The space within us reaches out, translates each thing.
For the essence of a tree to be real for you,
cast inner space around it, out of the space
that exists in you. Encircle it with restraint.
It has no borders. Only in the realm
of your renouncing can it, as tree, be known.
— Rilke, Uncollected Poems
Calm because I’m unknown,
And myself because I’m calm,
I want to fill my days
With wanting nothing from them.
For those whom wealth touches,
Gold irritates the skin.
For those on whom fame blows,
Life fogs over.
On those for whom happiness
Is their sun, night will fall.
But those who hope for nothing
Are glad for whatever comes.
— Ricardo Reis, 2 March 1933
Oh when, when, when will we ever have enough
of whining and defining? Haven’t champions
in the weaving of words been here already?
Why keep on trying?
Are not people perpetually, over and over and over again,
assaulted by books as by buzzing alarms?
When, between two books, the quieting sky appears,
or merely a patch of earth at evening —
rejoice . . .
Louder than all the storms, louder than all the oceans,
people have been crying out:
What abundance of quietude
the Universe must yield, if we screaming humans
can hear the crickets, and if the stars
in the screamed-at ether
can appease our hearts!
Let the farthest, oldest, most ancient
ancestors speak to us!
And let us be listeners at last, humans
finally able to hear.
— Rilke, Uncollected Poems
To think about God is to disobey God,
Since God wanted us not to know him,
Which is why he didn’t reveal himself to us . . .
Let’s be simple and calm,
Like the trees and streams,
And God will love us, making us
Us even as the trees are trees
And the streams are streams,
And will give us greenness in the spring, which is its season,
And a river to go to when we end . . .
And he’ll give us nothing more, since to give us more would
…make us less us.
— Alberto Caeiro, The Keeper of Sheep VI
Old and enormous are the stars.
Old and small is the heart, and it
Holds more than all the stars, being,
Without space, greater than the vast expanse.
— From Fernando Pessoa’s Ruba’iyat, in the manner of Omar Khayyam
The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
— Carl Sandburg
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbow’d.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishment the scroll,
I am master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
G. K. Chesterton described Henley as “a sad, sensitive and tender-hearted pessimist, who endured pain that came from nowhere, and enjoyed pleasure that came from nowhere, with the exquisite appreciation of some timid child.”
Exposed upon the mountains of the heart. See how small over there
the last outpost of words, and higher up,
just as small, one last farmyard of feeling.
Do you recognize it? Exposed
upon the mountains of the heart. Stony ground
under the hands.
Something still blooms here, on the dumb cliff face
blooms an unconscious weed, singing.
But where is the conscious one? He who began to be conscious
now is silent, exposed upon the mountains of the heart. . . .
— Rilke, Uncollected Poems
Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb —
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:
And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings against the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.
God will not let himself be lived like an easy morning.
Whoever enters that mineshaft
leaves wide-open earth behind,
crouches in tunnels to break Him loose.
— Rilke, Uncollected Poems
Things are not nearly so comprehensible and sayable as we are generally made to believe. Most experiences are unsayable; they come to fullness in a realm that words do not inhabit. And most unsayable of all are works of art, which — alongside our transient lives — mysteriously endure.
— Rilke, Paris, February 17, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet
What can enclose
this ample innerness?
So soft is this touch,
it could soothe any wound.
What skies are reflected
on the inland lake
of these open roses,
these untroubled ones?
See how loose they lie,
as if an abrupt gesture
would not scatter them.
They barely keep their shape.
They fill to overflowing
with inner space, spilling out
into days that swell
and close around them
until the whole summer becomes a room,
a room in a dream.
— Rilke, New Poems
I put down the cup of tea and examine my own mind. It alone can discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty, whenever the mind feels overtaken by itself; when it, the seeker, is at the same time the dark region through which it must go seeking and where all its equipment will avail it nothing. Seek? More than that: create. It is face to face with something which does not exist yet, which it alone can make actual, which it alone can bring into the light of day.
— Proust
On the street full of boxes, the loaders are cleaning the street. One by one, with laughter and wisecracks, they are putting the boxes on the trucks. From the vantage point of my office window I watch them with slow eyes on which the lids are sleeping. And anything subtle, incomprehensible, ties what I feel to the shipments I see being made up; any unknown sensation makes a box out of all this tedium of mine, or anguish, or nausea, and carries it on the shoulders of a joking man to a truck that is not here.
— Bernardo Soares (Fernando Pessoa), The Book of Disquiet
You, God, who live next door:
If at times, through the long night, I trouble you
with my urgent knocking —
this is why: I hear you breathe so seldom.
I know you’re all alone in that room.
If you should be thirsty, there’s no one
to get you a glass of water.
I wait listening, always. Just give me a sign!
I’m right here.
As it happens, the wall between us
is very thin. Why couldn’t a cry
from one of us
break it down? It would crumble
easily,
it would barely make a sound.
— Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 6
The Floating Library 