Poems to Night by Rainer Rilke (superbooks4u .TXT) 📕

to net shadows, for it is this ephemeral design which allows the poet to keep his vision malleable, on the move, to continually question and divine possibilities, to reach out, but not smother what he seeks as soon as he encounters it, for catching a glimpse is enough. As Rilke writes in the poem “Nocturnal Walk”, composed in Capri in 1908: “And whoever knows too much / the eternal will slip away from.” The Poems to Night confirm that it is this willed ambiguity, this patient tending of mystery which lends the poetry its surviving radiance in radically different atmospheres and epochs, such as our own. In this vein, Rilke’s extraordinary and sublime proposition, “Is night the sole reality / of a thousand years…” surely deserves no more than our consensual silence.

Will Stone,

Exmoor, 2020

* Anthony Stephens, Rainer Maria’s Gedichte an die Nacht: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1972).

POEMS TO NIGHT

The Siblings

O now we have, with what whimpering,

caressed ourselves, shoulders and eyelid.

And night has withdrawn into the rooms

like a wounded beast, in pain through us.

Were you elected from all for me,

was the sister not sufficient?

Lovely as a valley to me was your essence,

and now, too, from the prow of the heavens

it bows down an unfailing apparition

and he takes possession. Where to go?

Alas, with the gesture of mourning

you incline towards me, unconsoled.

(Paris, end of 1913)

When your face consumes me

like tears the one who weeps,

my brow, my mouth propagates

around the features I know for you.

(Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)

Once I took into my hands

your face. The moon fell upon it.

Most unfathomable of things

beneath an overflowing of tears.

Like a willing thing, quietly subsisting,

it was almost like holding something

and yet was no entity in the cold

night that infinitely eludes me.

Oh we stream towards these places,

pressing in on the narrow surface

all the waves of our heart;

yearning and weakness,

and to whom finally do we bear them?

Alas, to the stranger, who misunderstood us,

alas to the other, whom we never found,

to those servants, bound to us,

springtime winds, that with it vanished

and the loser, silence.

(Paris, end of 1913)

From face to face

what rising up.

From the guilty breaks out

sacrifice and forgiveness.

Does the night not blow cool,

splendidly distant,

moving across the centuries.

Raise the area of feeling.

Suddenly the angels

see the harvest.

(Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)

Look, angels sense through space

their infinite feelings.

Our incandescence would be their coolness.

Look, angels glow through space.

Whilst we, who know nothing more,

resist one thing, whilst another occurs in vain,

they stride on, enraptured by their intention,

across their fully formed domain.

(Paris, end of 1913)

Did I not breathe out of midnights,

on such a flood, for the love of you,

that someday you’d come?

For I hoped to appease your countenance

with almost unblemished magnificence,

when in eternal supposition

it rested awhile against mine.

Soundless the space in my outline;

in order to sate your great upward gaze

my blood was mirrored, deepened.

When through the olive trees’ pale separation

the night made me stronger with stars,

I rose, stood and turned back,

mastered the realization

I never referred to you later.

Oh what utterance was sown in me

should your smile ever come,

that I survey world space upon you.

But you don’t come, or you come too late.

Fall, angels, over this blue

flax field. Angels, angels, reap.

(Paris, end of 1913)

So, now it will be the angel

who drinks slowly from my features

the wine-enlightened face.

Thirsting, who signalled you to come?

How thirsty you are. God’s cataract

plunges through every vein. How

you can be so thirsty. Abandon

yourself to thirst. (How you have grasped me.)

And I feel, on the current, how your gaze

was parched, and towards your blood

so inclined that I overflow your brows,

those pure ones, completely.

(Paris, end of 1913)

Away, I asked you finally to taste my smile

(if it was not delectable),

in its irresistible approach behind the stars in the East

the angel waits that I make myself limpid.

That no look, no trace of yours limits him,

when he steps into the clearing;

let him be the suffering that afflicted me, wild nature:

and trust in the watering place.

Was I green or sweet to you, let us forget all,

or the shame will overtake us.

Whether I flower or expiate he will calmly appraise,

whom I did not tempt, who came…

(Paris, end of 1913)

Strong, silent, candelabra placed

on the edge: above the night becomes distinct;

we drain ourselves in unlit wavering

before your foundation.

Ours is: not to know the outcome

in the mad inner domain,

you appear out of our impediments

and glow like a high mountain range.

Your desire lies above our kingdom,

and we barely grasp what falls upon us;

like the pure night of the spring equinox

you are there, dividing day and day.

Who could ever infuse you

with the mixture that secretly dulls us?

You win glory from all that is monumental,

and we exist in the most trivial.

When we weep, we are nothing but touching,

where we look, we are at the highest awakening;

our smile is far from seducing,

and even when it does seduce, to whom does it attach?

(Anyone.) Angel, is this lament, is this lament?

What is it then, this lament of mine?

Alas, I shriek, with two pieces of wood I strike

without hope anyone will hear.

That I am noisy does not make you louder,

when you don’t feel me, because I am.

Light, light! Have the stars survey me

more ardently. For I am fading.

(Ronda, beginning of 1913)

Out of this cloud, see: the one that so wildly obscures

the star that was a moment past – (and me),

out of those mountainous lands there, which now have night,

night winds for a time – (and me),

out of this river on the valley floor, which catches

the gleam of a torn sky-clearing – (and me)

out of me and all of that, to make

a single thing, Lord: out of me and the feeling

with which the flock, returned to the pen,

in acquiescence breathe out the immense black

no-longer-being of the world – me and every light

in the darkness of so many houses, Lord:

to make one thing; out of strangers, for

there is not one I know, Lord, and me and me

to make one thing; out of the sleepers,

the old men in the hospice, those strangers

who cough gravely in their beds, and out of

sleep-drunk infants at a foreign breast,

out of so much