Poem of the Day

I’m quickly cycling through the poets in my usual rotation, and while I love my old standby poets, I need new material (and time to read it)!

The Man Watching
By Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

I’m headed to the wilds of West Texas today so the PotD will be on hiatus until after Thanksgiving. Have a lovely holiday!

Sunset
By Rainer Maria Rilke

Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colors
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,

leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so hopelessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs—

leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.

Here’s another by Rilke.

Pont du Carrousel
By Rainer Maria Rilke

That blind man, standing on the bridge, as gray
as some abandoned empire’s boundary stone,
perhaps he is the one thing that never shifts,
around which the stars move in their hours,
and the motionless hub of the constellations.
For the city drifts and rushes and struts around him.

He is the just man, the immovable
set down here in many tangled streets;
the dark opening to the underworld
among a superficial generation.

This is good to read when I feel like my life is out of control…

My life is not this steeply sloping hour
By 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 discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
                    And the song goes on, beautiful.

I love the uncertainty in this poem.

I live my life in growing orbits
By Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

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.

Reading Rilke’s poetry really makes me wish I knew German so I could get the full effect. It’s amazing that his work is this incredible, even when I know that something must be lost in translation.

The Song the Widow Sings
By Rainer Maria Rilke

At first life was good to me.
It kept me warm, it gave me courage.
Of course it does that to all the young,
but how could I have known that?
I had no idea what life was—
suddenly it was nothing but year after year,
not good anymore, not fresh anymore, not wonderful anymore,
as if torn in two pieces down the center.

It wasn’t his fault, and it wasn’t mine;
neither of us had much except patience,
and death didn’t have any.
I saw him come (what an ugly sight),
and I watched him, while he took and took:
of course what he took wasn’t mine.

What did belong to me then, what did I have that was mine?
Wasn’t even my grief
only a loan from Fate?
Fate wants not only the happiness,
he wants the pain and the screaming back,
and he buys it all secondhand.

Fate was there and got for almost nothing
every expression on my face,
everything except the way I walk.
Every day he had a clearance sale,
and when I was empty, he walked out
and left the door open.

I have several poems by Rilke in my stockpile, so let’s go with one of his today.

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 its inner light, even from a distance—

and changes 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.

I have quite a few poems by Rilke in my file, so here’s one of them.

You darkness, that I come from
By 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.

A quick post before I go to bed…

I love the dark hours of my being
By Rainer Maria Rilke

I love the dark hours of my being
in which my senses drop into the deep.
I have found in them, as in old letters,
my private life, that is already lived through,
and become wide and powerful now, like legends.
Then I know that there is room in me
for a second huge and timeless life.

But sometimes I am like the tree that stands
over a grave, a leafy tree, fully grown,
who has lived out that particular dream, that the dead boy
(around whom its warm roots are pressing)
lost through his sad moods and his poems.

I was flipping through my book of Rilke’s poetry and came across this one.

The Panther
IN THE JARDIN DES PLANTES, PARIS
By Rainer Maria Rilke

From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted
that it no longer holds anything anymore.
To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand
bars, and behind the bars, nothing.

The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride
which circles down to the tiniest hub
is like a dance of energy around a point
in which a great will stands stunned and numb.

Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise
without a sound—then a shape enters,
slips through the tightened silence of the shoulders,—
reaches the heart, and dies.

I wish that I could read German, because I feel I would get more out of Rilke’s poetry were that the case. I think that it must be wonderful in the native language if I am so moved by the translation.

The Solitary Man
By Rainer Maria Rilke

No, what my heart will be is a tower,
and I will be right out on its rim:
nothing else will be there, only pain
and what can’t be said, only the world.

Only one thing left in the enormous space
that will go dark and then light again,
only one final face full of longing,
exiled into what is always full of thirst,

only one farthest-out face made of stone,
at peace with its own inner weight,
which the distances, who go on ruining it,
force on to deeper holiness.

At the bookstore I also got a book of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry (as translated by Robert Bly), which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Here’s the first poem I opened up to and it seemed appropriate. (The German title is Herbsttag. You can find other translations here.)

October Day
By Rainer Maria Rilke

Oh Lord, it’s time, it’s time. It was a great summer.
Lay your shadow now on the sundials,
and on the open fields let the winds go!

Give the tardy fruits the hint to fill;
give them two more Mediterranean days,
Drive them on into their greatness, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house by now will not build.
Whoever is alone now will remain alone,
will wait up, read, write long letters,
and walk along sidewalks under large trees,
not going home, as the leaves fall and blow away.

I’m at my aunt and uncle’s house and my aunt has a book of poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. This is the first one I opened up to.

What birds plunge through is not the intimate space
By Rainer Maria Rilke

What birds plunge through is not the intimate space
in which you see all forms intensified.
(Out in the Open, you would be denied
your self, would disappear into that vastness.)

Space reaches from us and construes the world:
to know a tree, in its true element,
throw inner space around it, from that pure
abundance in you. Surround it with restraint.
It has no limits. Not till it is held
in your renouncing is it truly there.