All articles filed in Rainer Maria Rilke

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?…

The Wait It is life in slow motion, It’s the heart in reverse, It’s a hope-and-a-half: too much and too little at once. It’s a train that suddenly stops with no station around, and we can hear the cricket, and, leaning out the carriage door, we vainly contemplate a wind we feel that stirs the…

    These laborers of rain, these heavy clouds, see how evening takes them on celestial vacations; a delirium of uselessness has gripped them, and their vacationing edges dare transparencies. They nonchalantly imitate mountains and islands and propose luminous caps to the shipwrecks of sight. And later, in front of the moon, how many of…

From SONNETS TO ORPHEUS Translated by J. B. Leishman Breathing, invisible poem! That great world-space, at each inhalation exchanged for this human existence. Counter-weight of my rhythmical realization. Single wavelet, whose slowly gathering sea am I; you, of all possible seas most frugal and lowly,- space laid-by. Of all these places in space, how many…