Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

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As Once the Winged Energy of Delight

As once the winged energy of delight

carried you over childhood's dark abysses,

now beyond your own life build the great

arch of unimagined bridges.

Wonders happen if we can succeed

in passing through the harshest danger;

but only in a bright and purely granted

achievement can we realize the wonder.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Falling Stars

Do you remember still the falling stars

that like swift horses through the heavens raced

and suddenly leaped across the hurdles

of our wishes—do you recall? And we

did make so many! For there were countless numbers

of stars: each time we looked above we were

astounded by the swiftness of their daring play,

while in our hearts we felt safe and secure

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Dedication

I have great faith in all things not yet spoken.

I want my deepest pious feelings freed.

What no one yet has dared to risk and warrant

will be for me a challenge I must meet.

If this presumptuous seems, God, may I be forgiven.

For what I want to say to you is this:

my efforts shall be like a driving force,

quite without anger, without timidness

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Love Song

How can I keep my soul in me, so that

it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise

it high enough, past you, to other things?

I would like to shelter it, among remote

lost objects, in some dark and silent place

that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.

Yet everything that touches us, me and you,

takes us together like a violin's bow,

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Elegy I

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

hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly

pressed me against his heart, I would perish

in the embrace of his stronger existence.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror

which we are barely able to endure and are awed

because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

Each single angel is terrifying.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Song

You, whom I do not tell that all night long

I lie weeping,

whose very being makes me feel wanting

like a cradle.

You, who do not tell me, that you lie awake

thinking of me:—

what, if we carried all these longings within us

without ever being overwhelmed by them,

by Rainer Maria Rilke

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,

by Rainer Maria Rilke

The Wait

It is life in slow motion,

it's the heart in reverse,

it's a hope-and-a-half:

too much and too little at once.

It's a train that suddenly

stops with no station around,

and we can hear the cricket,

and, leaning out the carriage

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Black Cat

A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place

your sight can knock on, echoing; but here

within this thick black pelt, your strongest gaze

will be absorbed and utterly disappear:

just as a raving madman, when nothing else

can ease him, charges into his dark night

howling, pounds on the padded wall, and feels

the rage being taken in and pacified.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

What Survives

Who says that all must vanish?

Who knows, perhaps the flight

of the bird you wound remains,

and perhaps flowers survive

caresses in us, in their ground.

It isn't the gesture that lasts,

but it dresses you again in gold

armor —from breast to knees—

by Rainer Maria Rilke

A Walk

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.

going far beyond the road I have begun,

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;

it has an inner light, even from a distance-

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,

into something else, which, hardly sensing it,

we already are; a gesture waves us on

answering our own wave…

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Torso of an Archaic Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise

the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

to that dark center where procreation flared.

by Rainer Maria Rilke