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

than we had requested,

feel towards us, lean in on us.

(Capri 1907/Paris 1908)

Nocturnal Walk

Nothing is comparable. For what is not

wholly alone with itself, what can we declare;

we name nothing, we can only endure

and come to understand that here is a gleam,

and there a glance has brushed against us

as if just that which dwelled there

were our life. He who opts for resistance

will not receive world. And whoever knows too much

the eternal will slip away from. Sometimes

on such great nights we are as if

out of danger, shared out in equitably lit

parts of the stars. How they cluster.

(Capri, April 1908)

Urban Summer Night

Greyer grows the evening below,

and that is already night,

hung there like warm rags

about the street lamps.

But higher, suddenly imprecise,

has the light bare firewall

of a rear building thrust upwards,

on a night which has full moon

and nothing but moon.

And then a space glides up, spreading

wider, secure and spared,

and the windows on that side

stand white and uninhabited.

(Paris, 1908 or 1909)

Moonlit Night

Path in the garden, deep as a long drink,

quietly in the soft branch an escaping momentum.

Oh and the moon, the moon,

the benches are almost blooming

with her hesitant approach.

Silence, how it presses.

Are you awake now?

Starry and sensing the window facing you.

The wind’s hands lay over your nearing face

far-flung night.

(Paris, July 1911)

Like the evening wind

      through shouldered scythes of the reapers

softly goes the angel

      through the guiltless blade of suffering.

Keeps long hours

      at the side of the dark rider,

steers the same course

      as the feelings without name.

Standing as a tower by the sea,

      minded to last forever;

He is what you feel,

      supple at the deepest point of hardness,

that in the rock of woe

      the crowded druse of tears,

for so long water-pure,

      resolved into amethysts.

(Paris, winter 1913/14)

At night I wish to converse with the angel,

ask if he recognizes my eyes.

When he suddenly enquires: Can you see Eden?

Then I must say: Eden is on fire

I will lift my mouth to him,

hard as one who lacks desire.

And if the angel says: Do you know life?

Then I must say: Life devours

If he finds that joy within me

that becomes eternal in his spirit, –

and he takes it, raises it in his hands,

then I must say: joy is madness

(Irschenhausen, September 1914)

Night Sky and Falling Star

The sky, vast, full of joyous retention,

a provisional space, an excess of world.

And we, too far away for the formation,

too near to turn away the future.

There a star falls! And our desire to see it,

with a confused look, ardently conjoined:

What has begun, and what has elapsed?

What is guilty? And what forgiven?

(Muzot, August 1924)

Love the angel is space.

Cosmic space is like granting

loving angel, replete

with the starry gift.

We, in the struggling nights,

we fall from closeness to closeness;

and where the beloved thaws

we are a plunging stone.

But even here where we never

find each other, there are spaces of the angel.

Feel: at a divine double pace

blessedly they transform themselves.

(Muzot, 1922)

From the Periphery: Night

Stars of the night, I have awoken,

do they only overleap today, my face,

or at in the same moment the whole face of my years,

these bridges, resting on columns of light?

Who cares to walk there? For whom am I abyss and stream bed,

that he leads me in the widest circle –,

bounds over me and takes me like a bishop on a chessboard

and contends his victory?

(Muzot, September 1924)

Strong star, without need of support,

the night might concede to the others

which must first darken so that they brighten.

Star, which, already perfected, submerges,

when stars begin their passage

through the tentatively opening night.

Great star of the priestesses of love,

which, inflamed by a feeling,

transfigured to the last and burning up,

sinks down, where the sun sank:

a thousand times outdistancing

with its pure downfall.

(Muzot, January 1924)

What reaches us with the starlight,

what reaches us,

take the world in your countenance,

but do not take it lightly.

Show the night that you silently received

what she brought.

It is only when you merge into her

that the night knows you.

(Muzot, August 1924)

Earlier, how often, we stayed, star in star

when from the freest constellation

that speech-star detached from the rest and called.

Star in star we marvelled,

He, speaker of the constellation,

I, mouth of my life,

ancillary star to my eye.

And the night, how she granted us

the wakeful rapprochement.

(Val-Mont, February 1926)

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was born in December 1875 in Prague. In 1886 his parents had the child enrolled in the St Pölten military academy, which caused the shy, introspective only child great anxiety. In 1890 he graduated from St Pölten and entered the military secondary school of Mährisch Weisskirchen. In 1894 he published his first collection of poems, Leben und Lieder (Life and Songs). In the autumn of 1895 Rilke enrolled to study art history, literature and philosophy at the Charles University in Prague. From this point on he was determined to pursue a literary career. At the turn of 1895–96, the twenty-year-old published his second collection, Larenopfer (Offerings to the Lares), while a third collection, Traumgekrönt (Dream-Crowned), followed in 1896. Rilke left Prague for the University of Munich, switching his studies to political science, law and Darwinian theory. From 1897 Rilke resided in Berlin Wilmersdorf, but began to succumb to a lifelong compulsion for travel. In 1898, after a springtime of Italian journeys and the seminal reading of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, Rilke encountered Bremen, Hamburg and, crucially, the artists’ colony of Worpswede in northern Germany for the first time. He wrote the Florenzer Tagebuch (Florence Diaries), Schmargendorfer Tagebuch (Schmargendorf Diaries) and Notizen zur Melodie der Dinge (Notes on the Melody of Things). In the spring of 1899, Rilke made an artistically and spiritually ground-breaking journey to Russia with Lou Andreas Salomé, and in 1900 returned for a longer sojourn from May until August. That autumn Rilke revisited Worpswede, where he renewed his friendship with the painter Paula Becker, amongst others, and her friend Clara Westhoff, a former pupil of Rodin, whom he married the following year. In 1902 Rilke set his sights on Paris, with the idea of writing a monograph on Rodin. That same year The Book of Images was published. The next