The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria R…
Metadata
- Author: Rainer Maria Rilke
Highlights
That voice of Rilke’s poems, calling us out of ourselves, or calling us into the deepest places in ourselves, is very near to what people mean by poetry. It is also what makes him difficult to read thoughtfully. He induces a kind of trance, as soon as the whispering begins: — location: 266
It is as if he were peeling off layers of the apparent richness of the self, arguing us back to the poverty of a great, raw, objectless longing. — location: 285
The only explanation for it he ever offered was to say that he found the language useful, since there was “in German no exact equivalent for the French word absence, in the great positive sense with which Paul Valéry used it.” For what Orpheus has done is to turn the hut of our emptiness into something positive, into a temple, and that is also apparently what Rilke felt Valéry had done. The project of his poetry, then, was to find, in art, a way to transform the emptiness, the radical deficiency, of human longing into something else. — location: 312
As the poet pulled away from the social world the words in a poem pulled away from referential meaning. Poetry was an art near to music. It did not reach down to the mere world of objects. It made a music which lifted the traces of objects where they half survived in the referential meaning of words—street, apple, tree—toward a place where they lived a little in the eternal stillness of the poem. Something like this idea—it went by the name of symbolism—was inherited by the last, decadent or Parnassian, generation of nineteenth-century poets. The poem was to have as little commerce as possible with the middle-class world, and the poet, in his isolation, served only his art, which was itself in the service of beauty. — location: 323
As the poet pulled away from the social world the words in a poem pulled away from referential meaning. Poetry was an art near to music. It did not reach down to the mere world of objects. It made a music which lifted the traces of objects where they half survived in the referential meaning of words—street, apple, tree—toward a place where they lived a little in the eternal stillness of the poem. Something like this idea—it went by the name of symbolism—was inherited by the last, decadent or Parnassian, generation of nineteenth-century poets. The poem was to have as little commerce as possible with the middle-class world, and the poet, in his isolation, served only his art, which was itself in the service of beauty. — location: 323
Rilke, deciding to write poems about really seeing, wrote immediately a poem about the exhaustion of seeing. It took him to a much deeper place, and stripped away entirely the lyrical ego of his early poems. — location: 473
is loyal to the ideal rather than the actual. But in “Archaic Torso,” the thought tends to muscle past the line-end to complete itself in a restless pause at mid-line, and then plunge onward. Sculpture provides an analogy. — location: 507
Looking at things, he saw nothing—or, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, “the nothing”—that arose from his hunger for a more vivid and permanent world. He had a wonderful eye for almost anything he really looked at, dogs, children, qualities of light, works of art; but in the end he looked at them in order to take them inside himself and transform them: to soak them in his homelessness and spiritual hunger so that when he returned them to the world, they were no more at home in it than he was, and gave off unearthly light. — location: 542
Looking at things, he saw nothing—or, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, “the nothing”—that arose from his hunger for a more vivid and permanent world. He had a wonderful eye for almost anything he really looked at, dogs, children, qualities of light, works of art; but in the end he looked at them in order to take them inside himself and transform them: to soak them in his homelessness and spiritual hunger so that when he returned them to the world, they were no more at home in it than he was, and gave off unearthly light. — location: 542
His own being was otherness to him. It compelled him in the way that sexual otherness compels lovers. — location: 735
This energy and freedom of movement become, in the long run, not just how the poem is written but what it is about. — location: 844
He felt the energy of life starting up out of death in this most profound and ordinary way. That is why Orpheus also represents more than poetry. He stands where human beings stand, in the middle of life and death, coming and going. — location: 904
the untranslatable heart of Rilke’s late poetry: Gesang ist Dasein, singing is being, or song is reality, the moment when the pure activity of being consciously alive is sufficient to itself: — location: 925
the untranslatable heart of Rilke’s late poetry: Gesang ist Dasein, singing is being, or song is reality, the moment when the pure activity of being consciously alive is sufficient to itself: — location: 925
It is wonderful just to be able to watch the world come flooding in on this poet, who had held it off for so long. Human feeling is not so problematical here. It does not just evaporate; it flows through things and constitutes them. — location: 979
The point is to show, to praise. Being human, the poem says, being in the world is to be constantly making one’s place in language, in consciousness, in imagination. The work, “steige zurück in den reinen Bezug,” is “to rise again into pure relation.” Singing is being. It creates our presence. — location: 981
The point is to show, to praise. Being human, the poem says, being in the world is to be constantly making one’s place in language, in consciousness, in imagination. The work, “steige zurück in den reinen Bezug,” is “to rise again into pure relation.” Singing is being. It creates our presence. — location: 981
Eurydice has become the non-being from which being is born; he has planted her, quietly, at the center of himself. In the peace that follows, and the tenderness, the ending of the poem is almost flippant: cancel the count. — location: 1035
Oh quickly disappearing photograph in my more slowly disappearing hand. — location: 1267
it lies raging on the floor, still blazing up, and the flames refuse to die—. — location: 1291
it lies raging on the floor, still blazing up, and the flames refuse to die—. — location: 1291
Like a fruit suffused with its own mystery and sweetness, she was filled with her vast death, which was so new, she could not understand that it had happened. — location: 1379
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island, and that man’s property no longer. — location: 1388
One more time he saw the girl’s face, for just a moment, turning toward him with a smile that was as radiant as a hope and almost was a promise: to return from out of the abyss of death, grown fully, to him, who was still alive— — location: 1467
you see yourself, tiny, inside the golden amber of her eyeballs suspended, like a prehistoric fly. — location: 1515
One more time he saw the girl’s face, for just a moment, turning toward him with a smile that was as radiant as a hope and almost was a promise: to return from out of the abyss of death, grown fully, to him, who was still alive— — location: 1467
The secret of that life of his which had never yet come into being, spread out before him. Involuntarily he left the footpath and went running across the fields, with outstretched arms, as if in this wide reach he would be able to master several directions at once. And then he flung himself down behind some bush and didn’t matter to anyone. He peeled himself a willow flute, threw a pebble at some small animal, he leaned over and forced a beetle to turn around: none of this became fate, and the sky passed over him as over nature. — location: 1863
Can he stay and conform to this lying life of approximations which they have assigned to him, and come to resemble them all in every feature of his face? Can he divide himself between the delicate truthfulness of his will and the coarse deceit which corrupts it in his own eyes? Can he give up becoming what might hurt those of his family who have nothing left but a weak heart? — location: 1882
Is the word “rebellious” really that bad? The adults always mention the rebellious period with such troubled look and, more extremely, sighs and curses. Maybe it is because their project of molding has failed and as the son flees from the grasp of their power, they are irritated. But of course, the way that is not rebellious is the way of the establisment. Maybe it is just because this way is safer to tread.
Even during the time when poverty terrified him every day with new hardships, when his head was the favorite toy of misery, and utterly worn ragged by it, when ulcers broke out all over his body like emergency eyes against the blackness of tribulation, when he shuddered at the filth to which he had been abandoned because he was just as foul himself: even then, when he thought about it, his greatest terror was that someone would respond to him. What were all the darknesses of that time, compared with the thick sorrow of those embraces in which everything was lost? Didn’t you wake up feeling that you had no future? Didn’t you walk around drained of all meaning, without the right to even the slightest danger? Didn’t you have to promise, a hundred times, not to die? Perhaps it was the stubbornness of this most painful memory, which wanted to reserve a place in him to return to again and again, that allowed him, amid the dunghills, to continue living. Finally, he found his freedom again. And not until then, not until his years as a shepherd, was there any peace in his crowded past. — location: 1896
The crowded past - so poignant. Reminds me of a poem of Dickinson - Pain has an element of blank.
The humble love that his sheep felt for him was no burden; like sunlight falling through clouds, it dispersed around him and softly shimmered upon the meadows. On the innocent trail of their hunger, he walked silently over the pastures of the world. — location: 1906
So beautifully written - “the innocent trail of their hunger”
He was like someone who hears a glorious language and feverishly decides to write poetry in it. — location: 1918
From the roots of his being grew the sturdy evergreen plant of a fruitful joyousness. He became totally absorbed in mastering what constituted his inner life; he didn’t want to omit anything, for he had no doubt that in all this his love existed and was growing. — location: 1929
We ignore the gods and fill our minds with trash. For gods do not entice. They have their being, and nothing else: an overflow of being. Not scent or gesture. Nothing is so mute as a god’s mouth. As lovely as a swan on its eternity of unfathomed surface, the god glides by, plunges, and spares his whiteness. — location: 2042
Oh disobedient world, full of refusal. And yet it breathes the space in which the stars revolve. It doesn’t need us, and, at any time, abandoned to the distance, could spin off in remoteness, far from us. And now it deigns to touch our faces, softly, like a loved woman’s glance; it opens up in front of us, and may be spilling out its essence on us. — location: 2030
Does the world refuse us, or it is actually us who refuse it?
For who has noticed it? — location: 2038
the power of noticing
Often I gazed at you in wonder: stood at the window begun the day before, stood and gazed at you in wonder. — location: 2054
Connect: Straining so hard at the strength of night Rilke noticed the voice of God.
hotel’s distracted unnoticing bedroom moody around him, — location: 2116
again about noticing - how to look at things
For there is a boundary to looking. And the world that is looked at so deeply wants to flourish in love. — location: 2125
Work of the eyes is done, now go and do heart-work on all the images imprisoned within you; for you overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them. Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman, the one attained from a thousand natures, the merely attained but not yet beloved form. — location: 2127
anima and animus - integrating the other half in our soul.
But we, while we are intent upon one object, already feel the pull of another. Conflict is second nature to us. Aren’t lovers always arriving at each other’s boundaries?— although they promised vastness, hunting, home. — location: 2444
we never know the actual, vital contour of our own emotions—just what forms them from outside. — location: 2449
Our focus is in the external environment, and not something within
Murderers are easy to understand. But this: that one can contain death, the whole of death, even before life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart gently, and not refuse to go on living, is inexpressible. — location: 2495
Like a Greek tragedy
Fig-tree, 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. — location: 2584
But Fate, which is silent about us, suddenly grows inspired and sings him into the storm of his onrushing world. — location: 2603
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. — location: 2658
the alchemy of happiness
Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us. Our life passes in transformation. And the external shrinks into less and less. Where once an enduring house was, now a cerebral structure crosses our path, completely belonging to the realm of concepts, as though it still stood in the brain. — location: 2660
epistemology
If the animal moving toward us so securely in a different direction had our kind of consciousness—, it would wrench us around and drag us along its path. But it feels its life as boundless, unfathomable, and without regard to its own condition: pure, like its outward gaze. And where we see the future, it sees all time and itself within all time, forever healed. — location: 2722
sense of security provided by an unassuming outward gaze
And we: spectators, always, everywhere, turned toward the world of objects, never outward. It fills us. We arrange it. It breaks down. We rearrange it, then break down ourselves. — location: 2744
so we live here, forever taking leave. — location: 2750
elergy the poem of departure
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. — location: 2763
But to say them, you must understand, oh to say them more intensely than the Things themselves ever dreamed of existing. — location: 2780
Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; as you stood by the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile. Show him how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours, how even lamenting grief purely decides to take form, serves as a Thing, or dies into a Thing—, and blissfully escapes far beyond the violin.—And these Things, which live by perishing, know you are praising them; transient, they look to us for deliverance: us, the most transient of all. They want us to change them, utterly, in our invisible heart, within—oh endlessly—within us! — location: 2798
Neither childhood nor future grows any smaller ….. Superabundant being wells up in my heart. — location: 2814
A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence! Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear! And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared. — location: 3019
When there is poetry, it is Orpheus singing. He lightly comes and goes. — location: 3060
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive. — location: 3133
And if the earthly no longer knows your name, whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing. To the flashing water say: I am. — location: 3207
O gods, gods! who used to come so often and are still asleep in the Things around us, who serenely rise and at wells that we can only guess at splash icy water on your necks and faces, and lightly add your restedness to what seems already filled to bursting: our full lives. — location: 3326