
Dedication by Rainer Maria Rilke
Dedication by Rainer Maria Rilke I have great faith in all things not yet spoken. I want my deepest pious feelings freed. What no one yet has dared to risk and warrant will be for me a challenge I must meet. If this presumptious seems, God, may I be forgiven. For what I want to […]
Child In Red by Rainer Maria Rilke
Child In Red by Rainer Maria Rilke 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 […]
As Once The Winged Energy Of Delight by Rainer Maria Rilke
As Once The Winged Energy Of Delight by Rainer Maria Rilke 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 […]
Before Summer Rain by Rainer Maria Rilke
Before Summer Rain by Rainer Maria Rilke 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 […]
Fire’s Reflection by Rainer Maria Rilke
Fire’s Reflection by Rainer Maria Rilke Perhaps it’s no more than the fire’s reflection on some piece of gleaming furniture that the child remembers so much later like a revelation. And if in his later life, one day wounds him like so many others, it’s because he mistook some risk or other for a promise. […]
Black Cat by Rainer Maria Rilke
Black Cat by Rainer Maria Rilke 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 […]
Duino Elegies: The First Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke
Duino Elegies: The First Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I would perish in the embrace of his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are […]
Archaic Torso Of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke
Archaic Torso Of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke 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, […]
Childhood by Rainer Maria Rilke
Childhood by Rainer Maria Rilke 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 […]
Falling Stars by Rainer Maria Rilke
Falling Stars by Rainer Maria Rilke Do you remember still the falling stars that like swift horses through the heavens raced and suddenly leaped across the hurdles of our wishes–do you recall? And we did make so many! For there were countless numbers of stars: each time we looked above we were astounded by the […]
Autumn Day by Rainer Maria Rilke
Autumn Day by Rainer Maria Rilke Four Translations Lord: it is time. The summer was immense. Lay your shadow on the sundials and let loose the wind in the fields. Bid the last fruits to be full; give them another two more southerly days, press them to ripeness, and chase the last sweetness into the […]
from The Tenth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Tenth Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke Ah, but the City of Pain: how strange its streets are: the false silence of sound drowning sound, and there–proud, brazen, effluence from the mold of emptiness– the gilded hubbub, the bursting monument. How an Angel would stamp out their market of solaces, set up alongside their […]
For Hans Carossa by Rainer Maria Rilke
For Hans Carossa by Rainer Maria Rilke Losing too is still ours; and even forgetting still has a shape in the kindgdom of transformation. When something’s let go of, it circles; and though we are rarely the center of the circle, it draws around us its unbroken, marvelous curve. ————— The End And that’s the […]
Evening Love Song by Rainer Maria Rilke
Evening Love Song by Rainer Maria Rilke Ornamental clouds compose an evening love song; a road leaves evasively. The new moon begins a new chapter of our nights, of those frail nights we stretch out and which mingle with these black horizontals. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. […]
Evening by Rainer Maria Rilke
Evening by Rainer Maria Rilke The sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as […]
Death by Rainer Maria Rilke
Death by Rainer Maria Rilke 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 […]
Blank Joy by Rainer Maria Rilke
Blank Joy by Rainer Maria Rilke She who did not come, wasn’t she determined nonetheless to organize and decorate my heart? If we had to exist to become the one we love, what would the heart have to create? Lovely joy left blank, perhaps you are the center of all my labors and my loves. […]
Along The Sun-Drenched Roadside by Rainer Maria Rilke
Along The Sun-Drenched Roadside by Rainer Maria Rilke Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the great hollow half-treetrunk, which for generations has been a trough, renewing in itself an inch or two of rain, I satisfy my thirst: taking the water’s pristine coolness into my whole body through my wrists. Drinking would be too powerful, too […]
Again And Again, However We Know The Landscape Of Love by Rainer Maria Rilke
Again And Again, However We Know The Landscape Of Love by Rainer Maria Rilke Again and again, however we know the landscape of love and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names, and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others fall: again and again the two of us walk out together under the […]
Adam by Rainer Maria Rilke
Adam by Rainer Maria Rilke High above he stands, beside the many saintly figures fronting the cathedral’s gothic tympanum, close by the window called the rose, and looks astonished at his own deification which placed him there. Erect and proud he smiles, and quite enjoys this feat of his survival, willed by choice. As labourer […]
A Walk by Rainer Maria Rilke
A Walk by Rainer Maria Rilke My eyes already touch the sunny hill. going far ahead of the road I have begun. So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; it has inner light, even from a distance- and charges us, even if we do not reach it, into something else, which, hardly sensing […]