Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

Author:Rainer Maria Rilke
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466872622
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2016-05-20T16:00:00+00:00

THE SIXTH ELEGY

O fig tree, how long I’ve pondered you—

the way you almost skip flowering completely

and release, unheralded, your pure secret

into the sprigs of fruit already poised to ripen.

Like a fountain’s pipe, your bent boughs drive the sap

downward and up: and it leaps from sleep, almost

without waking, into the joy of its sweetest achievement.

Look: like the god into the swan.

. . . . . . But we, for our part, linger,

ah, flowering flatters us; the belated inner place

that is our culminating fruit we enter spent, betrayed.

Only a few feel the sap of action rise so strongly

that they’re stationed and glowing in their heart’s fullness

by the time the allure of flowering touches their eyelids,

touches their lips’ youthfulness, like soft nocturnal air—

heroes perhaps, and those destined to leave early,

whose veins gardener Death twists in a different fashion.

These plunge on, in advance of their own smiles,

the way those teams of chargers precede the conquering

kings in the gentle bas-reliefs at Karnak.

Oddly, the hero resembles the youthful dead. Permanence

does not concern him. Ascent is his existence; time and again

he annuls himself and enters the changed constellation

of his unchanging danger. Few would find him there. But Fate,

which wraps us in mute obscurity, grows ecstatic

and sings him into the storms of his tumultuous world.

I hear no one like him. But suddenly I’m pierced

by his darkened music, borne swiftly by the rush of air.

Then how gladly I would hide from that longing! If only,

oh if only I were a boy with the unknown yet before me

as I sat propped on my future’s arms, reading about Samson,

how his mother bore nothing at first, then—everything.

Was he not always the hero, O mother, even in you?

Did it not already begin there in you, his imperious choosing?

Thousands teemed in the womb, wanting to be him,

but look: he seized and excluded—, chose and made good.

If he crushed columns, it was when he burst

from the world of your body into the narrower world,

where he continued to choose and make good. O mothers of heroes,

O source of torrential rivers! You ravines into which,

high on the heart’s rim, lamenting virgins

have cast themselves, lives-to-be sacrificed to the son.

For even as the hero stormed through love’s arbors,

each heartbeat meant for him bore him upward and on: until

turned away already, he stood at the end of the smiles,

—someone new.

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