Category Archives: rilke

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvellous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.
― Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

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.

– Rilke, from The Sonnets to Orpheus (tr. Mitchell)

Dear Lou, for a month I have been alone and this is my first attempt to regain consciousness — you see what a plight I am in. In the end something will have been learnt, — at present of course I realise only this : that once more I was not proportioned to a task that was pure and joyous, a task in which Life again stepped up to me, guilelessly, forgivingly, as though it had not had any ill experience of me at all. Now it is clear that this time too I have muffed my exam and that I make no progress and must still sit for another year in the same agonising class and day after day, right from the beginning, be given those same words on the blackboard whose accents I thought I had learnt from the very bottom of my heart.

— Rilke, letter, 1914 (tr. Hull)

But now, like a whispering in dark streets,
rumors of God run through your dark blood.

— Rilke (tr. Barrows and Macy)

The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp,
that all my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there’s a power in me
to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

*

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

I have many brothers in the South
who move, handsome in their vestments,
through cloister gardens.
The Madonnas they make are so human,
and I dream often of their Titians,
where God becomes an ardent flame.

But when I lean over the chasm of myself –
it seems
my God is dark
and like a web: a hundred roots
silently drinking.

This is the ferment I grow out of.

More I don’t know, because my branches
rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.

*

We must not portray you in king’s robes,
you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.

Once again from our old paintboxes
we take the same gold for scepter and crown
that has disguised you through the ages.

Piously we produce our images of you
till they stand around you like a thousand walls.
And when our hearts would simply open,
our fervent hands hide you.

*

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.

*

You, god, who live next door –

If at times, through the long night, I trouble you
with my urgent knocking –
this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.
I know you’re all alone in that room.
If you should be thirsty, there’s no one
to get you a glass of water.
I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign!
I’m right here.

As it happens, the wall between us
is very thin. Why couldn’t a cry
from one of us
break it down?  It would crumble
easily,
it would barely make a sound.

*

If only for once it were still.
If the not quite right and the why this
could be muted, and the neighbor’s laughter,
and the static my senses make –
if all of it didn’t keep me from coming awake –

Then in one vast thousandfold thought
I could think you up to where thinking ends.

I could possess you,
even for the brevity of a smile,
to offer you
to all that lives,
in gladness.

— Rilke, from The Book of Hours (tr. Barrows and Macy)

I’m not living my own life… I feel refuted, abandoned, and above all threatened by a world ready to dissolve entire in such senseless disorder.

— Rilke, letter, 1917

I am too alone in the world, but not alone enough
to make every hour holy.

— Rilke

Great poetry begins in elegy and ends in praise.

Rilke

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…

Rilke

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.

Rilke