The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (18 page)

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.

Not even the children … But sometimes one,

oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.

(
In memoriam Egon von Rilke
)

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 your
self
, and cancel the count.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

(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—,

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.

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.

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.

(trilogy for future music of Ernst Křenek)

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.

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.

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

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, joy

of being No-one’s sleep under so many

lids.

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.