The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (17 page)

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.

[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 describe 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.

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.

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.

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.…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 into 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.

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.

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,