Quotes

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The Man Watching (II)

What we triumph over is so small,
and the victory makes us small too.
The eternal and uncommon
refuses to be bent by us.
Like the angel who appeared
to the wrestler in the Old Testament:
when his opponent’s sinews
grow hard as metal in the struggle,
they feel to his fingers like strings
on which to play a depthless melody.

Whoever is conquered by this angel
when the angel does not refuse to fight
walks away erect and ennobled,
strengthened by that fierce hand
that, like a sculptor’s, shaped him.
Winning does not tempt that man.
His growth is this: to be defeated
by ever greater forces.

— Rilke, Book of Images

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God Speaks

I am, you anxious one.

Don’t you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.
Can’t you see me standing before you
cloaked in stillness?
Hasn’t my longing ripened in you
from the beginning
as fruit ripens on a branch?

I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am waiting.
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.
And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours I, 19

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Your Singing Continues

As swiftly as the world is changing,
like racing clouds,
all that is finished
falls home to the ancient source.

Above the change and the loss,
farther and freer,
your singing continues,
god of the lyre.

How can we embrace our sorrows
or learn how to love,
or see what we lose

when we die? Only your song
over the earth
honors our life and makes it holy.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 19

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And Everything Matters

The tasks that have been entrusted to us are often difficult. Almost everything that matters is difficult, and everything matters.

— Rilke, Worpswede, July 16, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

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The Lute

I am the lute. When you describe my body,
its beautiful curving lines,
speak as if speaking of a ripely
curving fruit. Exaggerate the darkness you glimpse in me.

It was Tullia’s darkness, which at first was hidden
in her most secret place. The brightness of her hair
was like a sun-filled hall. At moments
some tone from within me

was reflected in her face
and she would sing to me.
Then I arched myself against her softness
and what was within me entered her at last.

— Rilke, New Poems

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Not by Grasping

A god can do it. But tell me how
a person can flow like that through the slender lyre.
Our mind is split. At the crossroads in our heart
stands no temple for Apollo.

Song, as you teach us, is not a grasping,
not a seeking for some final consummation.
To sing is to be. Easy for a god.
But when do we simply be? When do we

become one with earth and stars?
It is not achieved, young friend, by being in love,
however vibrant that makes your voice.

Learn to forget you sang like that. It passes.
Truly to sing takes another kind of breath.
A breath in the void. A shudder in God. A wind.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus I, 3

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Through All That Happens

As you unfold as an artist, just keep on, quietly and earnestly, growing through all that happens to you. You cannot disrupt this process more violently than by looking outside yourself for answers that may only be found by attending to you innermost feeling.

— Rilke, Paris, February 17, 1903
Letters to a Young Poet

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What Lies Ahead

Nothing alien happens to us, but only what has long been our own. We have already had to rethink so many concepts about motion; now we must also begin to learn that what we call fate comes not from outside us but from within. . . . Just as for so long we were mistaken about the movement of the sun, we are still mistaken about what lies ahead of us in time.

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

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Be Ahead of All Parting

Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened,
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.

Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.
Climb praising as you return to connection.
Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.

Be. And know as well the need to not be:
let that ground of all that changes
bring you to completion now.

To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.

— Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13

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The Panther

His gaze, forever blocked by bars,
is so exhausted it takes in nothing else.
All that exists for him are a thousand bars.
Beyond the thousand bars, no world.

The strong, supple pacing
moves in narrow circles.
It is a dance at whose center
a great will is imprisoned.

Now and again the veil over his pupils
silently lifts. An image enters,
pierces the numbness,
and dies away in his heart.

— Rilke, New Poems

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To Be in Nature Now

A solitary sojourn in the country is, especially at this moment, only half real, because the sense of harmlessness in being with nature is lost to us. The influence on us of nature’s quiet, insistent presence is, from the start, overwhelmed by our knowledge of the unspeakable human fate that, night and day, irrevocably unfolds.

— Rilke, Letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé
September 9, 1914

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Preface (excerpt) to Poems from the Book of Hours

[T]he monk who is the imaginary author of the poems is represented as an adherent of the peculiar faith that Rilke ascribed to his spiritual kinsmen, a faith in a God remote from the august if benign Father of western Christianity, a God, rather, who is waiting to be born of the artist’s alert and sensitive consciousness.

— Babette Deutsch (translator), from the Introduction

. . . In The Book of Hours, Rilke, not quite ready to speak purely as himself, uses a persona; he is a monk, a meditator, a solitary seeking God. But though there are echoes in the poems of Russian iconic mysticism and the severe sweetness of Giotto frescoes, this monk is not praying in a church; no institution or congregation supports him in his solitude, and his search is not for certainty. His elusive God is not imprisoned, like a fugitive in sanctuary, by beliefs or by cathedral walls. Rather the wall that separates the worshipper from his diety is built of images of the deity, and the soul’s illumination is “squandered on their frames.” God isn’t in the church: he is the church, the cathedral not yet built. “We are all workmen . . . building you.” God is the neighbor we hear breathing in the night. He is the gift, the lost or unfound wholeness of being. Flowing through all things, yet he needs mankind. Which creates the other? “What will you do, God,” the poet-monk asks with childlike directness, “when I die?”

In one of the greatest lines of the book, God is “to the ship, a haven — to the land, a ship.” And yet this is a contingent God, threatened, dependent. He might yet be joy, sword, ring, mountain, fire, storm — but is, now, only a starved fledgling bird who the poet must try, in fear and trembling, to keep alive. He must be wooed into being, refined into purity, he must ripen in deep peace and silence towards the future, like a wine “that unperturbed, grows ever sweeter and all its own.”

That mankind and deity may grow slowly together towards fulfillment in ages yet to come is an idea inexhaustible in suggestions, and welcome to a heart that looks for hope. Maybe it is an idea only a poet could have. The word that was not spoken in the beginning is the word we must all learn to speak.

Babette Deutsch’s selection and translation of nineteen poems from The Book of Hours is thoughtful, felicitous, and honest, a noble introduction to the work and to the poet. When New Directions first published this book in 1941, it appeared as part of an effort by several poets and critics to bring Rilke to the attention of English-speaking readers. But unmistakably the motive force of this, as of all good translation, was the translator’s love of the texts, the pure desire to sing what the poet sang.

— Ursula Le Guin
2009

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the interrogative mood?

Are your emotions pure? Are your nerves adjustable? How do you stand in relation to a potato? Should it still be Constantinople? Does a nameless horse make you more nervous or less nervous than a named horse? In your view, do children smell good? If before you now, would you eat animal crackers? Could you lie down and take a rest on a sidewalk? Did you love your mother and father, and do Psalms do it for you? If you are relegated to last place in every category, are you bothered enough to struggle up? Does your door bell ever ring? Is there sand in your craw? Could Mendeleyev place you correctly in a square on a chart of periodic identities, or would you resonate all over the board? How many push-ups can you do?

Are you inclined to favor the Windward Islands or the Leeward Islands? Does a man wearing hair tonic and chewing gum suggest criminality, or are you drawn to his happy-go-lucky charm? Are you familiar with the religious positions taken regarding the various hooves of animals? Under what circumstance, or set of circumstances, might you noodle for a catfish? Will you spend more money for better terry cloth? Is sugar your thing? If a gentle specimen of livestock passed you by en route to its slaughter, would you palm its rump? Are you disturbed by overtechnical shoes? Are you much taken by jewelry? Do you recall the passion you had as an undergraduate for philosophy? Do you have a headache?

Why won’t the aliens step forth to help us? Did you know that Native American mothers suckled their children to age five, merely bending at the waist to feed them afield? Have you ever witnessed the playing of shuffleboard at a nudist colony? If tennis courts could be but one surface, which surface should that be? In your economics, are you, generally, laissez-faire or socialist? If you could design the flag for a nation, what color or colors would predominate?

Should a tree be pruned? Are you perplexed by what to do with underwear whose elastic is spent but which is otherwise in good shape? Do you dance? Is having collected Coke bottles for deposit money part of the fond stuff of your childhood? Have you inadvertently hurt, or killed, animals? Would you eat carrion? When it comes to pillows, are you a down man or feather? Are you a man? Will you place two hundred dollars in the traditional red envelope and give it to me? Have you ever had to concern yourself with the imminence of freezing water pipes or deal with frozen water pipes? How is your health? If it might be fairly said that you have hopes and fears, would you say you have more hopes than fears, or more fears than hopes? Are all of your affairs in order? Would you have the slightest idea, if we somehow started over, how to reinvent the radio or even the telephone? Do you recall the particular manila rubber buttons in the garters that held up ladies’ hose before the invention of pantyhose? Who would you say is the best quarterback of all time? Between an automobile mechanic and a psychologist, which is worth more to you per hour?

Are you happy? Are you given to wondering if others are happy? Do you know the distinctions, empirical or theoretical, between moss and lichen? Have you seen an animal lighter on its feet than the sporty red fox? Do you cut slack for the crime of passion as opposed to its premeditated cousin? Do you understand why the legal system would? Are you bothered by socks not matching up in subtler respects than color? Is it clear to you what I mean by that? Is it clear to you why I am asking you all these questions? Is, in general, would you say, much clear to you at all, or very little, or are you somewhere in between in the murky sea of prescience? Should I say murky sea of presence of mind? Should I go away? Leave you alone? Should I bother but myself with the interrogative mood?

— Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood

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Overflow

Thus the overflow from things
flows into you.
Just as a fountain’s higher basins
spill down like strands of loosened hair
into the lowest vessel,
so streams the fullness into you,
when things and thoughts cannot contain it.

— Rilke, The Book of Hours II, 10