How it thrills us, the bird’s clear cry …
Any cry that was always there.
Children, playing in the open air,
children already go crying by
real cries. Cry chance in. Through crevasses
in that same space whereinto, as dreaming
men into dreams, the pure bird-cry passes
they drive their splintering wedge of screaming.
Where are we? Freer and freer, we gyre
only half up, kites breaking
loose, with our frills of laughter flaking
away in the wind.—Make the criers a choir,
singing god! that resurgently waking
may bear on its waters the head and the lyre.
DOES IT EXIST?
Does it exist, though, Time the destroyer?
When will it scatter the tower on the resting hill?
This heart, the eternal gods’ eternal enjoyer,
when shall the Demiurge ravish and spill?
Are we really such tremblingly breakable
things as Destiny tries to pretend?
Does childhood’s promise, deep, unmistakable,
down in the roots, then, later, end?
Ah, Mutability’s specter!
out through the simple accepter
you, like a vapor, recede.
We, though we wax but for waning,
fill none the less for remaining
powers a celestial need.
POEMS 1906-26
TURNING
The way from intensity to greatness leads through sacrifice.—Kassner
Long he’d outwrung it with gazing.
Stars collapsed on their knees
under that wrestlerish uplook.
Or he would kneelingly gaze
and his instancy’s perfume
tired an immortal until
it smiled at him out of its sleep.
He gazed at towers so hard,
he filled them with terror:
building them up again, suddenly, all in a moment.
And yet how often the day-
over-laden landscape
sank to rest in his calm perception at evening!
Animals trustfully entered
his open glance as they pastured,
and the imprisoned lions
stared as into incomprehensible freedom.
Birds flew straight through him,
kindly soul. Flowers
gazed back into him
large as to children.
And report that a seer was there
stirred those less,
more doubtfully, visible
creatures, women.
Gazing, since when?
How long fervently fasting,
with glance that at bottom besought?
When, waiting, he lived in foreign lands; the inn’s
distracted, alienated room
morosely around him; within the avoided mirror
once more the room,
and then, from his harrowing bed,
the room again—
airy councils were held,
inapprehensible councils,
about his still, through the painfully cumbered body,
still preceptible heart:
councils unoverheard
judged that it had not love.
(Further consecrations withheld.)
For gazing, look, has a limit.
And the on-gazeder world
wants to mature in love.
Work of sight is achieved,
now for some heart-work
on all those images, prisoned within you; for you
overcame them, but do not know them as yet.
Behold, O man within, the maiden within you!—
creature wrung from a thousand natures, creature
only outwrung, but never,
as yet, belov’d.
HYMN
August 1914
For the first time I see you rising,
hearsaid, remote, incredible War God.
How thickly our peaceful corn was intersown
with terrible action, suddenly grown mature!
Small even yesterday, needing nurture, and now
tall as a man: tomorrow
towering beyond man’s reach. Before we know it, he’s there,
the glowing god himself, tearing his crop
out of the nation’s roots, and harvest begins.
Up whirl the human sheaves to the human thunder-storm. Summer
is left behind among the sports on the green.
Playing children remain there, remembering elders,
trustful women. The universal parting
mingles with moving fragrance of blossoming limes,
whose heavy scent will hold a meaning for years.
Brides are more chosenly walking, as though not only
one life had united with theirs, but a whole people
set their affections in tune. With slowly measuring gaze
boys encircle the youth that already belongs
to the more adventurous future: he, who has stood perplexed
in the web of a hundred contradictory voices—
oh, how the single call has lightened his life! For what,
beside this, the one thing needful, would not seem merest caprice?
A god at last! Since the God of Peace so often
eluded our grasp, the God of Battles has grasped us,
hurling his bolt: while over the heart full of home
screams his thunderous dwelling, his scarlet heaven.
EVERYTHING BECKONS TO US
Everything beckons to us to perceive it,
murmurs at every turn ‘Remember me!’
A day we passed, too busy to receive it,
will yet unlock us all its treasury.
Who shall compute our harvest? Who shall bar
us from the former years, the long-departed?
What have we learnt from living since we started,
except to find in others what we are?
Except to re-enkindle commonplace?
O house, O sloping field, O setting sun!
Your features form into a face, you run,
you cling to us, returning our embrace!
One space spreads through all creatures equally—
inner-world-space. Birds quietly flying go
flying through us. Oh, I that want to grow,
the tree I look outside at grows in me!
It stands in me, that house I look for still,
in me that shelter I have not possessed.
I, the now well-beloved: on my breast
this fair world’s image clings and weeps her fill.
EXPOSED ON THE HEART’S MOUNTAINS
Exposed on the heart’s mountains. Look, how small there!
look, the last hamlet of words, and, higher,
(but still how small!) yet one remaining
farmstead of feeling: d’you see it?
Exposed on the heart’s mountains. Virgin rock
under the hands. Though even here
something blooms: from the dumb precipice
an unknowing plant blooms singing into the air.
But what of the knower? Ah, he began to know
and holds his peace, exposed on the heart’s mountains.
While, with undivided mind,
many, maybe, many well-assured mountain beasts,
pass there and pause. And the mighty sheltered bird
circles the summits’ pure refusal.—But, oh,
no longer sheltered, here on the heart’s mountains …
TO MUSIC
The Property of Frau Hanna Wolff
Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
end. You time,
vertically posed on the courses of vanishing hearts.
Feelings for what? Oh, you transformation
of feelin
gs into … audible landscape!
You stranger: Music. Space that’s outgrown us,
heart-space. Innermost us, transcendently
surging away from us—holiest parting,
where what is within surrounds us
as practised horizon, as other
side of the air,
pure,
gigantic,
no longer lived in.
WHEN WILL, WHEN WILL
Given to M.
… When will, when will, when will it have reached saturation,
this praising and lamentation? Has not all incantation
in human words been decanted by master-magicians? O vanity
of further experimentation! Is not humanity
battered by books as though by continual bells?
Perceiving, between two books, the silent heaven, or else
a segment of simple earth in evening light, rejoice!
Louder than storms, than oceans, the human voice
has cried … What infinite overbalance of stillness
there must be in cosmic space, since the grasshopper’s shrillness
stayed audible over our cries, and the stars appear
silently there in the ether above our shrieking!
Would that our farthest, old and oldest fathers were speaking!
And we: hearers at last! The first of all men to hear.
THE MAGICIAN
He calls it up. It shrinks together. Stays.
What stays? The Other; everything outside him
becomes a creature. And the thing displays
a swiftly made-up face that can deride him.
Prevail, magician, oh, prevail, prevail!
Create an equipoise. Cause no vibration:
you and the house have got to hold the scale
against the weight of all that augmentation.
Decision falls. The spell begins anew.
He knows, the call has countered the denial.
His face, though, stands at midnight, like a dial
with hands coincident. He’s spell-bound too.
FOR WITOLD HULEWICZ
Happy who know that behind all speeches
still the unspeakable lies;
that it’s from there that greatness reaches
us in the form we prize!
Trusting not to the diversely fashioned
bridges of difference we outfling:
so that we gaze out of every impassioned
joy at some wholly communal thing.
EROS
Masks! Masks! Or blind him! How can they endure
this flaming Eros gods and men obey,
bursting in summer-solstice on the pure
idyllic prologue to their vernal play?
How imperceptibly the conversation
takes a new, graver turn … A cry … And, there!
he’s flung the nameless fascination
like a dim temple round the fated pair.
Lost, lost! O instantaneous perdition!
In brief divinity they cling.
Life turns, and Destiny begins her mission.
And within there weeps a spring.
THE SAP IS MOUNTING BACK
The sap is mounting back from that unseenness
darkly renewing in the common deep,
back to the light, and feeding the pure greenness
hiding in rinds round which the winds still weep.
The inner side of Nature is reviving,
another sursum corda will resound;
invisibly, a whole year’s youth is striving
to climb those trees that look so iron-bound.
Preserving still that grey and cool expression,
the ancient walnut’s filling with event;
under the perching bird’s presentiment.
WORLD WAS IN THE FACE OF THE BELOVED
World was in the face of the beloved—
but was poured out all of a sudden:
world is outside, can’t be comprehended.
Why did I not drink, then, when I raised it,
drink from the full face of the beloved,
world—so near, I tasted its bouquet?
Oh, I did! I drank insatiably.
Only, I was so brim-full already
with world, that when I drank I overflowed.
THE GOLDSMITH
Coaxing chain-links, castigating rings,
“Wait! Go slowly!” is my constant cry:
“Outside there’ll be happenings by and by.”
Things, I keep repeating, Things, Things, Things,
as I ply my smith-craft: for till I
reach them, none can set up on its own
or undertake the tiniest career.
All, by grace of God, are equal here:
I, the gold, the fire, and the stone.
“Gently, ruby, drop that raging tone!
This pale pearl is trembling, and the flowing
tears have started in the beryl-stone.
Now you’ve rested, it’s sheer terror, going
round among you, as you leap from sleep.”
Bluely coruscating, redly glowing,
how they sparkle at me from the heap!
Gold, though, seems to know what I require,
for I’ve tamed its spirit in the fire;
still, I have to coax it carefully
round the gem; and suddenly, in grasping
that, the savage creature thrusts its rasping
claws with metal hatred into me.
R. M. R.
4 December 1875-29 December 1926
ROSE, OH THE PURE CONTRADICTION, DELIGHT, OF BEING NO ONE’S SLEEP UNDER SO MANY LIDS.
NOTES
NEW POEMS
DAVID SINGS BEFORE SAUL
I Samuel, xvi, 14-23.
THE DEPARTURE OF THE PRODIGAL SON
Luke, xv, 11-32.
THE OLIVE GARDEN
Luke, xxii, 39-46.
THE POET’S DEATH
Probably suggested by Rodin’s sculpture, La Morte du Poète.
BUDDHA
On a little mound in Rodin’s garden at Meudon stood an image of Buddha, which Rilke could see from his window and to which he often refers in his letters.
THE CATHEDRAL
and in those towers: Rilke had been struck by the contrast between the spireless towers of so many medieval French cathedrals (Chartres, Notre-Dame, Rheims, Amiens, etc.) and the spired towers of most German and Austrian ones.
THE GAZELLE
Rilke had written to his wife in June 1907 (a month before this poem was written): “Yesterday, by the way, I spent the whole morning in the Jardin des Plantes, in front of the gazelles … I saw only one of them stand up for a moment, it lay down again immediately; but I saw, while they were stretching and testing themselves, the magnificent workmanship of those limbs: (they are like guns, from which leaps are fired).”
DEATH EXPERIENCED
In memory of Countess Louise Schwerin, who had died 24 January 1906.
IN THE DRAWING-ROOM
Inspired by a visit to Chantilly.
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
all from that land: “that land” is Childhood, and the image of that of a coastline gradually sinking beneath the horizon from the gaze of a departing voyager.
ADAM and EVE
The two figures by Viollet-le-Duc on the facade of Notre-Dame.
CORRIDA
It was in 1830, as Rilke informed his wife in a letter (6 September 1907) enclosing this and another poem, that the torero Francisco Montez first practiced what afterwards became an established technique, namely, to step aside from the path of the charging bull and to dispatch the baffled animal when it returned. A portrait of Montez, “in gold and mauve-pink silk,” by Eugenio Lucas the elder (1824-70) was for many years on loan at the Kaiser Friederich Museum in Berlin, which Rilke often visited. At the time when he wrote this poem he had ne
ver been in Spain or seen a bull-fight (corrida).
THE MOUNTAIN
Hokusai and his numerous paintings (“writing”) of the volcano Fujiyama.
REQUIEM
FOR A FRIEND
The friend was Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907), perhaps the only painter of real genius among those whom Rilke met while staying in the artists’ colony of Worpswede in 1900. Shortly after his own marriage to her friend Clara Westhoff in April 1901, Paula Becker married the good-natured but rather mediocre artist Otto Modersohn, another member of the colony. The marriage was not successful, and in February 1906 Paula, who felt that it was strangling her creative powers, left her husband and went to Paris, from where, however, her husband persuaded her to return to him at the end of the year. She died at Worpswede on 21 November 1907, shortly after giving birth to a child.
What made her fate so significant for Rilke was that it seemed to symbolize in an especially poignant and tragic fashion that opposition between the claims of art and the claims of life of which he himself was continually aware. He found the attempt to be a poet and nothing but a poet so difficult that he was sometimes tempted to abandon it for some other profession. The “help” which he begs of her at the end of the poem may be regarded as help to resist this temptation.
DUINO ELEGIES
THE FIRST ELEGY
Gaspara Stampa: an Italian poetess (1523-1554) of noble family who recorded her at first happy and then unrequited love in some two hundred sonnets.
SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
The Sonnets to Orpheus were written as a funeral monument for Wera Ocukama Knoop at the Château de Muzot, Sierre, Switzerland, 2-23 February 1922, and were published at the end of March 1923.