Rainer Maria Rilke 1875-1926

 

Archaic Torso of Apollo1

 

We cannot know his legendary head2

With eyes like ripening fruit.  And yet his torso

Is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

Like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

 

Gleams in all its power.  Otherwise

The curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

A smile run through placid hips and thighs

To that dark center where procreation flared.

 

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

Beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

And would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

 

Would not, from all the borders of itself,

Burst like a star: for here there is no place

That does not see you.  You must change your life.

 

1All selections translated by Stephen Mitchell.  The first poem in the second volume of Rilke’s New Poems (1908), which were dedicated “to my good friend, Auguste Rodin” (the French sculptor, 1840-1917), whose secretary Rilke was for a brief period and on whom he wrote two monographs).  The poem itself was inspired by an ancient Greek statue discovered at Miletus (a Greek colony on the coast of Asia Minor) that was called simply the Torso of a Youth from Miletus; since the god Apollo was an ideal of youthful male beauty, his name was often associated with such statues.

 

2In a torso, the head and limbs are missing.

 

 

The Panther

In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris1

 

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

Has grown so weary that it cannot hold

Anything else.  It seems to him there are

A thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

 

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

The movement of his powerful soft strides

Is like a ritual dance around a center

In which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

 

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils

Lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,

Rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,

Plunges into the heart and is gone.

 

1 The Jardin des Plantes is a zoo in Paris.  Rilke also admired, at Rodin’s studio, the plaster cast of an ancient statue of a panther.

The Ninth Elegy

from the Duino Elegies

Why, if it's possible to spend this span
of existence as laurel, a little darker than all
other greens, with little waves on every
leaf-edge (like the smile of a breeze), why, then,
must we be human and, shunning destiny,
long for it? . . .

    Oh, not because happiness,
that over-hasty profit of loss impending, exists.
Not from curiosity, or to practise the heart,
that would also be in the laurel . . .
but because to be here is much, and the transient Here
seems to need and concern us strangely. Us, the most transient.
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.
And we also once, Never again. But this having been
once, although only once, to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.

And so we drive ourselves and want to achieve it,
want to hold it in our simple hands,
in the surfeited gaze and in the speechless heart.
want to become it. Give it to whom? Rather
keep all forever . . . but to the other realm,
alas, what can be taken? Not the power of seeing,
learned here so slowly, and nothing that's happened here.
Nothing. Maybe the suffering? Before all, the heaviness
and long experience of love—unutterable things.
But later, under the stars, what then? They are better untold of.
The wanderer does not bring a handful of earth,
the unutterable, from the mountain slope to the valley,
but a pure word he has learned, the blue
and yellow gentian. Are we here perhaps just to say:
house, bridge, well, gate, jug, fruit tree, window—
at most, column, tower . . . but to say, understand this, to say it
as the Things themselves never fervently thought to be.
Is it not the hidden cunning of secretive earth
when it urges on the lovers, that everything seems transfigured
in their feelings? Threshold, what is it for two lovers
that they wear away a little of their own older doorstill,
they also, after the many before,
and before those yet coming . . . lightly?

Here is the time for the unutterable, here, its country.
Speak and acknowledge it. More than ever
the things that we can live by are falling away,
supplanted by an action without symbol.
An action beneath crusts that easily crack, as soon as
the inner working outgrows and otherwise limits itself.
Our heart exists between hammers,
like the tongue between the teeth,
but notwithstanding, the tongue
always remains the praiser.

Praise the world to the angel, not the unutterable world;
you cannot astonish him with your glorious feelings;
in the universe, where he feels more sensitively,
you're just a beginner. Therefore, show him the simple
thing that is shaped in passing from father to son,
that lives near our hands and eyes as our very own.
Tell him about the Things. He'll stand amazed, as you stood
beside the rope-maker in Rome, or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how blameless and ours;
how even the lamentation of sorrow purely decides
to take form, serves as a thing, or dies
in a thing, and blissfully in the beyond
escapes the violin. And these things that live,
slipping away, understand that you praise them;
transitory themselves, they trust us for rescue,
us, the most transient of all. They wish us to transmute them
in our invisible heart—oh, infinitely into us! Whoever we are.

Earth, isn't this what you want: invisibly
to arise in us? Is it not your dream
to be some day invisible? Earth! Invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your insistent commission?
Earth, dear one, I will! Oh, believe it needs
not one more of your springtimes to win me over.
One, just one, is already too much for my blood.
From afar I'm utterly determined to be yours.
You were always right and your sacred revelation is the intimate death.
Behold, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows less . . . surplus of existence
is welling up in my heart.