Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke Read Free Book Online Page B

du nicht schreiten. Wie ein gestreckter
    Arm ist mein Rufen. Und seine zum Greifen
    oben offene Hand bleibt vor dir
    offen, wie Abwehr und Warnung,
    Unfaßlicher, weitauf.

THE SEVENTH ELEGY
    No longer, voice. No longer let wooing send forth your cry:
    you’re past that. Even though your cry would be clear as a bird’s
    when first Spring bears him aloft, almost forgetting
    that he’s a cautious creature and not an unsheathed heart
    being flung into brightness, into passionate skies.
    Like him, with all his art, you’d also woo—: invisibly,
    so that some silent mate might learn of you, and,
    as she listened, a reply would slowly wake and grow warm—
    the kindled complement of your own ardent feeling.
    O and Spring would understand—, annunciation
    would echo everywhere. First those small
    questioning notes, which a clear, confident day
    would surround with heightening silence.
    Then up the calls, up that long flight of steps to the dreamt-of
    temple of the future—; then the trill, that fountain,
    whose urgent jet is teased by its falling
    where promise is foreplay … And on ahead, the summer.
    Not only all of summer’s dawns—, not only
    how they change into day and gleam with genesis.
    Not only the days, so tender around flowers, and above,
    in the patterned treetops, so forceful and strong.
    Not only the calm reverence in these outspread powers,
    not only the paths, the meadows as evening deepens,
    not only, after late thunderstorms, the pulsing clarity,
    not only the onset of sleep and, near dusk, a premonition …
    But the nights! Those towering summer
    nights! And the stars, the stars of the earth!
    O to be dead and to know them endlessly,
    all the stars: for how, how, how to forget them!
    And thus: I’d call my lover. But not only she
    would come … Other girls would come from crumbling graves
    and stand before me … For could I limit
    my call to just one? The interred seek
    the earth’s surface forever. —You children: one present thing
    truly grasped would count for so many!
    The whole of destiny crowds into childhood;
    how often you would overtake your lover, panting,
    panting from the blissful chase, aimless, breaking into freedom.
    Life here is magic. Even you knew that, you girls
    who seemed deprived of it, who were trapped in the city’s
    vilest streets, festering there, or cast aside
    for rubbish. For each of you there was an hour, perhaps
    not even a full hour, but between two intervals
    a space not marked by the measures of time—,
    when you had an existence. Everything. Veins filled with existence.
    But we so easily forget what our laughing neighbor
    neither covets nor confirms. We want to lift it up
    and show it, even though the most visible happiness
    only reveals itself when we’ve transformed it, within.
    Nowhere, Love, will World exist but within. Our lives
    pass in transformation. And all the while the outside realm
    diminishes. Where once a solid house endured,
    some abstraction shoves itself into view, completely at ease
    among concepts, as if it still stood in the brain.
    The Zeitgeist is building vast reservoirs of power, formless
    as the thrusting energy it wrests from everything.
    It no longer recognizes temples. Furtively we hoard
    what the heart once lavished. Where one of them still survives,
    an object once prayed to, revered, knelt before—,
    it’s already reaching, secretly, into the invisible world.
    Many no longer see it, yet without the gain
    of rebuilding it greater now, with pillars and statues, within!
    Each dull turn of the world leaves such disinherited,
    to whom neither the past nor the coming life lends substance.
    For to humans even what comes next lies far away.
    This ought not baffle us but strengthen our defense
    of a still recognized form. —This once stood amidst men,
    stood amidst Fate, the destroyer, stood
    amidst Not-Knowing-Whither, as if it were alive there,
    and