Poems to Night by Rilke Rainer Maria

Author:Rilke, Rainer Maria [Rilke, Rainer Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: poetry, Classics
ISBN: 9781782275534
Amazon: 1782275533
Goodreads: 54915217
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 1916-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

(Ronda, January 1913)

Straining so hard against the powerful night

they cast their voices into laughter,

that badly burns. O world in revolt,

so replete with refusal. And yet breathe space,

where the stars drift. Look, all of this has no need

and could surrender to the distance,

move away into the beyond, far from us.

Now, it returns and touches our faces with a look

like the glance of the beloved; it unfurls

before us and perhaps scatters in us

its existence. And we are not worthy.

Perhaps the angels lose some strength,

when after us the starry firmament yields

and hangs here within our mournful fate.

Futility. For who can know? And where

one might become aware: who yet wills

to rest his brow against the nocturnal space

as upon his own window? Who has not renounced this?

Who has not dragged into his primordial element

fakery, falsified, counterfeit nights?

We have abandoned our gods for mouldering waste,

for gods do not beguile. They have being

and nothing but being, abundance of being,

but not a scent, not a sign. Nothing is so mute

as a god’s mouth. Sublime as a swan

on its eternity of fathomless surface:

so goes the god, and dives, safeguards his whiteness.

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