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

Where the towers

raged and, with fate averted, a city loomed over me

and before me were ranged unknowable mountains

and in the narrowing circle of hungering strangeness

welled the random flickering of my feelings – :

there it was, higher one,

no shame for you, that you know me. Your breath

passed over me, across widening solemn expanses

your smile entered into me.

(Paris, January 1914)

I want to hold out. Act. Go over

as far as you are able. Have you not composed

the faces of shepherds, more greatly even than

in the wombs of princesses, the future’s influence and boldness

formed the princely expression of countless kings?

When figureheads in the surprised wood of the frozen carving

assume their traits in the maritime space where

they forge on in silence:

O, how could a sentient being, who wills, who tears himself open,

unyielding night, in the end not resemble you.

(Paris, January 1914)

Ah, from an angel’s touch falls

into the sea a beam upon a moon,

my heart within, silently striving coral,

dwells there in its youthful branches.

Distress, inflicted on me by an unknown

perpetrator, remains clouded to me,

the current wavers, the current presses on,

depths function and obstructions.

Out of the rigid insentient ancients

the creatures turn, the suddenly elect,

and the eternal silence of all beings

precipitates a tumult of happening.

(Paris, February 1914)

Is pain – as soon as the ploughshare,

labouring, naturally reaches a new layer –

is pain not good? And what can it mean, the last

interrupting us in the depths of such affliction?

How much is still to be borne: when was the time

to achieve that other, lighter feeling?

And yet I know, better than most,

once resurrected, salvation.

(Paris, autumn 1913)

You who super-elevates me with this:

Night, – is it not, that you are granting me

the boundless, more due feeling

than I can sense? Alas, from here

the heavens are powerful, thronged with lions,

who to us remain inscrutable.

No, you cannot know them, for they are timid

and only approach with diffidence.

(Paris, autumn 1913)

Lifting one’s eyes from the book, from the close and countable lines,

to the consummate night outside:

O how the compressed feelings scatter like stars,

as if a posy of blooms were untied:

Youth of the lighter, inclined swaying of the heavy

and the tenderest of the quieter bow –.

Everywhere craving for connection and nowhere desire,

world too much and earth enough.

(Paris, February 1914)

POEMS TO NIGHT: DRAFTS

Isn’t there a smile? See, what is there

in fields that overflowed from abundance,

is what we bring to a modest blossoming

when we strive in our countenance?

Nocturnal music score never finished:

that reaches your limits, where is the margin?

Where is the voice that has your higher tones?

And in which man is the bass of your abyss?

Is it not granted us, until there

to propagate pure excitation of being,

where grows a superabundance of soul

blissfully happy at disclosed distances?

There it flowed after fall and resistance

of the running, relishing the opened,

in silent arms, the flow diverging

the broad becoming, the worshipper.

(O half of all worlds, unrecognized,

closing over my unrecognized gaze.)

(Paris, November 1913)

Turned upwards to the nourishing one,

I resolved myself to healing night,

my senses have flowed out from me

and the heart propagates namelessly.

(Paris, end of 1913)

Why does the day persuade us,

that here we succumb to privation,

when those powerful nights bow

from creation’s worldly harvest?

(Paris, end of 1913)

(To the Angel)

Don’t wait for my choice, demand,

you can do it, for you don’t require it.

As you throw yourself, soughing,

Impenetrable one, against my gait?

My want was still inclined

to avoid your surge.

But who vouches, in which dykes

when the world sea rises to the sky.

(Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)

How did I hold out this face, that its feeling

rough spaces of strangeness worked through;

there even the poor, delicately peeling birch

might move cities here from the hill.

(Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)

When I feed on your face this way

like the tear on the weeping one,

my brow, my mouth multiply

around the traits, I know of you

(I mean around those similarities

that separate us, because they are double

to broaden out a pure equivalence.)

(Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)

Only now, at the nocturnal hour, am I without fear

and may stand in blossoming gaze,

because you are responsible for your infinite happenings

laying claim to my inadequate face.

Now the resemblance emerges from it

(Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)

FURTHER POEMS AND SKETCHES AROUND THE THEME OF NIGHT

Now the red barberries are already ripening,

ageing asters breathe weakly in the beds.

Who is not rich now that summer is fading

will forever wait and never know self-possession.

Who cannot close his eyes now,

persuaded that an abundance of faces

is only waiting within him till night begins

to rise up in his darkness: –

he has passed away like an old man.

There is nothing left, no day’s coming,

and everything that happens lies to him;

you too, my God. And like a stone you are,

daily drawing him down into the deep.

(From Das Buch der Pilgerschaft [The Book of Pilgrimage], 1901)

From a Stormy Night

(Title page)

The night, urged by swelling storms,

how wide it suddenly became –,

there laid out together it remains

in the tiniest creases of time.

Where the stars counter, here it does not end

and does not begin deep in a forest

and not at my countenance

and not with your form.

The lamps falter and do not know:

do we feign light?

Is night the sole reality

of a thousand years…

(From The Book of Images, 1906; Berlin-Schmargendorf, January 1901)

Night of the Spring Equinox

A net of swift shadow mesh drags above

garden paths made of moon,

as if something captive were stirring there,

the far distant drew together.

Captive fragrance reluctantly lingers.

Yet all of a sudden it is as if a wave

were tearing the net at a luminescent place,

and all flows there, takes flight, drifts…

Once more breathes the vast night wind

we have long known, in bare trees

standing above, sharp and diamond-like,

in the deep, solemn spaces between

the great stars of a spring night.

(Capri, March 1907)

Stars Behind Olives

Beloved, so much leaves you senseless,

you lean backwards into the pure leafage,

you see the places, are the stars. I believe

the earth is no different to the night.

Behold, as in self-forgetting branches

the next mingles with the nameless;

we are shown this; they do not treat us as guests,

one only takes, amused and refreshed.

However much we have suffered these paths,

we have not worn out the garden,

and hours, greater