Poems to Night, Rainer Rilke [classic book list .txt] 📗

ill-defined and always me,

of nothing but me and all I do not know,

to make the thing, Lord Lord Lord, the thing

which, world-earthly like a meteor,

gathers in its heaviness only the sum

of flight: weighs nothing but arrival.

(Ronda, January 1913)

Why must one go out and take alien things

upon oneself, rather like the porter

who lifts the market basket filled by strangers

from stall to stall, and follows on, loaded down,

and cannot enquire: Lord, why the feast?

Why must one stand there like a shepherd,

so exposed to the excess of influence,

so much part of this space full of happening,

that by leaning against a tree in a landscape

and nothing more, his destiny is fulfilled.

And yet, in his far too widening gaze, he lacks

the calm abatement of the flock. He has

only the world, world in every glance uplifted,

in every inclining world. In him penetrates what

involuntarily belongs to others, inhospitable like music

and blind in his blood, transforming, passes.

There in the night he rises, and already from outside

has the bird call inside his being

and feels inspirited, because he gathers all the stars

into his vision, heavy – O not like someone

who makes a gift of this night to a beloved,

and regales her with the deeply felt heavens.

(Ronda, January 1913)

But for myself, when I find myself back in the cities’

tangled barbs of turmoil and the flurry

of vehicles around me, solitary,

but for myself, through this impenetrable commotion

I recall the sky and the earthy feet of the mountains,

the homebound herd entered.

Let me feel of stone,

and let the shepherd’s day labour seem possible,

how he roams there, ever browner, and with well-judged stone

gathers his flock where it has frayed.

With slow step, not light, his body ruminative,

but when stood, his wonderful bearing. Even now a God

could furtively enter that figure and be no less.

Now he lingers, now moves on, as the day

and shadows of clouds

pass through him, as though the space were slowly

thinking thoughts for him.

Let him be what you will, like the quivering night light

in the mantle of the lamp I place myself inside him.

A glow becomes steady. More pure

might Death find its passage.

(Ronda, January 1913)

Straining so hard against the powerful night

they cast their voices into laughter,

that badly burns. O world in revolt,

so replete with refusal. And yet breathe space,

where the stars drift. Look, all of this has no need

and could surrender to the distance,

move away into the beyond, far from us.

Now, it returns and touches our faces with a look

like the glance of the beloved; it unfurls

before us and perhaps scatters in us

its existence. And we are not worthy.

Perhaps the angels lose some strength,

when after us the starry firmament yields

and hangs here within our mournful fate.

Futility. For who can know? And where

one might become aware: who yet wills

to rest his brow against the nocturnal space

as upon his own window? Who has not renounced this?

Who has not dragged into his primordial element

fakery, falsified, counterfeit nights?

We have abandoned our gods for mouldering waste,

for gods do not beguile. They have being

and nothing but being, abundance of being,

but not a scent, not a sign. Nothing is so mute

as a god’s mouth. Sublime as a swan

on its eternity of fathomless surface:

so goes the god, and dives, safeguards his whiteness.

Everything seduces. Even the little bird

coerces us from within his pure foliage,

the flower lacks space and forces a way to us;

what does the wind not crave? Only the god,

like a column, permits passage, distributing

on high where he bears on each side

the light arch of his equanimity.

(Paris, February 1914)

Overflowing skies of squandered stars

splendour over grievance. Rather than into pillows,

weep upwards. Here, at the weeping,

at the ending face,

proliferating, begins

the enraptured world space. Who will interrupt,

if you thrust that way,

the flow? No one. Unless

you suddenly wrestle with the epic course

of those stars approaching you. Breathe.

Breathe the darkness of the earth, and again

look up! Again. Light and faceless,

the depth leans in on you from on high. In contained night

the dispersed face grants yours space.

(Paris, April 1913)

Where I once was, or am: there you are treading

over me, you infinite darkness out of light.

And the sublime that you prepare in space,

I draw, unknowable, to my fugitive face.

O Night, take note, the way I regard you,

how my being attempts to go back, give way,

that it dares to launch itself close to you;

can I conceive, that the twice-taken brow

extends over the same streams of upward glance?

Be this nature, be only one,

the one bolder nature: this life and

that star I lament unawares:

so will I apply myself, composed like stones

in the purest figure.

(Paris, autumn 1913)

Thoughts of night, raised from intuited experience,

that already passed into the questioning child with silence,

slowly I raise you towards my thought – and up, up,

the powerful proof gently receives you.

That you are gains affirmation; here, in the crowded vessel,

night, added to nights, secretly procreates.

Suddenly: with what feeling stands the infinite, the older,

over the sister within me, that, inclined, I shelter.

(Paris, December 1914)

Often I gazed at you in wonder. I stood at the window begun yesterday,

stood and marvelled at you. Yet the new city

was denied me and the unpersuaded landscape

darkened, as though I were nothing. Nor did things close by

venture to be understood. The street thrust upwards

at the lamp post: I could see it was an alien thing.

Over there a room, sympathetic, clear in the lamplight –

I was already a part; this they sensed, closed the shutters.

Remained there. Then a child cried. I knew the mothers

in the houses around, of what they are capable – and I knew

at once the inconsolable argument behind all weeping.

Or a voice sang out and reached a little beyond

expectation, or down below an old man

who coughed full of reproach, as if his body

were in the right and the gentler world in error. Then the hour struck,

but I counted too late, it fell past me.

Like a boy, a stranger, at last deemed worthy to join in

yet drops the ball and knows none of the games

in which the others indulge with such ease,

stands there, looks away – to where?: I stood and suddenly

became aware, you approached me, played with me, I understood,

grown-up night, and I gazed at you enraptured.