The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (13 page)

Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,

your path struggles on through incomprehensible

mankind. All the more futile perhaps

for keeping to its direction,

keeping on toward the future,

toward what has been lost.

Once. You lamented? What was it? A fallen berry

of jubilation, unripe.

But now the whole tree of my jubilation

is breaking, in the storm it is breaking, my slow

tree of joy.

Loveliest in my invisible

landscape, you that made me more known

to the invisible angels.

(Papyrus Prisse. From the sayings of Ptah-hotep, manuscript from ca. 2000
B.C
.)

‘We must die because we have known them.’ Die

of their smile’s unsayable flower. Die

of their delicate hands. Die

of women.

Let the young man sing of them, praise

these death-bringers, when they move through his heart-space,

high overhead. From his blossoming breast

let him sing to them:

unattainable! Ah, how distant they are.

Over the peaks

of his feeling, they float and pour down

sweetly transfigured night into the abandoned

valley of his arms. The wind

of their rising rustles in the leaves of his body. His brooks run

sparkling into the distance.

But the grown man

shudders and is silent. The man who

has wandered pathless at night

in the mountain-range of his feelings:

is silent.

As the old sailor is silent,

and the terrors that he has endured

play inside him as though in quivering cages.

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most

intimate. From images that are full, the spirit

plunges on to others that suddenly must be filled;

there are no lakes till eternity. Here,

falling is best. To fall from the mastered emotion

into the guessed-at, and onward.

To you, O majestic poet, to you the compelling image,

O caster of spells, was a life, entire; when you uttered it

a line snapped shut like fate, there was a death

even in the mildest, and you walked straight into it; but

the god who preceded you led you out and beyond it.

O wandering spirit, most wandering of all! How snugly

the others live in their heated poems and stay,

content, in their narrow similes. Taking part. Only you

move like the moon. And underneath brightens and darkens

the nocturnal landscape, the holy, the terrified landscape,

which you feel in departures. No one

gave it away more sublimely, gave it back

more fully to the universe, without any need to hold on.

Thus for years that you no longer counted, holy, you played

with infinite joy, as though it were not inside you,

but lay, belonging to no one, all around

on the gentle lawns of the earth, where the godlike children had left it.

Ah, what the greatest have longed for: you built it, free of desire,

stone upon stone, till it stood. And when it collapsed,

even then you weren’t bewildered.

Why, after such an eternal life, do we still

mistrust the earthly? Instead of patiently learning from transience

the emotions for what future

slopes of the heart, in pure space?

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,

look: the last village of words and, higher,

(but how tiny) still one last

farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground

under your hands. Even here, though,

something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge

an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.

But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know

and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.

While, with their full awareness,

many sure-footed mountain animals pass

or linger. And the great sheltered bird flies, slowly

circling, around the peak’s pure denial.—But

without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart.…

There stands death, a bluish distillate

in a cup without a saucer. Such a strange

place to find a cup: standing on

the back of a hand. One recognizes clearly

the line along the glazed curve, where the handle

snapped. Covered with dust. And
HOPE
is written

across the side, in faded Gothic letters.

The man who was to drink out of that cup

read it aloud at breakfast, long ago.

What kind of beings are they then,

who finally must be scared away by poison?

Otherwise would they stay here? Would they keep

chewing so foolishly on their own frustration?

The hard present moment must be pulled

out of them, like a set of false teeth. Then

they mumble. They go on mumbling, mumbling.…

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

O shooting star

that fell into my eyes and through my body—:

Not to forget you. To endure.

Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:

silence of paintings. You language where all language

ends. You time

standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation

of feelings into what?—: into audible landscape.

You stranger: music. You heart-space

grown out of us. The deepest space
in
us,

which, rising above us, forces its way out,—

holy departure:

when the innermost point in us stands

outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other

side of the air:

pure,

boundless,

no longer habitable.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’

hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me

suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed

in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

    And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note

of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we ever turn to

in our need? Not angels, not humans,

and already the knowing animals are aware

that we are not really at home in

our interpreted world. Perhaps there remains for us

some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take

into our vision; there remains for us yesterday’s street

and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease

when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.

    Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space

gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for—that longed-after,

mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart

so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?

But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.

    Don’t you know
yet
? Fling the emptiness out of your arms

into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds

will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Yes—the springtimes needed you. Often a star

was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you

out of the distant past, or as you walked

under an open window, a violin

yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.

But could you accomplish it? Weren’t you always

distracted by expectation, as if every event

announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place

to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you

going and coming and often staying all night.)

But when you feel longing, sing of women in love;

for their famous passion is still not immortal. Sing

of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)

who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.

Begin again and again the never-attainable praising;

remember: the hero lives on; even his downfall was

merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.

But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back

into herself, as if there were not enough strength

to create them a second time. Have you imagined

Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl

deserted by her beloved might be inspired

by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love

and might say to herself, “Perhaps I can be like her”?

Shouldn’t this most ancient of sufferings finally grow

more fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that we lovingly

freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured:

as the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension, so that

gathered in the snap of release it can be more than

itself. For there is no place where we can remain.

Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only

saints have listened: until the gigantic call lifted them

off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly,

kneeling and didn’t notice at all:

so complete was their listening. Not that you could endure

God’s
voice—far from it. But listen to the voice of the wind

and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.

It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young.

Didn’t their fate, whenever you stepped into a church

in Naples or Rome, quietly come to address you?

Or high up, some eulogy entrusted you with a mission,

as, last year, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa.

What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance

of injustice about their death—which at times

slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward.

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,

to give up customs one barely had time to learn,

not to see roses and other promising Things

in terms of a human future; no longer to be

what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave

even one’s own first name behind, forgetting it

as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.

Strange to no longer desire one’s desires. Strange

to see meanings that clung together once, floating away

in every direction. And being dead is hard work

and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel

a trace of eternity.— Though the living are wrong to believe

in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.

Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living

they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent

whirls all ages along in it, through both realms

forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us:

they are weaned from earth’s sorrows and joys, as gently as children

outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers. But we, who do need

such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often

the source of our spirit’s growth—: could we exist without
them
?

Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus,

the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness;

and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god

had suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time

that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.

Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas,

I invoke you, almost deadly birds of the soul,

knowing about you. Where are the days of Tobias,

when one of you, veiling his radiance, stood at the front door,

slightly disguised for the journey, no longer appalling;

(a young man like the one who curiously peeked through the window).

But if the archangel now, perilous, from behind the stars

took even one step down toward us: our own heart, beating

higher and higher, would beat us to death. Who
are
you?

Early successes, Creation’s pampered favorites,

mountain-ranges, peaks growing red in the dawn

of all Beginning,—pollen of the flowering godhead,

joints of pure light, corridors, stairways, thrones,

space formed from essence, shields made of ecstasy, storms

of emotion whirled into rapture, and suddenly, alone:

mirrors
, which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face

and gather it back, into themselves, entire.

But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we

breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment

our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume. Though someone may tell us:

“Yes, you’ve entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime

is filled with you …”—what does it matter? he can’t contain us,

we vanish inside him and around him. And those who are beautiful,

oh who can retain them? Appearance ceaselessly rises

in their face, and is gone. Like dew from the morning grass,

what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish

of hot food. O smile, where are you going? O upturned glance:

new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart …

alas, but that is what we
are.
Does the infinite space

we dissolve into, taste of us then? Do the angels really

reabsorb only the radiance that streamed out from themselves, or

sometimes, as if by an oversight, is there a trace

of our essence in it as well? Are we mixed in with their

features even as slightly as that vague look

in the faces of pregnant women? They do not notice it

(how could they notice) in their swirling return to themselves.