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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
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 […]