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

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Simple, for a god. But when can we be real? When does he pour the earth, the stars, into us? Young man, it is not your loving, even if your mouth was forced wide open by your own voice—learn to forget that passionate music. It will end. True singing is a different breath, about nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.

Don’t be afraid to suffer; return that heaviness to the earth’s own weight; heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

Only he whose bright lyre has sounded in shadows may, looking onward, restore his infinite praise. Only he who has eaten poppies with the dead will not lose ever again the gentlest chord.

everything that has been wrestled from doubt I welcome—the mouths that burst open after long knowledge of what it is to be mute.

Oh unheard starry music! Isn’t your sound protected from all static by the ordinary business of our days?

Never has grief been possessed, never has love been learned, and what removes us in death is not revealed. Only the song through the land hallows and heals.

the swarm of rejected maenads attacked you, shrieking,

you overpowered their noise with harmony, and from pure destruction arose your transfigured song. Their hatred could not destroy your head or your lyre, however they wrestled and raged; and each one of the sharp stones that they hurled, vengeance-crazed, at your heart softened while it was in mid-flight, enchanted to hear.

hadn’t been. But from their love, a pure beast arose. They always left it room. And in that heart-space, radiant and bare, it raised its head and hardly needed to

They fed it, not with any grain, but always just with the thought that it might be. And this assurance gave the beast so much power,

grew a horn upon its brow. One horn. Afterward it approached a virgin, whitely— and was, inside the mirror and in her.

Flower-muscle that slowly opens back the anemone to another meadow-dawn,

until her womb can feel the polyphonic light of the sonorous heavens pouring down;

muscle of an infinite acceptance, stretched within the silent blossom-star, at times so overpowered with abundance that sunset’s signal for repose is bare- ly able to return your too far hurled- back petals for the darkne...

In your wealth you seem to be wearing gown upon gown upon a body of nothing but light;

each separate petal is at the same time the negation of all clothing and the refusal of it.

To dim the masterful hand’s more glorious lingering, for the determined structure it more rigidly cuts the stones.

playing of absolute

forces that no one can touch who has not knelt down in wonder.

And the transfigured Daphne, as she feels herself become laurel, wants you to change into wind.

be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Be—and yet know the great void where all things begin, the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,

O fountain-mouth, you generous, always-filled mouth that speaks pure oneness,

And if a jug slips in, she feels that you are interrupting her.

god is the hidden place that heals again.

We are sharp-edged, because we want to know,

Dancing girl: transformation of all transience into steps: how you offered it there. And the arm-raised whirl at the end, that tree made of motion, didn’t it fully possess the pivoted year?

Didn’t it, so that your previous swirling might swarm in the midst of it, suddenly blossom with stillness?

And above, wasn’t it sunshine, wasn’t it summer, the warmth, the pure, immeasurab...

But it bore fruit also, it bore fruit, your...

Aren’t they here in their tranquil season: the jug, whirling to ripeness, and the...

Sing of the gardens, my heart, that you never saw; as if glass domes had been placed upon them, unreached forever.

Show that you always feel them, forever close.

Avoid the illusion that there can be any lack for someone who wishes, then fully decides: to be!

Silken thread, you were woven into the fabric. Whatever the design with which you are inwardly joined (even for only one moment amid years of grief), feel that the whole, the marvelous carpet is meant.

the bronze bell that, day after day, can lift its club to shatter our dull quotidian hum.

Or the only presence, in Karnak, the column, the column in which temples that were almost eternal have been outlived.

But this frenzy too will subside, leaving no traces.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,

whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing. To the flashing water say: I am.

My phone won’t charge and just as I was about to update my highlights it died.