The Duino Elegies & The Sonnets to Orpheus: A Dual Language Edition (Vintage International)

by Rainer Maria Rilke

for such a long time I have found meaning in the way you almost completely omit your blossoms and urge your pure mystery, unproclaimed, into the early ripening fruit. Like the curved pipe of a fountain, your arching boughs drive the sap downward and up again: and almost without awakening it bursts out of sleep, into its sweetest achievement. Like the god stepping into the swan. …… But we still linger, alas,

we, whose pride is in blossoming; we enter the

overdue interior of our final fruit and are already betrayed. In only a few does the urge to action rise up so powerfully that they stop, glowing in their heart’s abundance, while, like the soft night air, the temptation to blossom touches their tender mouths, touches their eyelids, softly: heroes perhaps, and those chose...

Truly being here is glorious. Even you knew it, you girls who seemed to be lost, to go under—, in the filthiest streets of the city, festering there, or wide open for garbage. For each of you had an hour, or perhaps not even an hour, a barely measurable time between two moments—, when you were granted a sense of being. Everything. Your veins flowed with being. But we can so easily forget what our laughing neighbor neither confirms nor envies. We want to display it, to make it visible, though even the most visible happiness can’t reveal itself to us until we transform it, within.