[For the sake of a single poem]

"...Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else --); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and dificult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars, -- and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories, You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves -- only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them."

From the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

-- Rainer Maria Rilke 

Turning-Point

The road from intensity to greatness 

    passes through sacrifice. --Kassner


For a long time he attained it in looking.

Stars would fall to their knees

beneath his compelling vision.

Or as he looked on, kneeling,

his urgency's fragrance

tired out a god until

it smiled at him in its sleep.

Towers he would gaze at so

that they were terrified:

building them up again, suddenly, in an instant!

But how often the landscape,

overburdened by day,

came to rest in his silent awareness, at nightfall.

Animals trusted him, stepped

into his open look, grazing,

and the imprisoned lions

stared in as if into an incomprehensible freedom;

birds, as it felt them, flew headlong

through it; and flowers, as enormous

as they are to children, gazed back

into it, on and on.

And the rumor that there was someone

who knew how to look,

stirred those less

visible creatures;

stirred the women.

Looking how long?

For how long now, deeply deprived,

beseechng in the depths of his glance?

When he, whose vocation was Wiating, sat far from home --

the hotel's distracted unnoticing bedroom

moody around him, and in the avoided mirror

once more the room, and later

from the tormenting bed

once more:

then in the air the voices

discussed, beyond comprehension,

his heart, which could still be felt;

debated what through the painfully buried body

could somehow be felt -- his heart;

debated and passed their judgement:

that it did not have love.

(And denied him further communions.)

For there is a boundary to looking.

And the world that is looked at so deeply

wants to flourish in love.

Work of the eyes is done, now

go and do heart-work

on all the images imprisoned within you; for you

overpowered them; but even now you don't know them.

Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,

the one attained from a thousand

natures, the merely attained but

not yet beloved form.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

The Swan

This laboring through what is still undone,
as though, legs bound, we hobbled along the way,

is like the awkward walking of the swan.

And dying -- to let go, no longer feel

the solid ground we stand on every day --

is like his anxious letting himself fall

into the water, which receives him gently

and which, as though with reverence and joy,

draws back past him in streams on either side;

while, infinitely silent and aware,

in his full majesty and ever more

indifferent, he condescends to glide.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

The Flamingos

Jardin des Plantes, Paris

With all the subtle paints of Fragonard

no more of their red and white could be expressed

then someone would convey about his mistresss

by telling you, "She was lovely, lying there

still soft with sleep." They rise above the green

grass and lightly sway on their long pink stems,

side by side, like enormous feathery blossoms,

seducing (more seductivelt than Phryne)

themsleves; till, necks curling, they sink their large 

pale eyes into the softness of their down,

where apple-red and jet-black lie concealed.

A shriek of envy shakes the parrot cage;

but they stretch out, astonished, and one by one

stride into their imaginary world.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Buddha in Glory

Center of all centers, core of cores,

almost self-enclosed and growing sweet --

all this universe, to the furthest stars

and beyond them, is your flesh, your fruit.

Now you feel how nothing clings to you;

your vast shell reaches into endless space,

and there the rich, thick fluids rise and flow.

Illuminated in your infinite peace,

a billion stars go spinning through the night,

blazing high above your head.

But in you is the presence that

will be, when all the stars are dead.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Love Song

How shall I keep my soul

from touching yours? How shall I

lift it out beyond you toward other things?

Ah, I would like to lodge it

in the dark with some lost thing

in some silent foreign place

that doesn't tremble when your depths stir.

Yes whatever touches you and me

blends us together just as a bow's stroke

from two strings draws one voice.

Across what instrument are we stretched taut?

And what player holds us in his hand?

O sweet song.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke

Sonnets to Orpheus (another translation)

Translated by C. F. Macintyre

Part I 

I. 1

There arose a tree. Oh, pure transcension!

Oh, Orpheus sings! Oh, tall tree in the ear!

And all was still. But even in this suspension

new beginnings, signs, and changes were.

Animals from the silence, from the clear

now opened wood came forth from nest and den;

and it so came to pass that not from fear

or craftiness were they so quiet then,

but to be listening. Howling, cry, roar

seemed little to their hearts. Where scarece a humble

hut for such reception was before

a hiding-place of the obscurest yearning,

with entrance shaft whose underpinnings tremble,

you made for the beasts temples in the hearing.

I. 2

She was almost a girl and forth she leaped

from this harmonious joy of song and lyre,

shining through her springtime veils and clear,

she made herself a bed in my ear. And slept

in me. Her sleep was everything. The trees

that I had always loved so much, and these

palpable distances, the field I felt,

and each amazement that to me befell.

She slept the world. Ah, singing god, how have

you so perfected her, she did not crave

to waken first? She rose and fell asleep.

Where is her death? Before your song is lost,

can you not find this motif? To what deeps

does she sink from me -- where? . . . A girl almost . . .

I. 3

A god can do it. But how shall a man, say,

get to him through the narrow lyre and follow?

His mind's dichotomy. Where two heartways

cross there stands no temple for Apollo.

Song, as you explain it, is not passion,

not striving for some end at last attained;

song is Being. Easy for gods to fashion,

But when shall we be? And when will he bend

the earth and stars upon our being? Youth,

it is not that you are in love; although

the voice bursts your mouth open, you must find

how to forget your rash song. That will go.

It is another breath that sings the truth.

A breath round nothing. A gust in the god. A wind.

I. 4

O you tender ones, sometimes walk

into the breath not intended for you;

let it divide against your cheeks,

behind you it trembles, joined anew.

O you blessed, whole ones, you

who seem to be the beginning of hearts.

Bows for arrows, targets for darts,

more everlasting your smile shines through

the tears. Don't fear to suffer pain;

give the heaviness back to earth's weight again;

heavy are mountains, heavy the seas.

Those you planted as children, ah, those trees

are long since too heavy for you to bear.

But the spaces . . . but the windy air . . .

I. 5

Erect no monumenr. But let the roses

blossom every year for his memory's sake.

For it is Orpheus. His metamorphosis

into this one and that. We need not take

trouble for other names. Once and for all,

it's Orpheus when there's song. He comes and goes.

Is it not much if sometimes a few days

he outlives the roses in the bowl?

He has to vanish, so you'll understand:

Even though himself he fears this evanescence.

For while his word surpasses this existence,

he's gone alone already in the distance.

The lyre's grating does not curb his hands.

He is obedient, even when he transgresses.

I. 6

Does he belong here? No, from both

realms his ample nature has grown.

One to whom the roots were known

could bend more deftly the willow's growth.

Never leave milk on the table or bread

when you go to sleep; that lures the dead.

But let him who conjures them to rise,

under the gentle lids of his eyes

mix their ghosts with all he perceives;

may the spell of fumitory and rue

be real for him as the clearest things.

Nothing impairs the symbol that's true;

be it from houses, be it from graves,

let him praise bracelet, pitcher, and ring.

I. 7

Praising, that's it! One ordained to praise,

he sprang like ore from the silence of stone.

His heart, oh, perishable winepress

of an infinite wine, for man alone.

His voice no dust can choke or dim

when divine instance seizes him.

All turns vineyard, clusters of grapes,

in his susceptible south grown ripe.

Nor mold in the kings' sepulchers

gives the lie to his landings, nor

that from the gods a shadow falls.

Of the abiding messengers,

he reaches far into death's door

glorious fruit in golden bowls.

I. 8

Only in the land of Praise can Lamentation

work: the guardian nymph of thw weeping source,

she watches over our precipitation,

that it run clearly on the rocky base,

the same on which the gates and altars stand.
See, around her tranquil shoulders broods

the dawning feeling: she, of all the band,

is the youngest of the Passions' sisterhood.

Rejoicing knows, and Longing is contrite:

only Lament still learns; and night by night

tallies with girlish hands the ancient evil.

But suddenly, unpracticed and awry,

she holds a star-sign of our voices high

against a sky her breathing does not trouble.

I. 9

Only whoso has raised

among the Shades his lyre

dares, with foreboding, aspire

to offer infinite praise.

No one but that one

who has eaten with the dead

their poppies will never forget

the softest tone.

Though the picture in the pool

before us grow dim:

Make the image yours.

Only in the dual

realm will voices become

eternal and pure.

I. 10

Antique sarcophagi, who have never

left my feelings, I greet you, from whom

the joyous waters of days in Rome

flow as a wandering song forever.

Or you so open, like the eyes

of a happy awakening shepherd: tombs

full of silence and dead-nettle bloom

whence fluttered enchanted butterflies;

all who are delivered from doubt,

I greet, the mouths now open anew,

already aware what silence means.

Do we know it, friends, or do we not?

The lingering hour molds these two

on the countenance of man.

I. 11

Look at the sky. is there no constellation

called "Horseman"? For this pride from earth we bear,

strangely engraven. And a second's there,

who rides and spurs and guides its destination.

Is not this being whipped and then restrained

like our existence, the sinew and the bone?

Highway and turning. But a touch explains.

New open vistas. And the two are one.

But are they that? Or do not they both mean

the road they go together? Then between,

the utter separation of table and trough.

Even stellar conjunctions can deceive.

But let us rejoice a short time to believe

the figure as a symbol. That's enough.

I. 12

Hail to the spirit that can unite us;

for we live really in figures. Always

go the clocks with little strides

along with our intrinsic days.

Without knowing our proper place,

we act as if from true relations.

The antennae feel their sister-stations,

and the emptiness of space

bore . . . pure tension. O music of forces!

Aren't the interruptions turned away

by the indulgent affairs of the day?

However the peasant works and sows,

he never reaches those deep sources

where seeds turn into summer. Earth bestows.

I. 13

Full-plumped apple, gooseberry and pear,

banana . . . all these speak

death and life in the mouth . . . I divine there . . .

read it on a child's cheek

who tastes them. This comes from afar. Will it be

in the mouth something nameless, slow?

Where words were once, discoveries flow,

out of the fruit's flesh, surprised and ser free.

Dare to say what you name Apple. This

sweetness, first condensing, thus

gently created in the taste,

becomes awake, transparent, clear,

ambiguous, sunny, earthy, here --

oh, experience, feeling, joy -- how vast!

I.  14

We have to do with flower, grape leaf, fruit.

They speak not only the language of the year.

Out of the dark a pied display appears,

perhaps by the envy of those underfoot

made bright: the dead who give earth strength anew.

How do we know what part they make their own?

This long time they have larded through and through

the clay, with the frank morrow of their bones.

Now arises the question: if this is

gladly done? This work of sullen salves,

does this globed fruit press toward us, their lords?

Are they the masters, in their rooty graves

sleeping, who grant from their abundant hoards

the mogrel begotten of dumb strength and kisses?

I.  15

Wait . . . that tastes good . . . It flies away fast.

. . . Just a bit of music, a trampling, a humming:

girls, you warm, you silent girls coming,

dance the taste of the fruit you test!

Dance the orange. Who can forget it,

how it drowns in itself, yet strives not to do

what makes it sweet! Now you have got it:

exquisitely, it has become you.

Dance the orange. The warmer land,

project from you, so this ripe fruit glisten

in its native air! Oh, ardently fling

off fragrance on fragrance. Create the relation

with the pure, the unyielding rind,

with the juice that brims this happy thing!

I. 16

You, my friend, are so alone,

because . . . with words and pointing fingers

slowly we make the world our own,

perhaps the frailest part, most full of danger.

Who points with his finger to a smell? --

But of the powers that we dread

you feel many . . . you know the dead

and are frightened by the sorcerer's spell.

Look, we together must bear alway

parcel and part, like a whole at last.

It's hard to help you. Don't plant me in

your heart -- for I would grow too fast.

But I'll guide my master's hand and say:

Here. This is Esau in his skin.

I. 17

The first, confused, the Ancient,

the root of what's been,

the sources, concealed and latent

that's never been seen.

Helmet and hunter's horn,

graybeards' absolutes,

wrath between men born

brothers, women like lutes . . .

Branch pushing branch, on the tree

not one twig is free . . .

then one! oh, higher, higher! . . .

But they still are breaking.

The highest if taking

shape as a lyre.

I. 18

Master, you hear the New,

trembling and droning?

Come now heralds who

praise it, intoning.

Really no hearing's still

hale in this turmoil,

but the machines will

have praise for toil.

See how it storms

in a rage to devour,

enervates us, deforms.

Since we gave it power,

let it run cool

and serve as a tool.

I. 19

Though the world change as fast

as cloud-shapes manifold,

all things perfected at last 

fall back to the very old.

Past flux and vicissitude,

more freely and higher

still endures your prelude,

god with the lyre.

We do not understand

grief, nor love's phases,

and what death keeps concealed

is not unveiled

Only song through the land

hallows and praises.

I.  20

What shall I dedicate, Master, say,

to you who taught the creatures to hear? --

My memory of one spring day,

at evening, in Russia -- a white horse there . . .

Across from the village he came alone,

a hobble on his fore fetlock,

for a night in the meadow, on his own;

on his neck tossed the shock

of his mane in time to his fiery mood,

in that clumsy gallop arrested.

What leaping fountains of stallion-blood!

He felt the spaces, oh, how great!

He neighed and listened--in him was invested

your saga.

                    His image I dedicate.

I.  21

Spring has come back again. The earth

is like a child who has memorized

poems, oh, many! . . . now it seems worth

the effort, for she wins the prize.

Her teacher was strict. We loved the white

hair of the old man's beard.

When we ask what the green and the blue are, right

off she knows every word.

Lucky earth, with your holiday,

and all the children coming to play!

We try to catch you. The gayest will do it.

Teacher trained her until she knew it,

and all that's printed in roots and long

unruly stems she sings in a song.

I. 22

We are the drivers.

But take time's stride

as trivial beside

what lasts forever.

The transient hastens

and soon will be over;

only what lingers

hallows and chastens.

Boys, on speed waste

no courage or power,

or on trails of flight.

Now all things rest:

darkness and light,

the book and the flower.

I. 23

Oh, first when the flight

shall no longer arise

for its own sake in the sky's 

stillness, and in bright

profile, be self-sufficient

a successful instrument,

a playful pet of the winds,

surely wheeling and slim --

not till the pure goal means

more than the growing machines

to youthful pride, will he,

by the winning overthrown,

who nears the distance be

what he is flying alone.

I. 24

Should we disown our oldest friendships, part

from the never-suing gids, because the hard

steel that we so rigorously have reared

does not know them? Or suddenly seek them on a chart?

These mighty friends, who take from us the dead,

nowhere touch our wheels. We've moved afar

our banquets and our baths; their messengers

are long too slow for us, so we have sped

past them. Now more lonely, one on another

wholly dependent, yet ignorant of each other,

we build no paths with fine meandering turns,

but by the gradient. Only in boilers burn

the former fires, lifting the hammers, ever

heavier. But we grow weak, like swimmers.

I. 25

Once more I will remember you whom I knew

like a flower with an unknown name; yet I

will show you to them, ravished from us, you

lovely playmate of the invincible cry.

Dancer at first, then the hesitant body stoof

suddenly, as if youth were cast in bronze;

sorrowing, listening. Then from the empowered ones

music sank into her altered blood.

Sickness drew near. Already by shadows mastered,

the darkened blood, half-suspect, could not wait,

but surged, toward its natural springtime bounding.

Again and again, interrupted by dark and disaster,

it glittered, earthly. Till after terrible pounding

it entered the desolate open gate.

I. 26

But you, divine one, unto the last still singing,

although attacked by the flouted Maenads' throng,

beautiful god, above the shrieks rose ringing

among the destoryers your ordered upbuilding song.

There was none there could harm your head or harp,

however they raved and struggled; all the sharp

stones they cast at you grew soft when nearing

your heart and, touching you, were endowed with hearing.

Finally, driven by vengeance, they broke and tore

your body, but in cliffs and lions lingered

your music, in birds and trees. You still sang there.

O you lost god! You never-ending clue!

Only since hatred at last parceled you

among us, are we hearers and a mouth for nature.

* * *

Part II

II. 1

Breath, you invisible poem! Pure

exchange unceasing between the great

ether and our existence. Counterweight

in which I rhythmically occur.

Single billow slow degrees 

of ocean take place

in me; most frugal, you, of all possible seas --

winnings of space.

How many parts of this space already were

within me! There's many a wind

like a son to me.

Do you know me, air, full of places where I used to be?

You, once smooth rind, 

roundness and leaf of my words.

II. 2

Even as a handy sheet of paper

sometimes catches a genuine master-stroke,

so, often into themselves the mirrors

take the one blessed smile of girls who awoke

and tried out the morning, alone --

or in the attendant lights' glitter.

And where the breath of their real faces shone

there falls but a mere reflection, later.

What have eyes once seen in the blackening coals

slowly cooling upon the hearth?

Glimpses of life, forever lost.

Ah, who knows the losses of earth?

Only one, who praises nevertheless,

can sing the heart born into the Whole.

II. 3

Mirrors: still no one knowing has told

what your essential nature is.

You, entirely filled, as with holes

of sieves, you, time's interstices.

You, wastrels still of the empty hall --

broad as the woods, when the twilight falls . . .

and the chandelier, like a sixteen-pointer,

pierces you none else can enter.

Often you are full of paintings. A few

seem to have passed straight into you;

others you timidly sent past.

But the loveliest one will stay, till there

to her withheld cheeks the unbounded clear

Narcissus forces his way at last.

II. 4

Oh, this is the animal that never was.

They did not know it and, for all of that,

they loved his neck and posture, and his gait,

clean to the great eyes with their tranquil gaze.

Really it was not.  Of their love they made it,

this pure creature. And they left a space

always, till in this clear uncluttered place

lightly he raised his head and scarcely needed

to be. They did not feed him any corn,

only the possibility he might

exist, which gave the beast such strength, he bore

a horn upon the forehead. Just one horn.

Unto a virgin he appeared, all white,

and was in the silver mirror and in her.

II. 5

Flower-muscle of the anemone

that little by little opens to the meadow-dawn,

until light's mighty polyphone pours down

into the womb from the sonorous sky,

muscle of infinite receptivity

so tautened in the still star of the bloom,

often with such abundance overcome

that the sunset's beckoning peacefully

is barely strong enough again to give

the far-sprung petal rims to you: O power

and resolution of how many worlds!

We, the violent, though we endure

longer, when, in which of all our lives

are we receivers finally unfurled?

II. 6

Roses, you on a throne, in antiquity

were a calyx in a simple ring.

But to us you're the full flower, an innumerably

inexhaustible thing.

In your richness you shine, with garment on garment

on a body of nothing but radiance;

yet a single petal is at once the avoidance

and denial of any raiment.

Your fragrance calls its sweetest names

across the centuries to us;

suddenly it lies plain in the air as fame.

But we do not know what to name it, we guess . . .

and memory surrenders to it all

that we have begged from hours evocable.

II. 7

Flowers, finally to ordering hands related

(hands of girls of long ago and today),

who often across the garden table lay,

meekly wounded and wilted,

awaiting the water to make you recover

from the death begun -- now raised anew

between the dripping poles of tender

fingers that can do,

light ones, even better than you guessed,

when you came to in the vase, and cooling

slowly give out the warmth of girls, like confessed

sins, how wearisome and gloomy,

committed by being picked, a bond made newly

with them who are your confederates in blooming.

II. 8

You few playmates of childhood long ago

in scattered city gardens: how we found

each other and grew hesitantly fond

and, like the lamb with the speaking scroll, although

speaking, were silent. All our fun belonged

to no one. Whose could it be?

And how it dissolved wherever people thronged,

and under the long year's anxiety!

Carriages passed us, strangers. Solid, dark,

houses stood near, make-believe -- and none

knew us ever. What was real in the All?

Nothing. Except the balls. Their splendid arcs.

Not even the children . . . but sometimes there was one,

ah, dying, who walked under the falling ball.

In memoriam Egon von Rilke

II. 9

Do not boast, you judges, of icons not clamped

on necks, or of the spared racks and thumbscrew.

No heart is lifted, none -- since the purposed cramp

of mercy is more gently twisting you.

What it's had from time the scaffold gives back again,

as children the toys from birthdays of last year.

Into the lofty, gate-like heart, the pure

and open heart, how different he'd enter then,

the gods of true mercy. Violently come and grip

with radiance round him, like the gods, his kin.

More than a wind for the confident great ships.

Not less than the gentle secret perception

that overcomes us silently within,

like a quietly playing child of an infinite conception.

II. 10

All we have won is threatened by the machine, so long

as it, instead of obeying, as spirit dares to command.
For the more resolute building it cuts more stiffly the stone,

lest it shine from the fairer lingering of the master-hand.

Nowhere stands the machine aside, that we escape once,

where it ouls and belongs to itself in the factory without noise.

It is life -- and it believes in its omniscience,

as with like resolution it orders and makes and destroys.

But still for us existence is enchanted: from a hundred places

it is still origin. A play of pure forces

that no one touches unless he kneels and admires.

The Unutterable, words fragilely slip by . . .

and from the most vibrant stones music anew aspires

building her deified house in the useless space of the sky.

II. 11

Many a quietly ordered rule of death now prevails,

onpressing, conquering man, since you undertook hunting first;

but better than trap and net, I know you, strip of sail,

that they let down into the caverns of Karst.

Gently they slipped you in, as if you were a pledge

to celebrate peace. But then, the fellow twisted your edge --

and a handful of white and reeling doves was thrown by the night

from the caverns into the day . . .

                but even that has its right.

After from the spectators be every breath of compassion,

not only from the hunter, who vigilantly takes heed

and effects the timely deed/

Killing is only an aspect of the wandering grief we endure . . .

To the spirit without passion

what happens to us is pure.

II. 12

Will the transformation. Of, be inspired by the burning

flame in which something that boasts of transformation withdraws;

that scheme-devising spirit, which masters earthly laws,

loves nothing so much in the soaring of symbols as the point of turning.

What shuts itself in abiding is already numb. It believes

itself safe in the shelter of unorstentatious gray?

Wait, a hardest forwarns the hard from far away.

Alas, an absent hammer upheaves!

He who pours out himself as a spring is perceived by Perceiving,

that conducts him enraptured through all the cheerful creation,

which often ends at the start and begins at the end.

Every happy space is a child or a grandchild of Leaving,

in which they wander astounded. And Daphne, since transformation,

feeling herself laurel, wills that you change to a wind.

II. 13

Keep ahead of all parting, as if it were behind

you, like the winter that is just now passed.

In winters you are so endlessly winter, you find

that, getting through winter, your heart on the whole will last.

Be ever dead in Eurydice -- arise singing

with greater praise, rise again to the pure relation.

Among the fleeting, in the realm of declination,

be a resonant glass that shatters while it is ringing.

Be -- at the same time, know the terms of negation,

the infinite basis of your fervent vibration,

that you may completely complete it this one time.

To teeming nature's store of used, as of dumb

and moldy things, to that uncountable count,

add yourself joyously, and annul the amount.

II. 14

Look at the flowers, faithful to earth's ways,

to whom we lend fate from fate's very rim --

but who knows? If they grieve that they decay,

we must be the grief for them.

All wills to float, yet heavily here and there,

we lie on everything, glad of our weight;

what consuming teaches we are for the Things to bear,

that are happy in their ever-childish state.

If one took them into intimate sleep and slept

deeply with the Things, ah, how light he would grow!

changed in a new day, out of the common depth.

Or maybe he would stay; and they'd flower and acclaim

him, the converted, who would then be like them,

all the still brothers and sisters where meadow-winds blow.

II. 15

O fountain-mouth, you giver, O you round

mouth speaking inexhaustibly one pure

thing, you mask of marble placed before

the flowing face of water. The background

is marching aqueducts. From far away,

passing the tombs, from the slope of the Apennines,

they carry to you what you are going to say,

which beyond the black ageing of your chin

falls into the basin there below.

This is the ear laid down, asleep,

the ear of marble into which you speak

forever. An ear of earth. She talks alone

to herself, and when sometimes a pitcher's slipped

under the flow, she thinks you interrupt.

II. 16

Always torn open by us again,

the god is the place that heals.

We are Sharpness, because we will

to know, he's divided and serene.

Even the pure, the avowed donation

he accepts in his world in so far as he

opposes himself to the free

end, without motion.

We hear the flowing from that well

where none but the dead drink,

when the god beckons them silently, the dead.

Only its hubbub's offered us instead.

And with a more quiet instinct

the lamb begs for his bell.

II. 17

Where, in that ever-happily watered garden, on what trees,

from what tenderly stripped flower-calices

ripen the strange fruits of consolation? Those delicate fruits

of which you perhaps find one underfoot

in the trodden field of your poverty. Time after time,

you're amazed at the size of the fruit, at the tenderness

of uts skin, at its wholesomeness,

and that the carelessness of a bird of envious worm

has not forestalled you. Are there trees, thronged by angels,

by slow and secret gardeners tended so strangely,

that they bear for us, without our being the owners?

Have we never been able, we phantoms and shades,

by our actions, too early ripened and soon to fade,

to disturb the serenity of these impertubable summers?

II. 18

Dancer: O you translation

of all transiency into action, how you made it clear!

And the whirl of the finish, that tree of motion,

didn't it wholly take it in the hard-won year?

And didn't its summit, so that your flourish just now could swarm

about it, blossom with stillness? And up in the blue

wasn't it summer and sunlight, with the warm

immeasurable warmth from you?

But it also bore, it bore, your tree of rapture.

Aren't these its peaceful fruits: the pitcher

striped with ripening, and the more ripened vase?

And in the decoration: has not the drawing

endured, the dark line your eyebrows traces

swiftly in the texture of their own turning?

II. 19

Somewhere lives gold in the indulgent bank,

on familiar terms with thousands. Nevertheless,

that blindman, the beggar, to a penny's like

a lost place, a dusty corner behind the clothes-press.

Money feels quite at home in all the shops,

plausibly dressed in silk, with carnations and furs.

But the silent beggar waits in all the stops

between the breaths of all money that sleeps or stirs.

Oh, how can it close at night, that ever-open hand?

Tomorrow fate brings it again, holds it out every day:

miserable, infinitely destructible, clear.

If but some clairvoyant could at last understand

astonished, and praise its duration, as only a singer may!

For only a god to hear.

II. 20

Between the stars, how far, and still much farther

is what one learns by existence.

Someone, for instance, a child . . . a neighbor . . . another --

oh, how inconceivably distant.

Maybe destiny measures us with spans of being,

and thuse seems inauspicious;

but think, how many spans between the girl fleeing

and the man whom she wishes.

Everything is remote -- and nowhere does the circle close.

On the cheerfully set table, see in the dish

how odd are the faces of fish.

Fish are mute . . . one used to think. Who knows?

But is there no place at last where, from each to each

there is something that might be language, without speech?

II. 21

Sing, my heart, the unknown gardens poured

crystalline, inaccessible, as in glass

Sing their rapture, praise them as compared

to none, those waters and roses of Shiraz

or Ispahan. My heart, show you never miss them.

That their ripening figs intend themselves for you.

That you are the friend of breezes blowing through

the flowering boughs, increasing as if to visions.

Avoid the mistake of thinking privations's caused

by a resolution taken, that is: to be!

Silken thread, you were woven in the frame.

No matter what pattern you feel most inwardly

(though it be a moment from the life of pain),

remember, a whole grand carpet is proposed.

II. 22

Oh, the splendid overflow, in spite of fate,

of our existence. In the parks, foaming, out-poured --

or as stone figures, under the balconies reared,

beside the keystones of the lofty gates!

Oh, the brzen bell each dat upeaving

against the banal everyday its cudgel.

Or the one, the column, the column outliving

in Karnak the almost eternal temple.

Today the same surpluses rush past, but as naught

save speed, from the yellow horizontal day

into the light-bedazzled immoderate night.

But, leaving no trace, the delirium fades away,

The curves through the air and those who guided the flight,

none is in vain perhaps. But just as if thought.

II. 23

Call me to one of your hours, the space

that always opposes you:

suppliant, close as a dog's face,

but always turning away anew

when you believe it's finally caught.

That is most yours which is thus withdrawn.

We are free, for where we thought

to have been welcomed, we were sent on.

Anxiously we crave a hold,

we, too young often for what is old

and too old for what never happened.

We are just but to what we praise anyhow,

for, ah, we are the iron and the bough

and the sweetness of danger that ripens.

II. 24

Oh, this pleasure, always new, from the loosened clay!

Almost no one helped in the earliest ventures.

But, despite that, cities rose by happy bays;

in spite of it, oil and water filled the pitchers.

The gods, we project them first with hardihood,

and surly destiny destroys them again.

But they are the deathless ones. Look here, we should

hear him through who will hear us in the end.

We, a race through thousands of years: fathers

and mothers, ever more full of the future birth,

which, one day surpassing us, will shatter us, later.

We, we the endlessly risked, what aeons we own!

And only Death, the laconic, knows what we're worth

and how much he always gains when puts us on loan.

II. 25

Already, listen, you hear the first harrows

at work: again man's rhythm teem

in the tense stillness of tomorrow's 

strong spring earth. What is coming seems

inspid no longer. Not the same

as that last year, but as something new.

Always expected, but when it came,

you never got it. It got you.

Even by the leaves of the wintered oaks

at evening a future brown's revealed.

Often the breezes exchange tokens.

Black are the bushes, but piles of dung

of a richer black lie on the fields.

Each passing hour grows more young.

II. 26

We are stirred by a bird's cry . . .

any once-created crying.

But outside, the children playing

cry beyond the actual cries.

Cry the hazard. Into the spaces

of ether (where the bird's cry passes 

unscathed, like men in dreams),

they drive the wedges of their screams.

Alas, where are we? Ever more free,

like loose kites, with edges of laughter,

we race through mid-air, wind-tattered.

-- Singing god! set in order these cries,

so they may awaken roaringly,

as a river bearing the head and the lyre.

II. 27

Does it really exist, this destroyer, Time?

When will it break the castle to shards

on the calm mountain? And the demiurge tame

this heart that forever belongs to the gods?

Are we really so fearfully fragile

as fate would prove to us?

Is childhood, deep and full of promise,

in the roots -- later -- tranquil?

Ah, the specter of the transient,

like a smoke-wraith, passes

through the guileless receiver.

As what we are, as drivers,

we count among permanent

powers for divine uses.

II. 28

Oh, come and go. You, almost a child, complete

for an instant the dance-figure, that it be

a pure constellation by which we beat

the order of stupid nature transiently.

Yes, for it was nature that first stirred

fully just to listen to Orpheus' song.

You were excited from the time you heard

and felt it strange when any tree thought long

whether it would go with you by ear.

You still knew where the lyre was raised to call,

resounding -- the unheard-of center. Therefore,

you tried the lovely steps and hoped to turn

the eyes and footsteps of your friend to learn

for once the whole and healing festival.

II. 29

Still friend of many distances, feel yet

how your breathing is augmenting space.

From the beamwork of gloomy belfried let

yourself ring. What devours you will increase

more strongly from this food. Explore and win

knowledge of transformation through and through.

What experience was the worst for you?

Is drinking bitter, you must turn to wine.

Be the magic power of this immense

midnight at the crossroads of your senses,

be the purport of their strange meeting. Though

earth itself forgot your very name,

say unto the tranquil earth: I flow.

To the fleeting water speak: I am.

--  Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by C. F. Macintyre)

Sonnets to Orpheus: Second Part

I

Breathing, invisible poem! That great

world-space, at each inhalation

exchanged for this human existence. Counter-weight

of my rhythmical realization.

Single wavelet, whose slowly

gathering sea am I;

you, of all possible seas most frugal and lowly, --

space laid-by.

Of all these places in space, how many a one

has been within me already. Many a wind

seems like a son.

Do you know me, air, still full of my dwelling-places?

You, the one-time smooth skinned

rondure and leaf of my phrases.

II

Just as the handiest paper snatches

sometimes for ever the master-stroke,

often only the mirror catches

smiles that nothing will re-evoke

from maidens approving the morning alone,

or the image obsequious lamp-light graces;

and later the real, the breathing faces

merely reflect what was once their own.

What have eyes not gazed into quivering flosses

glowing among logs that have ceased to blaze? --

Glimpses of living, beyond recall.

Earth, O Earth, who could tell your losses?

Only who sang with unfaltering praise

of the heart, born into the midst of it all.

III

Mirrors: no one has yet distilled with

patient knowledge your fugitive

essence. Your spaces in time, that are filled with

holes like those of a sieve.

Squandering the empty ball-room's pomp,

deep as forests when twilight broods . . .

And, like sixteen-pointers, the lustres romp

through your virginal solitudes.

Pictures crowd you at times. A few

seem to be taken right within you,

shyly to others you wave adieu.

There, though, the fairest will always be,

till through to her lips withheld continue

Narcissus, released into lucency.

IV

This is the creature there has never been.

They never knew it, and yet, none the less,

they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,

its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.

Not there, because they loved it, it behaved

as though it were. They always left some space.

And in that clear unpeopled space they saved

it lightly reared its head, with scarce a trace

of not being there. They fed it, not with corn,

but only with the possibility

of being. And that was able to confer

such strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.

Whitely it stole up to a maid, -- to be

within the silver mirror and in her.

V

Flower-muscle, gradually releasing

the anemone's pale meadow-day,

till at length into her lap unceasing

sky-light pours its polyphonic ray;

muscle stretching out that starry-flowered

quietness for endless welcoming;

so at times by fulness overpowered

that the restward call of evening

almost fails to bring your far-extended

petal-edges back to you once more:

world of will and power uncomprehended!

We, the violent, are not so fleeting.

Through what lives though must we pass before

we reach that stage of open-hearted greeting?

VI

You for Antiquity, rose throned in power,

were a calyx with only a single rim,

but for us of to-day you're the full, the numberless flower,

the theme whose depths we can only skim.

Grown so rich, you appear like draping on draping

about a body of air and fire;

though each of your leaves in itself is at once an escaping

and a disowning of all attire.

For centuries, name after sweetest name,

we have heard your fragrance singing:

suddenly it hangs in the air like fame.

And then we find to name it exceeds our powers. . .

And over to it go winging

memories yielded up by recallable hours.

VII

Flowers, whose kinship with ordering hands we are able

to feel at last (girls' hands, of once, of to-day),

who often, strewn all over the garden table.

tired and tenderly injured, lay

waiting for water to come, once more repealing

death already begun, -- and now

uplifted again between the poles of those feeling,

magnetical fingers you have to allow

can be far kinder than delicate you had guessed

on coming round in the jug, to find

you were cooling and slowly exhaling the warmth of girls, like

        things confessed,

like tiring sins remembered in drwosy gloom,

despoiling of you committed, to bind

you to them once more, who blend with you in their bloom.

VIII

You few, the one-time sharers of childhood's treasure

in the city's scattered garden walks,

how we met and awoke in each other a hesitant pleasure,

and, like the lamb with the scroll that talks,

spoke without speaking. If sometimes happiness found us,

no one possessed it. Whose could it be?

And how it would melt among all those moving around us,

and the long year's anxiety.

Unconcerning carriages rolling and swerving,

houses surrounded us strongly - untruthfully, though, and never

a thing that knew us. Was anything real at all?

Nothing. Only the balls. Their glorious curving.

No, not even the children. . . Though one would ever

pass, ah, fleetingly! under the falling ball.

        In memoriam Egon von Rilke    

IX

Boast not, judges, of racks no longer required,

of throats no longer locked in the iron's embrace.

Not one heart has it heightened, that newly-acquired

spasm of mercy's milder grimace.

Things it has slowly collected, the scaffold one day

offers us back, like children their long-ago gifted

birthday toys. He'd enter the pure, the uplifted,

gate-wide open heart in a different way,

the god of genuine mercy. Mightily, spreading

flamelier our from his origin.

More than a wind for the great ships steadily heading.

Potent no less than that gentle unconscious awaring,

silently winning us over within

like the quietly playing child of an infinite paring.

X

Long will machinery menace the whole of our treasure,

while it, unmindful of us, dares to a mind of its own.

Checking the glorious hand's flaunting of lovelier leisure,

now for some stubborner work sternlier it fashions the stone.

Not for an hour will it stay, so that for once we may flee it,

oiling itself in a quiet factory, fitly employed.

Now it is life, no less, and feels best able to be it,

having, with equal resolve, ordered, constructed, destroyed.

Even to-day, though, existence is magical, pouring

freshly from hundreds of well-springs, -- a playing of purest

forces, which none can surprise without humbly adoring.

Words still melt into something beyond their embrace. . .

Music, too, keeps building anew with the insecurest

stones her celestial house in unusable space.

XI

Many a rule of death rose with deliberate rightness,

onwardly-conquering man, during your hunting past:

better than trap or net known to me, fluttering whiteness,

you they were wont to hang down in the cavernous Karst.

Gently letting you in, as were you a token

publishing peace. But then: vassal would twitch at your thong,

Night would cast from the caves pallid handfuls of broken-

flighted doves to the light. . . 

                                            Not even that, though, was wrong.

Far from the gazer remain every emotion but gladness,

not from the hunter alone, gathering, watchful and keen,

that which his suns have matured.

Killing merely is one form of our wandering sadness. . .

Pure in the spirit serene

's all we ourselves have endured.

XII

Choose to be changed. With the flame, with the flame be

enraptured,

where from within you a thing changefully-splendid escapes:

nothing whereby that earth-mastering artist is captured

more than the turning-point touched by his soaring shapes.

That which would stay what it is renounced existence:

does it feel safe in its shelter of lustreless grey?

Wait, a hardest is warning the hard from a distance,

heaved is a hammer from far away.

He who pours forth like a spring shall be known of his Knowing;

ravished, it leads him through cheerful creation, that closes

often as not with beginning and opens with end.

Parting's child or descendent is each glad space they are going

gazingly through. And now, feeling her metamorphosis,

laurelled Daphne wants you, changed to a wind, for her friend.

XIII

Anticipate all farewells, as were they behind you

now, like the winter going past.

For through some winter you feel such wintriness bind you,

your then out-wintering heart will always outlast.

Dead evermore in Eurydice, mount with more singing

mount to relation more pure with more celebrant, tongue.

Here, in this realm of the dwindlers and dregs, be a ringing

glass, which has, even though shivered to pieces, been rung.

Be -- and, perceiving in that which is being's negation

merely the infinite ground of your fervent vibration,

beat, through this never-again, to the fullest amount.

To the stock of used-up, as well as of dumb and decaying

things within copious Nature, those sums beyond saying,

count yourself joyfully in and destroy the account.

XIV

Flowers, so faithful to earth that has sent them hither,

whom we lend fate from the borders of fate -- and yet

who knows, when we think we see them regretfully wither,

if it is not for us to be their regrer?

To all that would soar our selves are the grand aggravation,

we lay them on all we encounter, proud of their weight;

what terrifying teachers we are for that part of creation

which loves its eternally childish state.

Could someone but take them right into his slumber and sleep

deeply with things, how differently, lightly he'd wander

back to a different day out of that communal deep.

Or, it may be, he would stay, and they'd blossom and praise

him, the converted, now one of them and all yonder

silent brothers and sisters in woodlands and ways.

XV

O fountain mouth, you mouth that can respond

so inexhaustibly to all who ask

with one, pure, single saying. Marble mask

before the water's flowing face. Beyond,

the aqueducts' long derivation. past

the tombs, from where the Apennines begin,

they bring your saying to you, which at last,

over the grizzled age of your dark chin,

falls to the waiting basin, crytsal-clear;

falls to the slumbering recumbent ear,

the marble ear, with which you still confer.

One of earth's ears. With her own lonely mood

she thus converses. Let a jug intrude,

she'll only think you've interrupted her.

XVI

Still the god remains an ever-growing

wholeness we have irritably burst.

We are sharp, for we insist on knowing,

he exists serenly and dispersed.

Even gifts of purest consecration

only find acceptance in so much

as he turns in moveless contemplation

to the end we do not touch.

Only those who dwell

out of sight can taste the spring we hear,

when the god has silently assented.

With its brawling we must be contented.

And the lamb's more silent instinct's clear

when it begs us for its bell.

XVII

Where, in what ever-blissfully watered gardens, upon what trees,

out of, oh, what gently dispetalled flower-cups do these

so strange-looking fruits of consolation mature?

Delicious, when, now and then, you pick one up in the poor

trampled field of your poverty. Time and again you find

yourself lost in wonder over the size of the fruit,

over its wholesomeness, over its smooth, soft rind,

and that neither the heedless bird above nor jealous worm at the root

has been before you. Are there, then, trees where angels will congregate,

trees invisible leisurely gardeners so curiously cultivate,

that, without being oursm they bear for us fruit like those?

Have we, then, never been able, we shadows and shades,

with our doing that ripens too early and then as suddenly fades,

to disturb that even-tempered summer's repose?

XVIII

Dancer: you transmutation

of all going-by into going: what you have wrought!

And your finishing whirl, that tree of mere animation,

how it took over the year you had flyingly caught!

Did not its crown, that your swaying might settle to swarming,

suddenly blossom with stillness? Above that, too,

was there not sunnily, was there not summerly warming

all the warmth that exhaled from you?

Nay, it was able, your tree of rapture, to bear.

Are they not, all its fruits that so peacefully shine,

jug streaked with ripeness, vase further ripened, still there?

And does not your mark in their paintings still meet the discerning --

that of your eyebrows' darker line

swiftly inscribed on the wall of your own swift turning?

XIX

Gold dwells somewhere at ease in the pampering bank,

mixing with thousands on intimate terms. But to any

coin that blind man begging, to even a penny,

seems but a desolate place, a chink in a dusty plank.

Money shines out from the shops in its own dimension,

plausibly masking in silk, carnation, and fur.

He, though, silently stands in the breath-suspension

of all the money breathing, asleep or astir.

Oh, how does it ever close at night, that perpetually open hand?

Fate to-morrow will fetch it back and display it,

bright, poor, endlessly fragile, year after year.

Could but at last some gazer, astoundedly coming to understand,

celebrate its persistence! - Only a singer could say it.

Only a god could hear.

XX

Inter-stellar spaces -- ah yes, but how mnay times greater spaces terrestrial are!

First, for example, a child. . .  then a neighbour, a moment later, --

oh, how incredibly far!

Fate but through spanning us, maybe, with Being's measure

    seems so strange to our eyes:

think of the spans to a man from a maid, whose pleasure

lingers with him she flies!

All is remote -- nowhere does the circle close

Look at that curious face on the welcoming table,

staring out of its dish.

Fishes are dumb,. . . so one imagined. Who knows?

May there not be some place where, without them, the dwellers 

    are able

to speak what would be the language of fish?

XXI

Sing those gardens, my heart, poured as into a glass,

gardens you have not known, transparent, untrampled.

Waters and roses of Ispahan or Shiras,

blissfully sing them, praise them, the unexampled.

Show that by you, my heart, they are never missed:

pleasure for you their ripening figs are preparing,

you with their breezes, almost visibly bearing

fragrance of blossoming branches, can always tryst.

Know that no want exists for, no hand bereaving

takes from, the acted resolution: to be.

Silken thread, you have entered into the weaving.

Feel, with what pattern soever you're inwardly blended

(even a scene from the story of Agony),

feel that the whole, the praisable, carpet's intended.

XXII

Oh, but in spite of fate, life's glorious abundance

foaming over in parks and splendid estates, --

or in stone men, with all their straining redundance,

under balconies built over lofty gates.

Oh, the brazen bell that daily uplifts its solemn

hammer against the dullness of every day.

Or the one, the only, at Karnak, the column, the column,

surviving almost eternal temples' decay.

Now, though, the overflowings of that same font all

plunge but as speed from the yellow, the horizontal

day to the night so dazzlingly overwrought.

Rushing by but to vanish and leace no traces.

Lingering spirals of flight through ethereal spaces, --

not one, perhaps, is in vain. Yet as were they but thought.

XXIII

Call me to your lonely meeting-places

with the hour that always says you nay:

suppliantly near you, like dogs' faces,

time and time again, though, turned away,

when at last you think that it is yours.

Things thus snatched from you are most your own.

We are free -- dismissed from those same doors

where we thought such welcome had been shown.

Anxiously we hanker for a holdfast,

we, too youthful sometimes for the old past,

and too old for what has never been.

We, whose righteousness depends how far we

praise, for branch and axe and sweetness are we 

of a peril ripening unseen.

XXIV

Oh, delight leaping ever-new when we loosen the soil!

Hardly a hand lent the earliest darers assistance.

Towns arose none the less on gulds to a blessed existence,

pitchers were filled none the less with water and oil.

Gods, -- we plan them in bold provisional sketches

cross-grained Fate takes from us and flings to the past.

Still, they are the Immortals. Our spirit outstretches,

hearkening-out the one that will hear it at last.

We, but one race for millennia, growing ever greater,

age after age, with that child of the future whose birth

shall so entirely surpass and astonish us, later.

We, so immeasurably ventured, what aeons attend us!

And only taciturn Death knows what we are worth,

and how much it always pays him to lend us.

XXV

Hark, the earliest harrows striving

already; the rhythm of man once more

breaks the tense stillness around reviving

pre-vernal earth. What has come before

seems to return as unstaled as ever.

No new-comer, it comes like new.

Looked for again and again, you never

could capture it. Always it captured you.

Sunset splashes the wintered oaken

leaves with a brown that is yet to be.

Sometimes breezes exchange a token.

Black are the hedges. But heaps of dung

crouch more statedly black on the lea.

Hours grow more eternally young.

XXVI

How it thrills us, the bird's clear cry. . . 

Any cry that was always there.

Children, playing in the open air,

children already go crying by

real cries. Cry chance in. Through crevasses

in that same space whereinto, as dreaming

men into dreams, the pure bird-cry passes

they drive their splintering wedge of screaming.

Where are we? Freer and freer, we gyre

only half up, kites breaking

loose, with our frills of laughter flaking

away in the wind. -- Make the criers a choir,

singing god! that resurgently waking

may bear on its waters the head and the lyre.

XXVII

Does it exist, though, Time the destroyer?

When will it scatter the tower on the resting hill?

This heart, the eternal gods' eternal enjoyer,

when shall the Demiurge ravish and spill?

Are we really such tremblingly breakable

things as Destiny tries to pretend?

Does childhood's promise, deep, unmistakable,

down in the roots, then, later, end?

Ah, Mutability's spectre!

out through the simple accepter

you, like a vapour, recede.

We, though we wax but for waning,

fill none the less for remaining

powers a celestial need.

 XXVIII

Oh, come and go, you almost child, enhancing

for one brief hour the figure of the dance

to purest constellation of that dancing

where, subject as we are to change and chance,

we beat dull nature. For she only started 

hearing with all her ears at Orpheus' song.

And you still moved with motion then imparted,

and shrank a little when a tree seemed long

in treading with you the remembered pace.

You knew it still, that passage where the lyre

soundingly rose, the unimagined centre,

and practised all your steps in hope to enter

that theme again, whirling to one entire

communion with your friend both feet and face.

XXIX

Silent friend of those far from us, feeling

how your breath is still enlarging space,

fill the sombre belfry with your pealing/

What consumes you now is growing apace

stronger than the feeding strength it borrows.

Be, as Change will have you, shade or shine.

Which has grieved you most of all your sorrows?

Turn, if drinking's bitter, into wine.

Be, in this immeasurable night,

at your senses' cross-ways magic cunning,

be the sense of their mysterious tryst.

And, should earthliness forget you quite,

murmur to the quiet earth: I'm running.

Tell the running water: I exist.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by J. B. Leishman)

Sonnets to Orpheus: First Part

I

A tree ascending there. O pure transcension!

O Orpheus sings! O tall tree in the ear!

All noise suspended, yet in that suspension

what new beginning, beckoning, change, appear!

Creatures of silence pressing through the clear

disintricated wood from lair and nest;

and neither cunning, it grew manifest,

had made them breathe so quietly, nor fear,

but only hearing. Roar, cry, bell they found

within their hearts too small. And where before 

less than a hut had harboured what came thronging,

a refuge tunnelled out of dimmest longing

with lowly entrance through a quivering door,

you built them temples in their sense of sound.

II

And almost maiden-like was what drew near

from that twin-happiness of song and lyre,

and shone so clearly through her spring attire,

and made herself a bed within my ear.

And slept in me sleep that was everything:

the trees I'd always loved, the unrevealed,

treadable distances, the trodden field,

and my strangest self-discovering.

She slept the world. O singing god, and stayed,

while you were shaping her, with no desire

to wake, and only rose to fall asleep?

Where is her death? Oh, shall you find this deep

unsounded theme before your sound expire?

Sinking to where from me?. . . Almost a maid . . .

III

A god can do it. But can a man expect

to penetrate the narrow lyre and follow?

His sense is discord. Temples for Apollo

are not found where two heart-ways intersect.

For song, as taught by you, is not desire,

not wooing of something finally attained;

song is existence. For the god unstrained

But when shall we exist? And he require

the earth and heavens to exist for us?

It's more than being in love, boy, though your ringing

voice may have flung your dumb mouth open thus:

learn to forget those fleeting ecstasies.

Far other is the breath of real singing.

An aimless breath. A stirring in the god. A breeze.

IV

Step now and then, you gentle-hearted,

into the breath not breathed for you,

let it blow over your cheeks, and parted,

quiver behind you, united anew.

Blissful spirits no conflict harrows,

starters, surely, of many a heart.

Bows for arrows and targets for arrows,

divinelier smiling through tears that smart.

Be not afraid of suffering, render

heaviness back to the earth again;

mountains are heavy, and seas, and the tender

trees that in childhood you set in their places

have grows too heavy for you to sustain.

Ah, but the breezes. . . ah, but the spaces. . .

V

Raise no commemorating stone. The roses

shall blossom every summer for his sake.

For this is Orpheus. His metamorphosis

in this one and in that. We should not take

thought about other names. Once and for all,

it's Orpheus when there's song. He comes and goes.

Is it not much if sometimes, by some small

number of days, he shall outlive the rose?

Could you but feel his passing's needfulness!

Though he himself may dread the hour drawing nigher.

Already, when his words pass earthliness,

he passes with them far beyond your gaze.

His hands unhindered by the trellised lyre,

in all his over-steppings he obeys.

VI

Does he belong here? No, his spreading

nature from either domain has sprung.

Withes would they weave in a cunninger wedding,

hands to which roots of the willow had clung.

Going to bed, never leave on the table

bread or milk, forcing the dead to rise.  --

He shall invoke them, he who is able

to mingle in mildness of closing eyes

their appearance with all that we view;

he for whom magic of earth-smoke and rue

shall be clear as the clearest link between things.

Nothing can weaken the image he saves,

whether from dwellings, whether from graves,

glorifying pitchers or bracelets or rings.

VII

Praising, that's it! As a praiser and blesser

he came like the ore from the taciturn mine.

Came with his heart, oh, transient presser,

for men, of a never-exhaustible wine.

Voice never fails him for things lacking lustre,

sacred example will open his mouth.

All becomes vineyard, all becomes cluster,

warmed by his sympathy's ripening south.

Crypts and the mouldering kings who lie there

do not belie his praising, neither

doubt, when a shadow obscures our days.

He is a messenger always attendant,

reaching far through their gates resplendent

dishes of fruit for the dead to praise.

VIII

Only Praise's realm may Lamentation

traverse, naiad of the weeping spring;

watching over our precipitation,

till our tears are crystals, blazoning

that same rock that bears the gates and altars.

Round her quiet shoulders, as she broods,

look, a tiny dawn of feeling falters

she's the youngest of the sister-moods.

Triumph knows, and Longing makes confession, --

Lamentation learns: in nightly session

counts, with maiden-hands, old tribulation.

Then, however inexpertly limned,

lifts our voices in a constellation

to the sky her breathing has not dimmed.

IX

Only by him with whose lays

shades were enraptured

may the celestial praise

faintly be captured.

Only who tasted their own

flower with the sleeping

holds the most fugitive tone

ever in keeping.

Make but the mirroring pond

's fleetingly tendered

image endure!

Not till both here and beyond

voices are rendered

lasting and pure.

X

Welcome, whose meaning in me so long,

coffins of stone, has been quietly growing, --

you the Romans' gladdening water's flowing

through to-day as a wandering song;

you also, as open to all delight

as a wakening shepherd's eyes,

full of stillness and flowering nettle and flight

of delirious butterflies;

welcome to all we have snatched like this

from doubt, the mouths re-endowed with power

of speech, after knowing what silence is.

Knowing it or not, friends -- which is our case? --

Both alike has the lingering hour

graved in the human face.

XI

Search the heavens. Is no 'Horse-man' reckoned

there in starry outline? For we share

much with that proud earth. And with a second,

driving, curbing, whom it has to bear.

Is not this, first hunted and then broken,

just the nature of the course we run?

Turf and turning. Pressure, nothing spoken.

New horizones. And the two are one.

Are they though? Or are they never able

both to choose the way they both pursue?

Severingly unlike are field and table.

Even those uniting stars beguile.

Still, it gladdens and suffices too

to believe the symbol for a while.

XII

Hail. the spirit able to unite!

For we truly live our lives in symbol,

and with tiny paces move our nimble

clocks beside our real day and night.

Still we somehow act in true relation,

we that find ourselves we know not where.

Distant station feels for distant station --

what seemed empty space could bear. . . 

purest tension. Harmony of forces!

Do not just our limited resources

keep all interference from your flow?

Does the farmer, anxiously arranging,

ever reach to where the seed is changing

into summer? Does not Earth bestow?

XIII

Banana, rounded apple, russet pear,

goodeberry. . . Does not all this convey

life and death into your mouth? . . . It's there! . . . 

Read it on a child's face any day,

when it tastes them. What infinity!

Can't you feel inside your mouth a growing

mysteriousness, and, where words were, a flowing

of suddenly released discovery?

Dare to say what 'apple' has implied!

Sweetness, concentrated, self-repressing,

slowly yielding to the tongue's caressing,

growing awake, transparent, clarified,

double-meaning'd, sunshine-full, terrestrial: --

O experience, feeling, joy, -- celestial!

XIV

Our life-long neighbours, flower, vine-leaf, fruit,

they do not merely speak the season's speech.

These things so brightly manifest, that reach

from darkness, gleam, it may be, with the mute

envy of those through whom the earth grows strong.

What do we know about the part they play?

To mix their unused marrow with the clay

has been their second-nature for so long.

But do they do it for their own accords?

Is it by sullen slaves that these clenched fruits

are laboured and thrust forth to us, their lords?

Are they not lords, who sleep beside the roots,

and grant us, what their plenty never misses,

this middle-thing, made of dumb strength and kisses?

XV

Stay, . . . this is good . . . But already it's flown.

. . . Murmurs of music, a footing, a humming: --

Maidens, so warm, so mute, are you coming

to dance the taste of this fruit we've known?

Dance the orange. Who can forget it,

the way it would drown in itself, -- how, too,

it would struggle against its sweetness. And yet it

's been yours. Been deliciously changed into you.

Dance the orange. The landscape, create it

warm from yourselves, till its airs be enfolding

again the splendour they ripened! Loose,

glowingly, fragrance on fragrance! Relate it

all to the peel, so chastely withholding,

all to the joyfully plentiful juice!

XVI

The reason, friend, you feel so alone . . .

With our words and our pointings, little by little

we're making -- who knows? -- perhaps the most brittle,

most perilous part of the world our own.

Who among us can point to a smell? --

Yet there's many a power we obscurely dread

which you can feel . . . You're aware of the dead,

and you shrink away from the conjurer's spell.

Look, our tasks are really the same:

dealt out a puzzle of parts, to endeavour

to make it a whole. Hard to help you. Never

plant me in your heart. I should grow too well.

But I will guide my master's hand and exclaim:

This is Esau here in his own rough fell.

XVII

Undermost he, the earth-bound

root of uprearing

multitudes, source underground,

never appearing.

Helmet and hunting-horn,

words of the aging,

rage between brothers-born,

women assuaging.

Branch on branch, time on time,

vainly they spire. . .

One free! Oh, climb . . . oh, climb . . . 

One, though the others drop,

curves, as it scales the top,

into a lyre.

XVIII

Master, there's something new

droning and drumming.

It has heralds too, 

praising its coming.

Ill though our ears withstand

such perturbation,

now the machines demand

their celebration.

Source of our weakness

now, and in vengeful rage

ruining our heritage,

us shall these things at length,

us, who supply their strength,

serve in all meekness.

XIX

Change though the world may as fast

as cloud-collections,

home to the changeless at last

fall all perfections.

Over the thrust and the throng.

freer and higher,

echoes your preluding song,

god with the lyre.

Sorrow we misunderstand,

love we have still to begin,

death and what's hidden therein

await unveiling.

Song along circles the land,

hallowing and hailing.

XX

But what shall I offer you, Master, say,

you who taught all creatures to hear? --

The remembered evening of one spring day,

in Russia, a horse drawing near . . .

White, coming up from the village alone,

on one fetlock a tethering-block,

to spend the night alone, on his own:

how gaily he tossed the shock

of his mane in time to his mounting mood

on that rudely encumbered race!

How they leapt, the springs of the equine blood!

He had followed the call of space.

He sang and he listened -- your cycle swept

unbrokenly through him.

                                His image: accept.

XXI

Spirng has come again. Earth's a-bubble

with all those poems she knows by heart, --

oh, so many. . . With prize for the trouble

of such long learning, her holidays start.

Stern was her teacher, he'd over-task her

from time to time; but we liked the snows

in the old man's beard; and now we can ask her

what green, what blue are: she knows, she knows.

Eager to catch you, Earth, happy creature,

play with the children now outpouring!

Conqueringly foremost the happiest springs.

All she has ever been taught by her teacher,

all that's imprinted in roots and soaring

difficult stems,  -- she sings, she sings!

XXII

We wax for waning.

Count, though, Time's journeying

as but a little thing

in the Remaining.

End of unmeasured

hasting will soon begin;

only what's leisured

leads us within.

Boys, don't be drawn too far

into attempts at flight,

into mere swiftness. -- Look

how rested all things are:

shadow and fall of light,

blossom and book.

XXIII

Only when flight shall soar

not for its own sake only

up into heaven's lonely

silence, and be no more

merely the lightly profiling,

proudly successful tool,

playmate of winds, beguiling 

time there, careless and cool:

only when some pure Whither

outweighs boyish insistence

on the achieved machine

will who has journeyed thither

be, in that fading distance

all that his flight has been.

XXIV

Shall those primeval friends of ours, the unfated,

ever-unsuing gods, because they are nought for

the hard-faced steel we have sternly nursed, be repudiated,

or else within some map be suddenly sought for?

Those overmastering friends, who are always reaving

the dead from us, brush nowhere against our wheels.

Now we have left the welcoming bath and the old guest-meals

far behind, we find their messengers tardy beyond believing,

we that can overtake them. Lonely misunderstanders

one of another we wholly depend on at every turning,

nowadays the ways we led in lovely meanders

run right ahead. In boilers only are burning

the former fires and heaving the heavier-growing

hammers. But we are like swimmers whose strength is going.

XXV

Now it is you, though, you whom I never

knew but as some unnamable flower, I will try

once more to recall and show them, vanished for ever,

beautiful playmate of, ah, the invincible cry.

Dancer, who all of a sudden, her body rebelling,

stopped, as her youth had been bronzed into art,

mournfully hearkening. -- Then, from the Ever-Impelling,

music entered into her altered heart.

Sickness was near. In grip of the shadows already,

darklier thrusted the blood, though defiantly ready

to surge to its natural spring-tide just as before.

Time and again out of darkness emerged with a mocking

earthly effulgence. Then, after terrible knocking,

entered a hopelessly open door.

XXVI

You that could sound till the end, though, immortal accorder,

seized by the scorn-maddened Maenads' intemperate throng,

wholly outsounded their cries when in musical order

soared from the swarm of deformers your formative song.

Wrestle and rage as they might on that fated career,

none was able to shatter your head or your lyre:

hard stones hurled at your heart could only acquire

gentleness, soon as they struck you, and power to hear.

Though they destroyed you at last and revenge had its will,

sound of you lingered in lions and rocks you were first to

enthral, in the trees and the birds. You are singing there still.

O you god that has vanished! You infinite track!

Only because dismembering hatred dispersed you

are we hearers to-day and a mouth which else Nature would lack.

-- Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by J. B. Leishman)