Springtimes have needed you.
And there are stars expecting you to notice them.
From out of the past, a wave rises to meet you
the way the strains of a violin
come through an open window
just as you walk by.

As if it were all by design.
But are you the one designing it?



– Rainer Maria Rilke, from the first "Duino Elegy" (trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

"Do not measure in terms of time: one year or ten years means nothing. For the artist there is no counting or tallying up; just ripening like the tree that does not force its sap and endures the storms of spring without fearing that summer will not come. But it will come. It comes, however, only to the patient ones who stand there as if all eternity lay before them—vast, still, untroubled. I learn this every day of my life, I learn it from hardships I am grateful for: patience is all."


– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

"I am not saying that we should love death, but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life's other half) in our love. This is what actually happens in the great expansiveness of love, which cannot be stopped or constricted. It is only because we exclude it that death becomes more and more foreign to us and, ultimately, our enemy.

It is conceivable that death is infinitely closer to us than life itself. . . .
What do we know of it?"


– Rainer Maria Rilke, from a letter dated 1923, found in A Year With Rilke (trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

"When I saw others straining toward God, I did not understand it, for though I may have had him less than they did, there was no one blocking the way between him and me, and I could reach his heart easily.  It is up to him, after all, to have us, our part consists of almost solely in letting him grasp us."


– Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke and Benvenuta: An Intimate Correspondence

Praise, my dear one.
Let us disappear into praising.
Nothing belongs to us.


– Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems (trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy)

"There is nothing that does not seem to have been understood, grasped, experienced and recognized in the tremulous after-ring of memory; no experience has been too slight, and the least incident unfolds like a destiny, and fate itself is like a wonderful, wide web in which each thread is guided by an infinitely tender hand and laid alongside another and held and borne up by a hundred others."


– Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters To A Young Poet (trans. M. D. Herter Norton)

Understand, I'll slip quietly
away from the noisy crowd
when I see the pale
stars rising, blooming, over the oaks.

I'll pursue solitary pathways
through the pale twilit meadows,
with only this one dream:
You come too.


– Rainer Maria Rilke

It feels as though I make my way
through massive rock
like a vein of ore
alone, encased.


I am so deep inside it
I can't see the path or any distance:
everything is close
and everything closing in on me
has turned to stone.


Since I still don't know enough about pain,
this terrible darkness makes me small.
If it's you, though –


press down hard on me, break in
that I may know the weight of your hand,
and you, the fullness of my cry.


– Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (trans. Anita Barrows and JoAnna Macy)

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.


These are the words we dimly hear:


You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.


Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.


Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don't let yourself lose me.


Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.


Give me your hand.


– Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (trans. Anita Barrows & Joanna Macy)

Loneliness

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,
dissapointed 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...

– Rainer Maria Rilke (trans. Robert Bly)

"And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been."


– Rainer Maria Rilke