Rainer Maria Rilke - Blog Posts

You who never arrived

Rainer Maria Rilke

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

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 landscape,

cities, towers, and bridges, and un- suspected 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…

Du im Voraus

Du im Voraus

verlorne Geliebte, Nimmergekommene,

nicht weiß ich, welche Töne dir lieb sind.

Nicht mehr versuch ich, dich, wenn das Kommende wogt,

zu erkennen. Alle die großen

Bildern in mir, im Fernen erfahrene Landschaft,

Städte und Türme und Brücken und un-

vermutete Wendung der Wege

und das Gewaltige jener von Göttern

einst durchwachsenen Länder:

steigt zur Bedeutung in mir

deiner, Entgehende, an.

Ach, die Gärten bist du,

ach, ich sah sie mit solcher

Hoffnung. Ein offenes Fenster

im Landhaus—, und du tratest beinahe

mir nachdenklich heran. Gassen fand ich,—

du warst sie gerade gegangen,

und die spiegel manchmal der Läden der Händler

waren noch schwindlich von dir und gaben erschrocken

mein zu plötzliches Bild.—Wer weiß, ob derselbe

Vogel nicht hinklang durch uns

gestern, einzeln, im Abend?

꧁࿇♡ೃ⁀➷・❥・♡࿇꧂

"We live so quietly, and our greatest catastrophes happen deep within us, that only distant waves appear on our surface."

-Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke, "You who never arrived." The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell)

But I am afraid; I have a nameless fear of that transformation. I have not yet grown accustomed to this world, which seems a goodly one. Why should I move on to another one? I should dearly like to remain among the meanings I have grown fond of, and if something really does have to change, I should at least like to be able to live among dogs […]

from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

Oh, what a happy fate, to sit in the silent room of an ancestral house among the quiet things in their abiding places, and to hear the tits sounding their first notes outside in the green and sun-shot garden, and away in the distance the village clock. To sit and gaze upon a warm strip of afternoon sunlight and to know a great deal about girls from the past and to be a poet. And to think that I too might have become such a poet if I had been able to live somewhere, anywhere on earth, in one of the many closed-up country houses that no one looks after. I would have required only one room (the sunny room under the gables). There I would have lived with my old things, my family portraits, my books. And I would have had an armchair and flowers and dogs and a stout stick for the stony paths. And nothing else. Nothing but a book bound in yellowish, ivory-coloured leather with old-style floral endpapers: in this I would have written.

from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke

DAUGHTER OF LIFE, KNOW YOUR DEATH :

it was not I who loved, yet it was another world I wished for that did. may this rain and day be forever, for tonight only ends in blood and tears of my lost life and brother.

by @to-lamb-to-slaughter (source of image unknown) / rainer maria rilke, translation by c. f. macintyre, from duino elegies; “the second elegy,” / by @to-lamb-to-slaughter (source of image unknown) / medea by euripides

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet