Letters to a Young Poet: A New Translation and Commentary by Rainer Maria Rilke

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke [Rilke, Rainer Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781611806861
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 2021-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

LETTER SEVEN

Rome

May 14, 1904

My dear Mr. Kappus,

Much time has passed since I received your last letter. Please don’t hold it against me. First there was work, then disturbances, and finally ill health that impeded this reply that should have come to you from quiet and wholesome days. Early spring, with its wicked, moody changes, was awful here as well, but now I’m feeling somewhat better again and up to greeting you and to responding to some points in your letter.

You see, I’ve copied out your sonnet because I found it to be beautiful and simple and created in a classic form of such pleasing restraint. It’s the best of your poetry that I’ve read. And now I am offering you this copy because I know how important and novel an experience it is to come across one’s own work in another’s handwriting. Read these lines as though they were strange to you and you will recognize how very much they are yours.

I found joy in reading this sonnet and your letter often; I thank you for both. And don’t let your solitude obscure the presence of something within it that wants to emerge. Precisely this presence will help your solitude expand. People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult, as is true for everything alive. Everything in nature grows and defends itself in its own way and against all opposition, straining from within and at any price to become distinctively itself. It is good to be solitary, because solitude is difficult, and that a thing is difficult must be even more of a reason for us to undertake it.

To love is good too, for love is difficult. For one person to care for another, that is perhaps the most difficult thing required of us, the utmost and final test, the work for which all other work is but a preparation. With our whole being, with all the strength we have gathered, we must learn to love. This learning is ever a committed and enduring process.

To love is not about merging. It is a noble calling for the individual to ripen, to differentiate, to become a world in oneself in response to another. It is a great, immodest call that singles out a person and summons them beyond all boundaries. Only in this sense may we use the love that has been given us. This is humanity’s task, for which we are still barely ready.

Here young people err so often and so painfully: that they (who at their age find it hard to be patient) throw themselves at each other when love overcomes them, scatter themselves in tumultuous confusion. But how should it be? What is life to do with this tide of passionate feelings that they take for communion and that they would eagerly call their happiness and their future? Then each loses themself and loses the other and many others who

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