The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke https://bcinemaseekersforum.runboard.com/t34884 Runboard| The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke en-us Thu, 28 Mar 2024 12:07:17 +0000 Thu, 28 Mar 2024 12:07:17 +0000 https://www.runboard.com/ rssfeeds_managingeditor@runboard.com (Runboard.com RSS feeds managing editor) rssfeeds_webmaster@runboard.com (Runboard.com RSS feeds webmaster) akBBS 60 The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilkehttps://bcinemaseekersforum.runboard.com/p156653,from=rss#post156653https://bcinemaseekersforum.runboard.com/p156653,from=rss#post156653All of Rilke's poems are devastatingly beautiful. The best overall book in English is 'Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke' Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell (bilingual edition: original German and English) Here are some wonders... #1 Ignorant Before the Heavens of My Life Ignorant before the heavens of my life, I stand and gaze in wonder. Oh the vastness of the stars. Their rising and descent. How still. As if I didn't exist. Do I have any share in this? Have I somehow dispensed with their pure effect? Does my blood's ebb and flow change with their changes? Let me put aside every desire, every relationship except this one, so that my heart grows used to its farthest spaces. Better that it live fully aware, in the terror of its stars, than as if protected, soothed by what is near. #2 Fear of the Inexplicable But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished the existence of the individual; the relationship between one human being and another has also been cramped by it, as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone that is responsible for human relationships repeating themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new,unforeseeable experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope. But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us. We are set down in life as in the element to which we best correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we hold still we are, through a happy mimicry,scarcely to be distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us. #3 [Again and again, however we know the landscape of love] Again and again, however we know the landscape of love and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names, and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others fall: again and again the two of us walk out together under the ancient trees, lie down again and again among the flowers, face to face with the sky. (Translated by Stephen Mitchell) #4 Fall Day Lord, it is time. This was a very big summer. Lay your shadows over the sundial, and let the winds loose on the fields. Command the last fruits to be full; give them two more sunny days, urge them on to fulfillment and throw the last sweetness into the heavy wine. Who has no house now, will never build one. Whoever is alone now, will long remain so, Will watch, read, write long letters and will wander in the streets, here and there restlessly, when the leaves blow. (translated by Barbara Abbott and Larry Hauser) Finally, here is a link to Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet" (trans. Stephen Mitchell): www.sfgoth.com/~immanis/rilke/letter1.html nondisclosed_email@example.com (questers)Thu, 03 Jun 2004 00:53:53 +0000