Category: 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?

Ah, Mutability’s spectre!
out through the simple accepter
you, like a vapour, recede.

We, though we wax but for waning,
fill none the less for remaining
powers a celestial need.
Rainer Maria Rilke
(From Sonnets To Orpheus)

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 blooming meadows, the meadows
made imaginary by this stop.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke Poems ( from Orchards)

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 there profiles will become feminine.

Around them, these depths which soon
ought to hold the numberless worlds, blanch.
And a friend who doesn’t watch herself says: Nice,
and closes herself on the unutterable.

-Rainer Maria Rilke
From French poems : translated by A.Poulin, JR

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 a one
has been within me already. Many a wind
seems like a son.

Do you know me, air, still full of my
dwelling-places?
You, the one-time smooth-skinned
rondure and leaf of my phrases.

–Rainer Maria Rilke
from Rilke Poems