THE FIRST DUINO ELEGY       by Rainer Maria Rilke

Who, though I cry aloud,
would hear me in the angel orders?
And should my plea ascend,
were I gathered to the glory
of some incandescent heart,
my own faint flame of being
would fail for the glare.
Beauty is as close to terror
as we can well endure.
Angels would not condescend
to damn our meagre souls.
That is why they awe
and why they terrify us so.
Every angel is terrible!
And so I constrain myself and
swallow the deep, dark music
of my own impassioned plea.
Oh, to whom can we turn
in the hour of need?
Neither angel nor man.
Even animals know that we
are not at home here.
We see so little of what
is clearly visible to them.
For us there is only
a tree on a hillside,
which we can memorize, or
yesterday's sidewalks, or
a habit which discovered us,
found us comfortable and moved in.
O and night...the night!
Wind of the infinite
blowing away all faces.
Within our solitude appears
a nearly lovely god
or goddess, all the
heart is ever apt to meet.
Lovers fare no better,
concealing, by their love,
each other's destiny.
Do you still not understand?
Pour your emptiness
into the breeze-
the birds may soar
more swiftly for it.

Yes, springtime needed you!
The very stars, row on row,
sparkled for your attention.
From bygone days a wave rolled
or a violin yielded itself as you
wandered by some open window.
These were your instructions.
But what could you do-
distracted, as you were,
by all of that significance?-
as though each signpost
pointed on beyond itself
towards something higher yet:
a mere prelude to The Beloved!
(Where would you find room to
keep such a one, in amongst
those vast, weird thoughts,
always coming and going,
often spending the night?)
Sing, in your lovelorn
longing, of the losers.
Make their dark fame glisten.
Sing of those whom you are
nearly moved to envy in the
purity of their despair:
hearts more loving in their pain
than many never broken.
Sing again-and yet again-
your altogether insufficient
praise of them.
The hero lives!
His ruin is but a pretext
to be born again.
Depleted Nature calls her lovers
back into her bosom, as though
she had not strength to fashion them anew.
Have you yet sung the bold grief
of Gaspara Stampa so poignently
that another girl, likewise spurned in love,
might be moved to similar transcending passion?
Is it not time these ancient seeds of pain
put forth a flower?...time that, lovingly,
we free ourselves from lovers?...
time we fit ourselves, quivering
like an arrow to its bowstring,
enduring tension with the prospect
of flight exceeding the limits of
the feathered shaft, the string,
the very bow which looses it?
Nowhere may we remain.

Voices, Voices!
Hear, my heart,
as only the holy hear,
lifted from Earth by
celestial command but
taking no notice, so
perfect is their listening.
You could not bear to hear
the voice of God.
Not that, no...
but perhaps attend
the ceaseless murmer of
silence: the vespers
of the untimely dead,
borne upon the wind...
the whispers of the
children who haunted
that cathedral in Naples-
the church in Rome...
the injunction discovered
on a tombstone last year at
Santa Maria Formosa.
All they ask:
"Weep no more for us!
Your tears muddy the
path of our ascent."

Strange to be no more of Earth.
To quit half learned habits.
To view roses and their kind
no more in human terms.
To be no more a babe in arms
that ever fear to drop you.
To leave the name you are
known by like a child leaves
a broken toy.
Strange to desire nothing.
Strange to watch the
known world dissolve.
Death is very difficult.
Lost time is painfully
reconstructed until the
struggle yields some
slight glimmer of eternity.
The living are mistaken
in their distinctions-
angels often do not know
whether they walk among
the quick or the dead.
So 'tis said.
The storm of eternity roars;
all voices drown in its thunder.

Children who have gone do not require us.
Weaned, they need no mother's breast.
Our joys and sorrows don't concern them.
But we, for whom the mysteries are golden,
still unsolved, our very sustenance-
can we exist without them?
Grief is our spirit's fodder.
Remember the Lament for Linos: how
the first shaft of song shot through
barren air carving a sudden vacuum
in the astonished space where
godlike youth forever vanished,
leaving only a melody, which is
our sole comfort and enchantment.

. . . Rainer Maria Rilke

translated by Robert Hunter

The Second Duino Elegy

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Every angel is terrible.
Knowing this, I invoke thee,
O Deadly Birds of the Soul.
Gone are the days of Tobias,
when shining Raphael,
awful majesty disguised,
stood at a door, twin
to the youth who gazed
out, curious, upon him.
Should such an archangel
now descend a single step
from behind the stars,
our hearts would rise and
rage until they burst!
Who art thou?

Primordial Perfection!
First darlings of Creation:
mountain summits crimson
in the dawn of genesis-
pollen of Godhead in
resplendent blossom,
essence of light...
halls, stairs, thrones,
places of pure being,
shields shaped of ecstasy,
swirling storms of rapture-
all suddenly ceasing...
mirrors!...commanding all
the scattered sweetness
into themselves again.

When we feel, we do not recoup but
blow until we empty, fading like embers
or trace of perfume, bit by bit.
Should someone say:
"You are the sweet
spring air I breathe,
my heart's own blood!"...
what can it mean?
Contain us? They? No!
We slip in, out and
round them like wind.
And the beautiful...
Who can hold them?
Fairness pours from their faces
and...gone!-morning
dew in rising sun...
our essence dissipates
like steam from a kettle.
O smile, where do you run,
eyes turned to the sky...
new, warm, receding wave
of the heart's own sea?
O sorrow:
all these things are what we are.
Is there any taste of us in that
eternity into which we merge?
Do angels reclaim only perfect light,
or does some hint of what we were remain?
Do our faces linger, if only in that
slight way a mother's face reflects
her unborn child?
They cannot see it in their swirling
return to self! (How could they see it?)


Lovers, had they the time, could
recite words of wonder to the night.
But most things end by concealing us.
Look: trees are!
Our shelters endure.
But we, like mingled winds,
claim no single habitat.
All things conspire to
keep us secret-half,
it seems, from shame
and half in token of
some unspoken hope.


O Lovers, completed in
one another, I turn
to you to ask of us.
Is there certainty in your embraces?
Look at it this way...
my hands sometimes recognize each other
and offer sanctuary to my weary face.
This yields some slight sensation.
But what proof of existence is that?
You who fan the fires of one another's
passion till, overcome, you cry
"No more!"-who, beneath lover's hands,
swell like purple grapes at harvest;
who subside, that the other may
more completely come to be:
I ask you about us.
I know the blessed touch
abides with you-that what
love cherishes does not decay;
immortality oozes from those caresses-
a promise, almost, of eternity.
And yet, when you've weathered
the shy fear of first glances,
the sighs of longing at the window,
the first-never again that first-
garden promenade together:
O lovers, are you then as you were?
When you raise the glasses
of each other's lips to drink,
thirst to thirst,
where does the drinker vanish?


Were you not awed by
the easy attitudes of
Grecian graveyard statuary?
Did not love and farewell
sit lightly on their shoulders,
as though compounded of an
essence unknown to us?
Remember how the hands
rested without pressure
despite apparent strength?
Their very poses seem to say:
"It is given us to touch this way.
If the gods press us harder...
that is for the gods to say."
If only we could discover
such a singular human place-
pure, determined, self-contained,
our own fruitful soil between
the river and the stone!
But our hearts outrun us.
We cannot capture their essence by
lingering before consoling statuary,
nor by contemplation of those godlike forms
containing all for which we yearn
in monumental measure.