The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

  as though you had long known just when the floor would do that …

  And he listened and was soothed. So powerful was your presence

  as you tenderly stood by the bed; his fate,

  tall and cloaked, retreated behind the wardrobe, and his restless

  future, delayed for a while, adapted to the folds of the curtain.

  And he himself, as he lay there, relieved, with the sweetness

  of the gentle world you had made for him dissolving beneath

  his drowsy eyelids, into the foretaste of sleep—:

  he seemed protected … But inside: who could ward off,

  who could divert, the floods of origin inside him?

  Ah, there was no trace of caution in that sleeper; sleeping,

  yes but dreaming, but flushed with what fevers: how he threw himself in.

  All at once new, trembling, how he was caught up

  and entangled in the spreading tendrils of inner event

  already twined into patterns, into strangling undergrowth, prowling

  bestial shapes. How he submitted—. Loved.

  Loved his interior world, his interior wilderness,

  that primal forest inside him, where among decayed treetrunks

  his heart stood, light-green. Loved. Left it, went through

  his own roots and out, into the powerful source

  where his little birth had already been outlived. Loving,

  he waded down into more ancient blood, to ravines

  where Horror lay, still glutted with his fathers. And every

  Terror knew him, winked at him like an accomplice.

  Yes, Atrocity smiled … Seldom

  had you smiled so tenderly, mother. How could he help

  loving what smiled at him. Even before he knew you,

  he had loved it, for already while you carried him inside you, it

  was dissolved in the water that makes the embryo weightless.

  No, we don’t accomplish our love in a single year

  as the flowers do; an immemorial sap

  flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl,

  this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday appear, but

  seething multitudes; not just a single child,

  but also the fathers lying in our depths

  like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds

  of ancient mothers—; also the whole

  soundless landscape under the clouded or clear

  sky of its destiny—: all this, my dear, preceded you.

  And you yourself, how could you know

  what primordial time you stirred in your lover. What passions

  welled up inside him from departed beings. What

  women hated you there. How many dark

  sinister men you aroused in his young veins. Dead

  children reached out to touch you … Oh gently, gently,

  let him see you performing, with love, some confident daily task,—

  lead him out close to the garden, give him what outweighs

  the heaviest night ……

  Restrain him ……

  THE FOURTH ELEGY

  O trees of life, when does your winter come?

  We are not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn us

  like migratory birds’. Late, overtaken,

  we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind

  and fall to earth at some iced-over lake.

  Flowering and fading come to us both at once.

  And somewhere lions still roam and never know,

  in their majestic power, of any weakness.

  But we, while we are intent upon one object,

  already feel the pull of another. Conflict

  is second nature to us. Aren’t lovers

  always arriving at each other’s boundaries?—

  although they promised vastness, hunting, home.

  As when for some quick sketch, a wide background

  of contrast is laboriously prepared

  so that we can see more clearly: we never know

  the actual, vital contour of our own

  emotions—just what forms them from outside.

  Who has not sat, afraid, before his heart’s

  curtain? It rose: the scenery of farewell.

  Easy to recognize. The well-known garden,

  which swayed a little. Then the dancer came.

  Not him. Enough! However lightly he moves,

  he’s costumed, made up—an ordinary man

  who hurries home and walks in through the kitchen.

  I won’t endure these half-filled human masks;

  better, the puppet. It at least is full.

  I’ll put up with the stuffed skin, the wire, the face

  that is nothing but appearance. Here. I’m waiting.

  Even if the lights go out; even if someone

  tells me “That’s all”; even if emptiness

  floats toward me in a gray draft from the stage;

  even if not one of my silent ancestors

  stays seated with me, not one woman, not

  the boy with the immovable brown eye—

  I’ll sit here anyway. One can always watch.

  Am I not right? You, to whom life tasted

  so bitter after you took a sip of mine,

  the first, gritty infusion of my will,

  Father—who, as I grew up, kept on tasting

  and, troubled by the aftertaste of so

  strange a future, searched my unfocused gaze—

  you who, so often since you died, have trembled

  for my well-being, within my deepest hope,

  relinquishing that calmness which the dead

  feel as their very essence, countless realms

  of equanimity, for my scrap of life—

  tell me, am I not right? And you, dear women

  who must have loved me for my small beginning

  of love toward you, which I always turned away from

  because the space in your features grew, changed,

  even while I loved it, into cosmic space,

  where you no longer were—: am I not right

  to feel as if I must stay seated, must

  wait before the puppet stage, or, rather,

  gaze at it so intensely that at last,

  to balance my gaze, an angel has to come and

  make the stuffed skins startle into life.

  Angel and puppet: a real play, finally.

  Then what we separate by our very presence

  can come together. And only then, the whole

  cycle of transformation will arise,

  out of our own life-seasons. Above, beyond us,

  the angel plays. If no one else, the dying

  must notice how unreal, how full of pretense,

  is all that we accomplish here, where nothing

  is allowed to be itself. Oh hours of childhood,

  when behind each shape more than the past appeared

  and what streamed out before us was not the future.

  We felt our bodies growing and were at times

  impatient to be grown up, half for the sake

  of those with nothing left but their grownupness.

  Yet were, when playing by ourselves, enchanted

  with what alone endures; and we would stand there

  in the infinite, blissful space between world and toy,

  at a point which, from the earliest beginning,

  had been established for a pure event.

  Who shows a child as he really is? Who sets him

  in his constellation and puts the measuring-rod

  of distance in his hand? Who makes his death

  out of gray bread, which hardens—or leaves it there

  inside his round mouth, jagged as the core

  of a sweet apple? …… Murderers are easy

  to understand. But this: that one can contain

  death, the whole of death, even before

&n
bsp; life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart

  gently, and not refuse to go on living,

  is inexpressible.

  THE FIFTH ELEGY

  Dedicated to Frau Hertha Koenig

  But tell me, who are they, these wanderers, even more

  transient than we ourselves, who from their earliest days

  are savagely wrung out

  by a never-satisfied will (for whose sake)? Yet it wrings them,

  bends them, twists them, swings them and flings them

  and catches them again; and falling as if through oiled

  slippery air, they land

  on the threadbare carpet, worn constantly thinner

  by their perpetual leaping, this carpet that is lost

  in infinite space.

  Stuck on like a bandage, as if the suburban sky

  had wounded the earth.

  And hardly has it appeared

  when, standing there, upright, is: the large capital D

  that begins Duration … , and the always-approaching grip

  takes them again, as a joke, even the strongest

  men, and crushes them, the way King Augustus the Strong

  would crush a pewter plate.

  Ah and around this

  center: the rose of Onlooking

  blooms and unblossoms. Around this

  pestle pounding the carpet,

  this pistil, fertilized by the pollen

  of its own dust, and producing in turn

  the specious fruit of displeasure: the unconscious

  gaping faces, their thin

  surfaces glossy with boredom’s specious half-smile.

  There: the shriveled-up, wrinkled weight-lifter,

  an old man who only drums now,

  shrunk in his enormous skin, which looks as if it had once

  contained two men, and the other

  were already lying in the graveyard, while this one lived on without him,

  deaf and sometimes a little

  confused, in the widowed skin.

  And the young one over there, the man, who might be the son of a neck

  and a nun: firm and vigorously filled

  with muscles and innocence.

  Children,

  whom a grief that was still quite small

  once received as a toy, during one of its

  long convalescences.…

  You, little boy, who fall down

  a hundred times daily, with the thud

  that only unripe fruits know, from the tree of mutually

  constructed motion (which more quickly than water, in a few

  minutes, has its spring, summer, and autumn)—

  fall down hard on the grave:

  sometimes, during brief pauses, a loving look

  toward your seldom affectionate mother tries to be born

  in your expression; but it gets lost along the way,

  your body consumes it, that timid

  scarcely-attempted face … And again

  the man is clapping his hands for your leap, and before

  a pain can become more distinct near your constantly racing

  heart, the stinging in your soles rushes ahead of

  that other pain, chasing a pair

  of physical tears quickly into your eyes.

  And nevertheless, blindly,

  the smile ……

  Oh gather it, Angel, that small-flowered herb of healing.

  Create a vase and preserve it. Set it among those joys

  not yet open to us; on that lovely urn

  praise it with the ornately flowing inscription:

  “Subrisio Saltat.”

  And you then, my lovely darling,

  you whom the most tempting joys

  have mutely leapt over. Perhaps

  your fringes are happy for you—,

  or perhaps the green

  metallic silk stretched over your firm young breasts

  feels itself endlessly indulged and in need of nothing.

  You

  display-fruit of equanimity,

  set out in front of the public, in continual variations

  on all the swaying scales of equipoise,

  lifted among the shoulders.

  Oh where is the place—I carry it in my heart—,

  where they still were far from mastery, still fell apart

  from each other, like mating cattle that someone

  has badly paired;—

  where the weights are still heavy; where

  from their vainly twirling sticks

  the plates still wobble

  and drop ……

  And suddenly in this laborious nowhere, suddenly

  the unsayable spot where the pure Too-little is transformed

  incomprehensibly—, leaps around and changes

  into that empty Too-much;

  where the difficult calculation

  becomes numberless and resolved.

  Squares, oh square in Paris, infinite showplace

  where the milliner Madame Lamort

  twists and winds the restless paths of the earth,

  those endless ribbons, and, from them, designs

  new bows, frills, flowers, ruffles, artificial fruits—, all

  falsely colored,—for the cheap

  winter bonnets of Fate.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  Angel!: If there were a place that we didn’t know of, and there,

  on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed

  what they never could bring to mastery here—the bold

  exploits of their high-flying hearts,

  their towers of pleasure, their ladders

  that have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaning

  just on each other, trembling,—and could master all this,

  before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead:

  Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up,

  forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid

  coins of happiness before the at last

  genuinely smiling pair on the gratified

  carpet?

  THE SIXTH ELEGY

  Fig-tree, for such a long time I have found meaning

  in the way you almost completely omit your blossoms

  and urge your pure mystery, unproclaimed,

  into the early ripening fruit.

  Like the curved pipe of a fountain, your arching boughs drive the sap

  downward and up again: and almost without awakening

  it bursts out of sleep, into its sweetest achievement.

  Like the god stepping into the swan.

  …… But we still linger, alas,

  we, whose pride is in blossoming; we enter the overdue

  interior of our final fruit and are already betrayed.

  In only a few does the urge to action rise up

  so powerfully that they stop, glowing in their heart’s abundance,

  while, like the soft night air, the temptation to blossom

  touches their tender mouths, touches their eyelids, softly:

  heroes perhaps, and those chosen to disappear early,

  whose veins Death the gardener twists into a different pattern.

  These plunge on ahead: in advance of their own smile

  like the team of galloping horses before the triumphant

  pharaoh in the mildly hollowed reliefs at Karnak.

  The hero is strangely close to those who died young. Permanence

  does not concern him. He lives in continual ascent,

  moving on into the ever-changed constellation

  of perpetual danger. Few could find him there. But

  Fate, which is silent about us, suddenly grows inspired

  and sings him into the storm of his onrushing world.

  I hear no one like him. All at once I am pierced

  by his darkened voice, carried on the streaming air.

  Then how gladly I
would hide from the longing to be once again

  oh a boy once again, with my life before me, to sit

  leaning on future arms and reading of Samson,

  how from his mother first nothing, then everything, was born.

  Wasn’t he a hero inside you, mother? didn’t

  his imperious choosing already begin there, in you?

  Thousands seethed in your womb, wanting to be him,

  but look: he grasped and excluded—, chose and prevailed.

  And if he demolished pillars, it was when he burst

  from the world of your body into the narrower world, where again

  he chose and prevailed. O mothers of heroes, O sources

  of ravaging floods! You ravines into which

  virgins have plunged, lamenting,

  from the highest rim of the heart, sacrifices to the son.

  For whenever the hero stormed through the stations of love,

  each heartbeat intended for him lifted him up, beyond it;

  and, turning away, he stood there, at the end of all smiles,—transfigured.

  THE SEVENTH ELEGY

  Not wooing, no longer shall wooing, voice that has outgrown it,

  be the nature of your cry; but instead, you would cry out as purely as a bird

  when the quickly ascending season lifts him up, nearly forgetting

  that he is a suffering creature and not just a single heart

  being flung into brightness, into the intimate skies. Just like him

  you would be wooing, not any less purely—, so that, still

  unseen, she would sense you, the silent lover in whom a reply

  slowly awakens and, as she hears you, grows warm,—

  the ardent companion to your own most daring emotion.

  Oh and springtime would hold it—, everywhere it would echo

  the song of annunciation. First the small

  questioning notes intensified all around

  by the sheltering silence of a pure, affirmative day.

  Then up the stairs, up the stairway of calls, to the dreamed-of

  temple of the future—; and then the trill, like a fountain

  which, in its rising jet, already anticipates its fall

  in a game of promises.… And still ahead: summer.

  Not only all the dawns of summer—, not only

  how they change themselves into day and shine with beginning.

  Not only the days, so tender around flowers and, above,