Duino Elegies
by Rainer Maria Rilke

Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992 translated by Stephen Mitchell

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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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