Read Online The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Rainer Maria Rilke
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not in my way. They let me be.
They say that nothing can happen to me.
How good.
Nothing can happen. All things flow
from the Holy Ghost, and they come and go
around that particular Ghost (you know)—,
how good.
No we really mustn’t imagine there is
any danger in any of this.
Of course, there’s blood.
Blood is the hardest. Hard as stone.
Sometimes I think that I can’t go on—.
(How good.)
Oh look at that beautiful ball over there:
red and round as an Everywhere.
Good that you made it be.
If I call, will it come to me?
How very strange the world can appear,
blending and breaking, far and near:
friendly, a little bit unclear.
How good.
THE DWARF’S SONG
My soul itself may be straight and good;
ah, but my heart, my bent-over blood,
all the distortions that hurt me inside—
it buckles under these things.
It has no garden, it has no sun,
it hangs on my twisted skeleton
and, terrified, flaps its wings.
Nor are my hands of much use. Look here:
see how shrunken and shapeless they are:
clumsily hopping, clammy and fat,
like toads after the rain.
And everything else about me is torn,
sad and weather-beaten and worn;
why did God ever hesitate
to flush it all down the drain?
Is it because he’s angry at me
for my face with its moping lips?
It was so often ready to be
light and clear in its depths;
but nothing came so close to it
as big dogs did.
And dogs don’t have what I need.
FROM
NEW POEMS
(1907; 1908)
Notes
THE PANTHER
In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
THE GAZELLE
Gazella Dorcas
Enchanted thing: how can two chosen words
ever attain the harmony of pure rhyme
that pulses through you as your body stirs?
Out of your forehead branch and lyre climb,
and all your features pass in simile, through
the songs of love whose words, as light as rose-
petals, rest on the face of someone who
has put his book away and shut his eyes:
to see you: tensed, as if each leg were a gun
loaded with leaps, but not fired while your neck
holds your head still, listening: as when,
while swimming in some isolated place,
a girl hears leaves rustle, and turns to look:
the forest pool reflected in her face.
THE SWAN
This laboring through what is still undone,
as though, legs bound, we hobbled along the way,
is like the awkward walking of the swan.
And dying—to let go, no longer feel
the solid ground we stand on every day—
is like his anxious letting himself fall
into the water, which receives him gently
and which, as though with reverence and joy,
draws back past him in streams on either side;
while, infinitely silent and aware,
in his full majesty and ever more
indifferent, he condescends to glide.
THE GROWNUP
All this stood upon her and was the world
and stood upon her with all its fear and grace
as trees stand, growing straight up, imageless
yet wholly image, like the Ark of God,
and solemn, as if imposed upon a race.
And she endured it all: bore up under
the swift-as-flight, the fleeting, the far-gone,
the inconceivably vast, the still-to-learn,
serenely as a woman carrying water
moves with a full jug. Till in the midst of play,
transfiguring and preparing for the future,
the first white veil descended, gliding softly
over her opened face, almost opaque there,
never to be lifted off again, and somehow
giving to all her, questions just one answer:
In you, who were a child once—in you.
GOING BLIND
She sat just like the others at the table.
But on
They say that nothing can happen to me.
How good.
Nothing can happen. All things flow
from the Holy Ghost, and they come and go
around that particular Ghost (you know)—,
how good.
No we really mustn’t imagine there is
any danger in any of this.
Of course, there’s blood.
Blood is the hardest. Hard as stone.
Sometimes I think that I can’t go on—.
(How good.)
Oh look at that beautiful ball over there:
red and round as an Everywhere.
Good that you made it be.
If I call, will it come to me?
How very strange the world can appear,
blending and breaking, far and near:
friendly, a little bit unclear.
How good.
THE DWARF’S SONG
My soul itself may be straight and good;
ah, but my heart, my bent-over blood,
all the distortions that hurt me inside—
it buckles under these things.
It has no garden, it has no sun,
it hangs on my twisted skeleton
and, terrified, flaps its wings.
Nor are my hands of much use. Look here:
see how shrunken and shapeless they are:
clumsily hopping, clammy and fat,
like toads after the rain.
And everything else about me is torn,
sad and weather-beaten and worn;
why did God ever hesitate
to flush it all down the drain?
Is it because he’s angry at me
for my face with its moping lips?
It was so often ready to be
light and clear in its depths;
but nothing came so close to it
as big dogs did.
And dogs don’t have what I need.
FROM
NEW POEMS
(1907; 1908)
Notes
THE PANTHER
In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris
His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.
THE GAZELLE
Gazella Dorcas
Enchanted thing: how can two chosen words
ever attain the harmony of pure rhyme
that pulses through you as your body stirs?
Out of your forehead branch and lyre climb,
and all your features pass in simile, through
the songs of love whose words, as light as rose-
petals, rest on the face of someone who
has put his book away and shut his eyes:
to see you: tensed, as if each leg were a gun
loaded with leaps, but not fired while your neck
holds your head still, listening: as when,
while swimming in some isolated place,
a girl hears leaves rustle, and turns to look:
the forest pool reflected in her face.
THE SWAN
This laboring through what is still undone,
as though, legs bound, we hobbled along the way,
is like the awkward walking of the swan.
And dying—to let go, no longer feel
the solid ground we stand on every day—
is like his anxious letting himself fall
into the water, which receives him gently
and which, as though with reverence and joy,
draws back past him in streams on either side;
while, infinitely silent and aware,
in his full majesty and ever more
indifferent, he condescends to glide.
THE GROWNUP
All this stood upon her and was the world
and stood upon her with all its fear and grace
as trees stand, growing straight up, imageless
yet wholly image, like the Ark of God,
and solemn, as if imposed upon a race.
And she endured it all: bore up under
the swift-as-flight, the fleeting, the far-gone,
the inconceivably vast, the still-to-learn,
serenely as a woman carrying water
moves with a full jug. Till in the midst of play,
transfiguring and preparing for the future,
the first white veil descended, gliding softly
over her opened face, almost opaque there,
never to be lifted off again, and somehow
giving to all her, questions just one answer:
In you, who were a child once—in you.
GOING BLIND
She sat just like the others at the table.
But on
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