“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.
Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke
All posts tagged Rainer Maria Rilke
“You have not grown old, and it is not too late
To dive into your increasing depths
where life calmly gives out its own secret.”
“You must give birth to your images.
They are the future waiting to be born.
Fear not the strangeness you feel.
The future must enter you long before it happens.
Just wait for the birth, for the the hour of the new clarity.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
A Walk
by Rainer Maria Rilke
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-
and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
You Who Never Arrived
~ Rainer Maria Rilke
You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved,
you who were lost from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up
trying to recognize you in the surging wave
of the next moment. All the immense
images in me – the deeply felt
faraway landscape, cities, towers, bridges,
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods –
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You who are all the gardens
I have ever gazed at.
An open window in a country house –
and you almost stepped out to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon –
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same bird
echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening . . .
On Darkness, – Rainer Maria Rilke
“You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.
But the darkness pulls in everything;
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!—
powers and people—
and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.
I have faith in nights.”
Carol of the Bells – Nox Arcana
Before us great Death stands
Our fate held close within his quiet hands.
When with proud joy we lift Life’s red wine
To drink deep of the mystic shining cup
And ecstasy through all our being leaps—
Death bows his head and weeps.
Rainer Maria Rilke
“Everything is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors,
there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke
Maverick Mist 