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Love Song
How should I keep my soul
from touching yours? How shall I
lift it up beyond you to other things?
Ah, I would gladly hide it
in darkness with something lost
in some silent foreign place
that doesn’t tremble when your deeps stir.
Yet whatever touches you and me
blends us together the way a bow’s stroke
draws one voice from two strings.
Across what instrument are we stretched taut?
And what player holds us in his hand?
O sweet song.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, in New Poems, trans. Edward Snow
Sorry to bother… I wonder if you could recommend me a book of poems, by an author you enjoy. I think you’re a good person to ask it. These past days I’ve been feeling as if my soul is sick, so I’m looking for something to read, something to remember how much I like poetry … a book, yes, or a collection, because I believe that only one poem would not be enough. Sorry for the bad English, it is not my mother language.
For Hans Carossa
Losing is also ours; and even forgetting
has its shape in the permanent realm of change.
Things we’ve let go of circle; and though we’re rarely at the center
of these circles: they trace around us the unbroken figure.
— Rainer Maria Rilke (Muzot, February 7, 1924), in Uncollected Poems, trans. Edward Snow
The Rose Interior
Where is there an outside
for this inside? On what pain
is linen like this placed?
What skies find themselves reflected
in the inland lake
of these open roses,
these blissfully unworried ones:
see how neglectfully in all this looseness
they relax, as if no trembling hand
could ever spill them.
They scarcely can contain
themselves; many let themselves
fill up with inner space
until they overflow and stream
into the days, which keep on
closing more and more completely,
until all of summer becomes
a room, a room within a dream.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, in New Poems, translated by E. Snow
Moving Forward
The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
Into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
And in the ponds broken off from the sky
My feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly
We drive and are driven.
But time’s stride—
think of it lost
in the ever remaining.
All that’s hurrying
will quickly be past;
only what lingers
grants us credence.
Boys, don’t fling your courage
into the thrills of speed
or attempts at flight.
All that is is at rest—
darkness and the morning light,
flower and book.
To come through it: to have joyfully
survived even the happiness—quietly, completely.
First the testings were mute, then verbal.
Who could look back unamazed?
No one has been able, since life lasts
because no one could.—But the infinite
attempts! The new greenness of birch trees
is not so new as what befalls us.
A wood dove coos. And again what you suffered
seems, ah, as if yet unlived-through.
The bird keeps calling. You are in the middle
of the call. Awake and weakened.
