Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke Read Free Book Online

really has him could lose him like a little pebble, or don’t you think that whoever had him could only be lost by him alone? – But if you acknowledge that he was not present in your childhood, and not before that, if you suspect that Christ was deceived by his longing and Mohammed betrayed by his pride, and if you feel with horror that even now he is not present, at the moment when we are talking about him, what then gives you the right to miss him who never was, as if he had disappeared, and to search for him as if he were lost?
    Why don’t you think of him as a coming god, who since eternity has lain ahead of us, the future one, the eventual fruit of a tree of which we are the leaves? What prevents you from casting his birth out into the times of becoming and from living your life like a painful and beautiful day in the history of a great pregnancy? Don’t you see how everything that happens is always a beginning again, and could it not be
His
beginning, given that beginnings are in themselves always so beautiful? If he is the complete being, must not slighter things come before him, so that he can pick himself out of fullness and abundance? – Must he not be the last in order toencompass all things in himself, and what significance would we have if the one whom we hanker for had already been?
    As the bees collect honey together, so we fetch the sweetness out of everything and build
Him
. We begin with the very slightest things, with what is barely noticeable (as long as it comes about through love), with our work and the repose that comes after, with a moment of silence or with a small solitary joy, with everything that we do on our own without helpers and accomplices, we begin him whom we shall never know, just as our ancestors could not live to know us. And yet they are in us, these people long since passed away, as a disposition, as a load weighing on our destinies, as a murmur in the blood and as a gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.
    Is there anything that can strip you of the hope of dwelling one day in him, the most remote, the most extreme?
    Dear Mr Kappus, celebrate Christmas in the piety of the feeling that He perhaps requires of you precisely this existential anxiety in order to begin. Precisely these days of transition are perhaps the period when everything in you is working on him, just as before, as a child, you worked on him withbated breath. Be patient and even-tempered and remember that the least we can do is not make his becoming more difficult than the earth makes it for spring when it decides to come.
    And I wish you happiness and confidence.
    Yours,
    Rainer Maria Rilke

Rome, 14 May 1904
    My dear Mr Kappus,
    Much time has gone past since I received your last letter. Don’t hold that against me; first it was work, then disruptions and finally ill-health that kept me from replying, whereas I wanted to write to you out of good, peaceful days. Now I feel a little better again (even here the beginning of spring with its bad and fickle transitions was hard to bear) and can manage to send you greetings, dear Mr Kappus, and (as I am very glad to do) say this and that about your letter, as best I can.
    You will see: I have copied out your sonnet because I found that it had beauty and simplicity and a native form in which it unfolds with such quiet propriety. It is the best of the verses of yours I have been permitted to read. And I’m giving you this copy now because I know that it is important and a whole new experience to come across a work of one’s own in a foreign hand. Read the lines as if they were unknown to you, and you will feel in your inmost self how very much they are yours. –
    It has been a pleasure for me to read this sonnet and your letter, which I did often. I thank you for both.
    And you must not let yourself be diverted out of your solitude by the fact that something in you wants to escape from it. Precisely this desire, if you use it calmly and judiciously, as a kind