The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

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Authors: Rainer Maria Rilke
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Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice
    surging forth with all my earthly feelings?
    They yearn so high that they have sprouted wings
    and whitely fly in circles around your face.
    My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
    and stands alone before you: can’t you see?
    Don’t you know that my prayer is growing ripe
    upon your vision, as upon a tree?
    If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
    But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
    and I grow strong with all magnificence
    and turn myself into a star’s vast silence
    above the strange and distant city, Time.
[I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all]
    I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all
    my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;
    as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small
    and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.
    The wondrous game that power plays with Things
    is to move in such submission through the world:
    groping in roots and growing thick in trunks
    and in treetops like a rising from the dead.

FROM
THE BOOK OF PICTURES
    (1902; 1906)
Notes
LAMENT
    Everything is far
    and long gone by.
    I think that the star
    glittering above me
    has been dead for a million years.
    I think there were tears
    in the car I heard pass
    and something terrible was said.
    A clock has stopped striking in the house
    across the road …
    When did it start? …
    I would like to step out of my heart
    and go walking beneath the enormous sky.
    I would like to pray.
    And surely of all the stars that perished
    long ago,
    one still exists.
    I think that I know
    which one it is—
    which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
    stands like a white city …
AUTUMN DAY
    Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
    Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,
    and on the meadows let the wind go free.
    Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;
    grant them a few more warm transparent days,
    urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
    the final sweetness into the heavy wine.
    Whoever has no house now, will never have one.
    Whoever is alone will stay alone,
    will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,
    and wander on the boulevards, up and down,
    restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.
EVENING
    The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
    held for it by a row of ancient trees;
    you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
    one journeying to heaven, one that falls;
    and leave you, not at home in either one,
    not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
    not calling to eternity with the passion
    of what becomes a star each night, and rises;
    and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
    your life, with its immensity and fear,
    so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
    it is alternately stone in you and star.
THE BLINDMAN’S SONG
    I am blind, you outsiders. It is a curse,
    a contradiction, a tiresome farce,
    and every day I despair.
    I put my hand on the arm of my wife
    (colorless hand on colorless sleeve)
    and she walks me through empty air.
    You push and shove and think that you’ve been
    sounding different from stone against stone,
    but you are mistaken: I alone
    live and suffer and howl.
    In me there is an endless outcry
    and I can’t tell what’s crying, whether it’s my
    broken heart or my bowels.
    Are the tunes familiar? You don’t sing them like this:
    how could you understand?
    Each morning the sunlight comes into your house,
    and you welcome it as a friend.
    And you know what it’s like to see face-to-face;
    and that tempts you to be kind.
THE DRUNKARD’S SONG
    It wasn’t in me. It went out and in.
    I wanted to hold it. It held, with Wine.
    (I no longer know what it was.)
    Then Wine held this and held that for me
    till I came to depend on him totally.
    Like an ass.
    Now I’m playing his game and he deals me out
    with a sneer on his lips, and maybe tonight
    he will lose me to Death, that boor.
    When
he
wins me, filthiest card in the deck,
    he’ll take me and scratch the scabs on his neck,
    then toss me into the mire.
THE IDIOT’S SONG
    They’re

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