Loneliness (Einsamkeit)
Being apart and lonely is like rain.
It climbs toward evening from the ocean plains;
from flat places, rolling and remote, it climbs
to heaven, which is its old abode.
And only when leaving heaven drops upon the city.
It rains down on us in those twittering
hours when the streets turn their faces to the dawn,
and when two bodies who have found nothing,
disappointed and depressed, roll over;
and when two people who despise each other
have to sleep together in one bed -
that is when loneliness receives the rivers...
poem by Rainer Maria Rilke from Das Buch der Bilder (21 September 1902), translated by Robert Bly
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In The Beginning
Ever since those wondrous days of Creation
our Lord God sleeps: we are His sleep.
And He accepted this in His indulgence,
resigned to rest among the distant stars.
Our actions stopped Him from reacting,
for His fist-tight hand is numbed by sleep,
and the times brought in the age of heroes
during which our dark hearts plundered Him.
Sometimes He appears as if tormented,
and His body jerks as if plagued by pain;
but these spells are always outweighed by the
number of His countless other worlds.
Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming
poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
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Sacrifice
How my body blooms from every vein
more fragrantly, since you appeard to me;
look, I walk slimmer now and straighter,
and all you do is wait-:who are you then?
Look: I feel how I'm moving away,
how I'm shedding my old life, leaf by leaf.
Only your smile spreads like sheer stars
over you and, soon now, over me.
Whatever shines through my childhood years
still nameless and gleaming like water,
I will name after you at the altar,
which is blazing brightly from your hair
and braided gently with your breasts.
Translated by Edward Snow
poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
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Piano Practice
The summer hums. The afternoon fatigues;
she breathed her crisp white dress distractedly
and put into it that sharply etched etude
her impatience for a reality
that could come: tomorrow, this evening--,
that perhaps was there, was just kept hidden;
and at the window, tall and having everything,
she suddenly could feel the pampered park.
With that she broke off; gazed outside, locked
her hands together; wished for a long book--
and in a burst of anger shoved back
the jasmine scent. She found it sickened her.
Translated by Edward Snow
poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
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Eve
Simply she stands at the cathedral’s
great ascent, close to the rose window,
with the apple in the apple-pose,
guiltless-guilty once and for all
of the growing she gave birth to
since form the circle of eternities
loving she went forth, top struggle through
her way throughout the earth like a young year.
Ah, gladly yet a little in that land
Would she have lingered, heeding the harmony
And understanding of the animals.
But since she found the man determined,
She went with him, aspiring after death,
And she had as yet hardly known God.
poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
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Entry (Eingang)
Whoever you may be:
Leave well before the night
your room where but familars you see;
last leave your home, which bars the far from sight
whoever you may be.
Then use your eyes that, weak, can barely free
themselves from looking down your worn-off sill -
and raise, extremely slowly, an endarkened tree
all up the sky: alone and slim and still.
And you have made a world. And it is grand
and like a word that may in silence grow.
And as your will its mind shall understand,
your eyes, with slow caress, shall let it go...
poem by Rainer Maria Rilke (24 February 1900), translated by Walter Aue
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Parting
How I have felt that thing that's called 'to part',
and feel it still: a dark, invincible,
cruel something by which what was joined so well
is once more shown, held out, and torn apart.
In what defenceless gaze at that I've stood,
which, as it, calling to me, let me go,
stayed there, as though it were all womanhood,
yet small and white and nothing more than, oh,
waving, now already unrelated
to me, a sight, continuing wave,--scarce now
explainable: perhaps a plum-tree bough
some perchinig cuckoo's hastily vacated.
Translated by J.B. Leishman
poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
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I Am, O Anxious One
I am, O 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 round 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.
poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
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The Song Of The Beggar
I am always going from door to door,
whether in rain or heat,
and sometimes I will lay my right ear in
the palm of my right hand.
And as I speak my voice seems strange as if
it were alien to me,
for I'm not certain whose voice is crying:
mine or someone else's.
I cry for a pittance to sustain me.
The poets cry for more.
In the end I conceal my entire face
and cover both my eyes;
there it lies in my hands with all its weight
and looks as if at rest,
so no one may think I had no place where-
upon to lay my head.
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poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
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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
an 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,
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poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
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