Uncollected Poems Quotes

“Now we wake up with our memory
and fix our gazes on that which was;
whispering sweetness, which once coursed through us,
sits silently beside us with loosened hair”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems

“Overflowing heavens of squandered stars
flame brilliantly above your troubles. Instead
of into your pillows, weep up toward them.
There, at the already weeping, at the ending visage,
slowly thinning out, ravishing
worldspace begins. Who will interrupt,
once you've forced your way there,
the current? No one. You may panic,
and fight the overwhelming course of stars
that streams towards you. Breathe.
Breathe the darkness of the earth and again
look up! Again. Lightly and facelessly
depths lean toward you from above. The serene
countenance dissolved in night makes room for yours.

Paris, April 1913”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems

“Come when you should. All this will have been passing through me for you to breathe.
I have gazed at it for so long, for your sake,
namelessly, with the gaze of poverty,
and have loved it, as if already you drank it in.

And yet: when I recall that all this-
myself, stars, flowers, the sharp flight
of a bird out of gesturing brushwood,
the clouds' haughtiness and what the wind
could do to me at night, whisking me
out of one being into next,-that all this,
in endless succession (for I am all this,
am what the potion's roar left behind
in my ear, am the exquisite taste which once
a ripe fruit expended on my lips),-
that all this, when once you're really here,
all, even back to the boy's low gaze
into the chalices of high-grown flower fields,
even back to one of my mother's smiles
which I perhaps, thronged with your being,
shall think of as something stolen-, that all this
I then shall have to inexhaustibly outgive,
night and day, so much unsparingly
assimilated nature-, never knowing if what
begins to glow in you is mine: perhaps
you'll grow more beautiful entirely from your own beauty,
from the profusion of restedness in your limbs,
from what is sweetest in your blood,-for all I know,
because there is awareness even in your hand,
because your hair flatters your shoulders,
because something in the dark breeze
is one with you, because your forget me totally,
because you don't strain to hear, because you are a woman:
when I recall how I've thrust tenderness
into that blood I'd never startled,
the voiceless heartstream of things held dear

Toledo, November 1912”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems

“Come when you should. All this will have been/ passing through me for you to breathe.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems

“Unknowing before the heavens of my life/ I stand in wonder. O the great stars./ The rising and the going down. How quiet./ As if I didn't exist. Am I part? Have I dismissed/ the pure influence? Do high and low tide/ alternate in my blood according to this order?/ I will cast off all wishes, all other links,/ accustom my heart to its remotest space. Better/ it live in the terror of its stars than/ seemingly protected, soothed by something near.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems

“Losing is also ours; and even forgetting/ has a shape in the permanent realm of mutation./ Things we've let go of circle; and though we are rarely a center/ of these circles: they trace around us the unbroken figure.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems

“O espaço, fora de nós, ganha e traduz as coisas:
Se quiseres conquistar a existência de uma árvore,
Reveste-a de espaço interno, esse espaço
Que tem seu ser em ti. Cerca-a de coações.
Ela não tem limite, e só se torna realmente uma árvore
Quando se ordena no seio da tua renúncia.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Uncollected Poems