Duino Elegies
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992 translated by Stephen Mitchell
The First Elegy
- 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 are still 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 has suddenly left
forever,
- the Void felt for the first time that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and
helps us.
The Second Elegy
- 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.
- Lovers, if they knew how, might utter strange, marvelous words in the night air.
- For it seems that everything hides us.
- Look: trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand.
- We alone fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind.
- And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as
unutterable hope.
- Lovers, gratified in each other, I am asking you about us.
- You hold each other. Where is your proof?
- Look, sometimes I find that my hands have become aware of each other,
- or that my time-worn face shelters itself inside them.
- That gives me a slight sensation.
- But who would dare to exist, just for that?
- You, though, who in the other’s passion grow until, overwhelmed, he begs
you:
- “No more . . . ”; you who beneath his hands swell with
abundance,
- like autumn grapes; you who may disappear because the other has wholly emerged:
- I am asking you about us.
- I know, you touch so blissfully because the caress preserves,
- because the place you so tenderly cover does not vanish;
- because underneath it you feel pure duration.
- So you promise eternity, almost, from the embrace.
- And yet, when you have survived the terror of the first glances,
- the longing at the window, and the first walk together, once only, through the
garden:
- lovers, are you the same?
- When you lift yourselves up to each other’s mouth and your lips join,
- drink against drink: oh how strangely each drinker seeps away from his action.
- Weren’t you astonished by the caution of human gestures on Attic
gravestones?
- Wasn’t love and departure placed so gently on shoulders
- that it seemed to be made of a different substance than in our world?
- Remember the hands, how weightlessly they rest, though there is power in the
torsos.
- These self-mastered figures know: “We can go this far,
- this is ours, to touch one another this lightly; the gods can press down harder upon
us.
- But that is the gods’ affair.”
- If only we too could discover a pure, contained, human place,
- our own strip of fruit-bearing soil between river and rock.
- Four our own heart always exceeds us, as theirs did.
- And we can no longer follow it,
- gazing into images that soothe it or into the godlike bodies where,
- measured more greatly, it achieves a greater repose.
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