A Purely Human Place

If only we too could find some defined, narrow,
purely human place, our own small strip of fertile soil
between stream and stone. For even now our heart
transcends us . . .

RILKE Duino Elegies: The Second Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)

Forever Taking Leave

And we: Spectators, always, everywhere,

looking at, never out of, everything!

It overfills us. We arrange it. It falls apart.

We rearrange it, and fall apart ourselves.

Who has turned us around like this, so that

always, no matter what we do, we're in the stance

of someone just departing? As he,

on the last hill that shows him all his valley

one last time, turns, stops, lingers —,

we live our lives, forever taking leave.

RILKE Duino Elegies: The Eighth Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)

O Fig Tree

O fig tree, how long I've pondered you —
the way you almost skip flowering completely
and release, unheralded, your pure secret
into the sprigs of fruit already poised to ripen.
Like a fountain's pipe, your bent boughs drive the sap
downward and up: and it leaps from sleep, almost
without waking, into the joy of its sweetest achievement.
Look: like the god into the swan.
                                                        . . . . . . But we, for our part, linger,
ah, flowering flatters us; the belated inner place
that is our culminating fruit we enter spent, betrayed.

RILKE Duino Elegies: The Sixth Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)

(Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the pictures)

Angels

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?

RILKE Duino Elegies: The First Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)

Why can't they hear me, the angels?

Because they are far too busy meditating, mediating and annunciating . . .

. . . and pinned like butterflies . . .

. . . being frozen in paint and fresco . . .

. . . in galleries, museums and medieval churches . . .

. . . or publicising their appearance in new-age self-help books.

(Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the pictures)

The Sayable And the Unsayable

 . . . Ah, but what can one carry across

into that other relation? Not the art of seeing,

learned so slowly here, and no event that transpired here. Not one.

The pain, then. Above all, the hard labor of living,

the long experience of love, — all the purely

unsayable things. But later on,

among the stars, what then: there the unsayable reigns.

The traveler doesn't bring from the mountain slope

into the valley some handful of sod, around which all stand mute,

but a word he's gained, a pure word, the yellow and blue

gentian . . .

 . . . What if we're here just for saying: house,

bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window, —

at most: column, tower . . . but for saying, understand,

oh for such saying as the things themselves

never hoped so intensely to be. Isn't this the sly purpose

of the taciturn earth, when it urges lovers on:

that in their passion each single thing should find ecstasy?

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home.

Speak and attest. More than ever

the things we can live with are falling away,

and ousting them, filling their place: a will with no image.

Will beneath crusts which readily crack

whenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders.

Between the hammers our heart

lives on, as the tongue,

even between the teeth, remains

unceasing in praise.

RILKE Duino Elegies: The Ninth Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)

(For AS Kline's line-by-line commentary on Rilke's Ninth Elegy, please click here.)

O Trees Of Life

O trees of life, how far off is winter?

We're in disarray. Our minds don't commune

like those of migratory birds. Left behind and late,

we force ourselves suddenly on winds

and fall, exhausted, on indifferent waters.

Blooming makes us think of fading.

And somewhere out there lions still roam, oblivious,

in all their splendor, to any weakness.

RILKE Duino Elegies: The Fourth Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW) 

When A Happy Thing Falls

But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:
they might point to the catkins hanging
from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain
descending on black earth in early spring. —

And we, who always think of happiness
rising, would feel the emotion
that almost baffles us
when a happy thing falls.

RILKE Duino Elegies: The Tenth Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)

(Thanks to Wikimedia Commons for the pictures) 

The Interpreted World

. . . how little at home we are

in the interpreted world. That leaves us

some tree on a hillside, on which our eyes fasten

day after day; leaves us yesterday's street

and the coddled loyalty of an old habit

that liked it here, stayed on, and never left.

RILKE Duino Elegies: The First Elegy (Translated by EDWARD SNOW)