Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke—better known as Rainer Maria Rilke—was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. Several critics have described Rilke's work as inherently "mystical". His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry, and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief,...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth4 December 1875
CountryGermany
and I circle ten thousand years long; And I still don't know if I'm a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song
I live my life in widening circle That reach out across the world. I may not ever complete the last one, But I give myself to it. I circle around God, that primordial tower. I have been circling for thousands of years, And I still don't know: am I a falcon, A storm, or a great song? [I, 2]
I am circling around God, around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years, and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm, or a great song.
And you suddenly know: It was here! You pull yourself together, and there stands an irrevocable year of anguish and vision and prayer.
We wasters of sorrows! How we stare away into sad endurance beyond them, trying to foresee their end! Whereas they are nothing else than our winter foliage, our sombre evergreen, one of the seasons of our interior year.
May I strike my heart's keys clearly, and may none fail because of slack, uncertain, or fraying strings. May the tears that stream down my face make me more radiant: may my hidden weeping bloom.... How we waste our afflictions!... [T]hey're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year—; not only a season—: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.
And now let us believe in a long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been, full of work that has never been done, full of tasks, claims, and demands; and let us see that we learn to take it without letting fall too much of what it has to bestow upon those who demand of it necessary, serious, and great things.
That is the principle thing - not to remain with the dream, with the intention, with the being-in-the-mood, but always forcibly to convert it into all things
These soft nights hold me like themselves aloft and I lie without a lover.
...perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
One must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.
I have never been aware before how many faces there are. There are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.
A billion stars go spinning through the night, blazing high above your head. But in you is the presence that will be, when all the stars are dead.
For it is not simply because of mere sluggishness alone that human relationships repeat themselves from case to case in such unspeakable monotonous and unrefreshed ways; there is also a certain shyness for unforseeable experiences generally because one doesn't feel up for them. But only for the one that is on the lookout for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatic, will the relationship to another become something alive and to speak to the whole potential of one's existence.