Letters to a Young Poet

by Rainer Maria Rilke

No one can advise and assist you, no one. There is only one way: go into yourself. Seek out the reason that commands you to write; discover if it has stretched out its roots into the deepest part of your heart, admit to yourself whether you would have to die if it were forbidden you to write.

So spare yourself of these general motifs, turning to those that your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, your passing thoughts and your faith in some kind of beauty—describe it all with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and use it to express yourself, the things that surround you, the images of your dreams, and the objects of your memory.

If your daily life seems poor to you, do not blame that: blame yourself. Tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor and unimportant place.

I only wanted to advise you also, to grow quietly and seriously throughout your development too; you cannot disturb it more violently than if you look to the outside and from the outside expect a response to questions that only your innermost feeling at your quietest hour can possibly answer.

There is no measuring with time, not even a year matters, and ten years are nothing. To be an artist means: to neither reckon nor count; to ripen like the tree, which does not rush its sap, and stands firm in the storms of spring, without anxiety that summer may not come after. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there, as if eternity lay before them, so carelessly silent and vast. I learn it daily, learn it with pain, am grateful for it: Patience is all!

If you adhere to nature, to what is simple in it, to what is small and overlooked, but can so unexpectedly become great and immeasurable; if you have this love for things that are most small and wholly simple, striving like a servant to gain their trust, even though they are obviously poor: then everything will become easier, more harmonious, and at some level reconciled, maybe not in the sense of explicit understanding, which stands back amazed, but in your innermost consciousness, in wakefulness and knowledge.

I want to ask you, as best I can, dear sir, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to have love for the questions themselves, like locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Do not seek out the answers now, which cannot be given to you because it you cannot live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then, without noticing it, you will gradually come, on some far-off day, to live your way into the answer.

love your solitude, accept the pain it causes you, and make a melody with it.

To love is also good: because love is difficult. For one person to love another: that is perhaps the hardest thing that is handed to us, the utmost, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, cannot love: they have to learn it. With their whole being, with all their powers, gathered around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love.

perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us just once as beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrifying is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants help from us.

always my wish that you find enough patience in yourself to endure, and enough simplicity to believe; that you gain more and more confidence in what is difficult, and in particular your solitude. And for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is right, every time.