Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)

Of all the poetry and prose I've read, I have found Rilke's to be some of the most heartfelt, sensual, thoughtful, and compassionate. Born in Prague, on December 4, 1875, to parents with a failing marriage, Rilke was a highly sensitive and gifted young writer. He suffered through poor health and heartache throughout most of his life, but was able to provide compassion and advice to others as well as develop his own literary talents. Below are selections of some of my favorite poems and quotes by this extraordinary individual.

Poems

  • Love's Beginning
    O smile, inaugurating smile, our smile! How one it was!
    --Breathing the scent of lime trees, hearing park-stillness,
    suddenly looking up, each in the other, wondering,
    'till we smiled.

    ...And the tree-tops, outlined against the pure, free sky, already teeming
    with future nights, had described outlines for it
    against the ecstatic future of our faces.

    .

  • Nocturnal Walk
    All's past compare! What is not utterly in self-aloneness?
    What can be expressed? We've names for nothing,
    we endure at best, and come to feel that here a gleam, maybe,
    and there a glance has traversed us in such manner
    as though within it that existed which is our life.

    For one who has resisted no world has risen. And one
    knowing too much eternity will by-pass. Overspread by these great
    nights we seem at moments long past reach of peril,
    and distributed lightly among the stars.
    Oh, how they throng!

    .

  • A Walk
    My eyes already touch the sunny hills,
    going far ahead of the road I have begun.
    So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; it has
    inner light, even from a distance -
    And changes us, even if we do not reach it,
    into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are;
    a gesture waves us on, answering
    our own wave...But what we feel is
    the wind on our faces.

    .

  • How can I keep my soul in me? So that it doesn't touch
    your soul -- How can I raise it high enough past you, to other things?
    I would like to shelter it, among remote lost objects,
    in some dark and silent place that doesn't resonate
    when your depths resound.

    Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
    takes us together like a violin's bow, which draws one
    voice out of two separate strings. Upon what instrument are we two
    spanned? And what musician holds us in his hand?
    --Oh, sweetest song....

    .

  • Give me, O Earth, for keeping,
    tears of your purest clay.
    Pour, O my being, the weeping,
    lost within you, away.

    Let the withheldness flow where that
    will receive which should.
    Nothing is bad but the nowhere,
    all that exists is good.

    .

  • Child in Red
    Sometimes she walks through the village in her little red dress
    all absorbed in restraining herself. And yet, despite herself,
    she seems to move according to the rhythm of her life to come.
    She runs a bit, hesitates, stops,
    half-turns around...
    and, all while dreaming, shakes her head for or against.

    Then she dances a few steps, that she invents and forgets,
    no doubt finding out that life moves on too fast.
    It's not so much that she steps out of the small body
    encircling her, but that she carries in herself
    frolics and ferments.

    It's this dress that she'll remember,
    later in a sweet surrender; when her whole
    life is full of risks,
    the little red dress will always seem right.

    .

  • You, who never arrived, - in my arms,
    Beloved,
    who were lost from the start,
    I don't even know what songs would please you.
    I have given up trying to recognize you in
    the surging wave of the next moment.
    All the immense images in me --
    the far-off, deeply felt landscapes,
    cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
    turns in the path, and those powerful lands
    that were once pulsing with the life of the gods --
    All rise within me to mean you -
    who forever elude me.

    You, Beloved, who are all the gardens
    I have ever gazed at, longing,
    An open window in a country house -
    and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
    Streets that I chanced upon - you had just
    walked down them and vanished.
    And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still
    dizzy with your presence, and, startled,
    gave back my too-sudden image.
    Who knows?
    -perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us,
    yesterday, separate, in the evening.

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