Poems
1918
Rainer Maria Rilke wrote poetry that makes you feel like you've been waiting your whole life without knowing it. These are poems written from the inside of solitude, where the self meets the world in moments of startling intimacy, and the boundaries between the human and the sacred dissolve. Here is a poet who found language for what has no language: the way death lives inside every beautiful thing, how loneliness can become a form of worship, the strange courage it takes to simply be alive. The collection moves from early work through the visionary heights of the Book of Hours and the Duino Elegies, tracing an evolution from delicate lyricism toward a rawer, more urgent spirituality. Rilke's verses ask you to look harder at the ordinary until it becomes luminous. A panther circles its cage. An archaic torso of Apollo still breathes. Autumn arrives like a guest we have always known. This is poetry for anyone who has ever felt the unbearable distance between what they feel and what they can say, and needed to find a voice anyway.
Editions
X-Ray
“For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“Yet, no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“A billion stars go spinning through the night,glittering above your head,But in you is the presence that will bewhen all the stars are dead.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“If no one else, the dying must notice how unreal, how full of pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is allowed to be itself.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“My life is not this steeply sloping hour,in which you see me hurrying.Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;I am only one of my many mouths,and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.I am the rest between two notes,which are somehow always in discordbecause Death’s note wants to climb over”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“Rose, oh pure contradiction, joyof being No-one's sleep under so manylids.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“There is time only to work slowlyThere is no time not to love””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“Oh hours of childhood,when behind each shape more than the past appearedand what streamed out before us was not the future.We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to grown up, half for the sakeof those with nothing left but their grownupness.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
“Harshness vanished. A sudden softness has replaced the meadows' wintry grey. Little rivulets of water changed their singing accents. Tendernesses, hesitantly, reach toward the earth from space, and country lanes are showing these unexpected subtle risings that find expression in the empty trees.””
— Rainer Maria Rilke
