Neue Gedichte
1907
In 1907, Rilke stumbled into a Paris exhibition of Cézanne's paintings and left transformed. Neue Gedichte emerges from that rupture - fifty-five poems that reject sentiment entirely, demanding instead that we witness the world with the precision of sculpture, the clarity of pure thought. Here, a panther prowls the hollows of its own reflection, a torso of Apollo fractures the silence with its impossible stare, and even a single rose becomes a blade of concentrated being. These are not poems about things. They are things themselves, rendered with such ferocious attention that language seems to forget its translucence and achieve weight, texture, presence. Rilke's radical proposition remains undiminished: that we have never truly seen anything until we have sung it into existence.
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“Oh quickly disappearing photograph in my more slowly disappearing hand.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“Whoever you are: in the evening step out of your room, where you know everything;””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“IN APRIL Again the woods are odorous, the lark Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark, Where branches bare disclosed the empty day. After long rainy afternoons an hour Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings Them at the windows in a radiant shower, And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings. Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies; And cradled in the branches, hidden deep In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“Perform no miracles for me, But justify Thy laws to me Which, as the years pass by me. All soundlessly unfold.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“O wondrous time, O spending on and on of time, O solitude.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“The bleak fields are asleep, My heart alone wakes; The evening in the harbour Down his red sails takes. Night, guardian of dreams, Now wanders through the land; The moon, a lily white, Blossoms within her hand.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,die sich über die Dinge ziehn.Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen,aber versuchen will ich ihn.Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm,und ich kreise jahrtausendelang;und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturmoder ein großer Gesang.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“Seldom have you smiled so tenderly, mothers. How could he help loving what smiled at him. Before you he loved it, since, while you carried him, it was dissolved in the waters, that render the embryo light.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“Wir haben nie, nicht einen einzigen Tag, den reinen Raum vor uns, in den die Blumen unendlich aufgehn.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
