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

It is all about praising.
Created to praise, his heart
is a winepress destined to break,
that makes for us an eternal wine.

His voice never chokes with dust
when words for the sacred come through.
All becomes vineyard. All becomes grape,
ripening in the southland of his being.

Nothing, not even the rot
in royal tombs, or the shadow cast by a god,
gives the lie to his praising.

He is ever the messenger,
venturing far through the doors of the dead,
bearing a bowl of fresh-picked fruit.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 7

In the last analysis, I have a completely indescribable passion for experiencing God, and this God is unquestionably closer to that of the Old Testament than He is to the Messiah’s Gospels. I must admit that what I have most wanted in life has been to discover within myself a temple to earth, and to dwell therein.

— Rilke, Letter to Rudolf Zimmerman
March 10, 1922

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly here:

You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours I, 59

Why not think of God as the one who is coming, who is moving toward us from all eternity, the Future One, culminating fruit of the tree whose leaves we are? What stops you from projecting his birth on times to come and living your life as a painful and beautiful day in the history of an immense pregnancy? Do you not see how all that is happening is ever again a new beginning? And could it not be His Beginning, for to commence is ever in itself a beautiful thing. If he is to be fulfillment, then all that is lesser must precede him, so that he can fashion himself from out of the greatest abundance. Must he not be last, in order to include everything within himself? And what meaning would be ours, if he, for whom we yearn, had already existed?

— Rilke, Rome, December 23, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

No. Of my heart I will make a tower
and stand on its very edge,
where nothing else exists — just once again pain
and what cannot be said, and once again world.

Once again in all that vastness
now dark, now light again, the single thing I am,
one final face confronting
what can never be appeased.

That ultimate face, enduring as stone,
at one with its gravity,
drawn by distances that could dissolve it
into some promise of the sacred.

–Rilke, New Poems

You come and go. The doors swing closed
ever more gently, almost without a shudder.
Of all who move through the quiet houses,
you are the quietest.

We become so accustomed to you,
we no longer look up
when your shadow falls over the book we are reading
and makes it glow.

— Rilke, From The Book of Hours I, 45

God, are you then All? And I the separated on
who tumbles and rages?
Am I not the whole? Am I not all things
when I weep, and you the single one, who hears it?

— Rilke, From the Book of Hours II, 3

To speak again of solitude, it becomes ever clearer that in truth there is nothing we can choose or avoid. We are solitary. We can delude ourselves and act as if this were not so. That is all we can do. How much better to realize from the start that is what we are, and to proceed from there. It can, of course, make us dizzy, for everything our eyes rest upon will be taken from us, no longer is anything near, and what is far is endlessly far.

–Rilke, Borgeby gärd, Sweden, August 12, 1904
Letters to a Young Poet

That great god Sleep: I yield to him all greediness for time. What does he care about Time! Ten hours, eleven, even twelve — if he wants to consume them in his silencing and privileged way, let him. Alas, I seldom manage to retire early; evening is my time to read. Seductive books, aided by the improbably intensifying noises of the old house, usually keep me awake till past midnight. The personal errands of the mouse in the thick walls of some yet-to-be-cleared inner room deepen the mystery of the endless surrounding night.

— Rilke, Letter to Lou Andreas-Salome
January 13, 1923

I inscribe this book to S.D. — English, innumerable, and an Angel.
Also: I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow — the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.

— Jorge Luis Borges, the Dedication of A Universal History of Iniquity

In deep nights I dig for you like treasure.
For all I have seen
that clutters the surface of my world
is poor and paltry substitute
for the beauty of you
that has not happened yet. . . .

— Rilke, From the Book of Hours II, 34

All the worlds of the universe plunge into the Invisible as into a yet deeper reality. Certain stars increase in intensity and extinguish themselves in the angels’ endless awareness. Others move toward transformation slowly and with great effort, and their next self-realization occurs in fear and terror.

We are the transformers of Earth. Our whole being, and the flights and falls of our love, enable us to undertake this task.

— Rilke, Letter to Witold Hulewicz
November 13, 1925

Sing, my heart, the gardens you never walked,
like gardens sealed in glass balls, unreachable.
Sing the waters and roses of Isfahan and Shiraz;
praise them, lush beyond compare.

Swear, my heart, that you will never give them up.
That the figs they ripened ripened for you.
That you could tell by its fragrance
each blossoming branch.

Don’t imagine you could ever let them go
once they made the daring choice: to be!
Like a silken thread, you entered the weaving.

Whatever image you take within you deeply,
even for a moment in a lifetime of pain,
see how it reveals the whole — the great tapestry.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 21

If I cried out, who
in the hierarchies of angels
would hear me?

And if one of them should suddenly
take me to his heart,
I would perish in the power of his being.
For beauty is but the beginning of terror.
We can barely endure it
and are awed
when it declines to destroy us.

— Rilke, From the First Duino Elegy