February 2003
by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated from the German by Edward Snow
The First Elegy
Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed
in his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure,
and we stand in awe of it as it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every angel is terrifying.
And so I check myself and swallow the luring call
of dark sobs. Alas, whom can we turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in the interpreted world. That leaves us
some tree on a hillside, on which our eyes fasten
day after day; leaves us yesterday's street
and the coddled loyalty of an old habit
that liked it here, stayed on, and never left.
O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace
gnaws at our faces --, for whom won't the night be there,
desired, gently disappointing, a hard rendezvous
for each toiling heart. Is it easier for lovers?
Ah, but they only use each other to hide what awaits them.
You still don't see? Cast the emptiness from your arms
into the spaces we breathe: perhaps the birds
will sense the increase of air with more passionate flying.
Yes, the springtimes needed you. Many a star was waiting
for your eyes only. A wave swelled toward you
out of the past, or a violin surrendered itself
as you walked by an open window. All that was mission.
But were you up to it? Weren't you always
distracted by expectation, as though each moment
announced a beloved's coming? (But where would you keep her,
with all those huge strange thoughts in you
going and coming and sometimes staying the night?)
No, in longing's grip sing women who loved:
their feats of passion still lack undying fame.
The bereft ones you almost envy, since you
found them so much bolder in love than those fulfilled.
To begin ever anew their impossible praise.
Remember: the hero lives on. Even his downfall
was only a pretext for attained existence, a final birth.
But nature, depleted, takes back into herself
women who loved, as though she lacked the strength
to create them a second time. Have you invoked Gaspara Stampa
enough so that any girl abandoned by her lover
would feel from this exalted model
of a woman's love: let me be as she was!
Isn't it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours
grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves
from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived:
the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string
to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.
Voices, voices. Listen, my heart, as before now
only saints had listened, while that vast call
raised them off the ground; yet they paid no heed
and kept on kneeling, those impossible ones,
listening wholly absorbed. Not that you could bear
God's voice -- by no means. But listen to the wind's breathing,
that uninterrupted news that springs from silence.
It's rustling toward you now from all the youthful dead.
When you entered a church in Rome or Naples,
didn't their fate speak quietly to you?
Or an inscription echoed deep inside you,
as, not long ago, that tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.
Their charge to me? -- that I brush gently aside
the veil of injustice that sometimes
hinders a bit their spirits' pure movement.
True, it's strange to dwell on earth no longer,
to cease practicing customs barely learned,
not to give roses and other things of such promise
a meaning in some human future;
to stop being what one was in endlessly anxious hands,
and ignore even one's own name like a broken toy.
Strange, not to go on wishing one's wishes. Strange
to see all that was once so interconnected
now floating in space. And death demands a labor,
a tying up of loose ends, before one has
the first feeling of eternity. -- But the living
all make the same mistake: they distinguish too sharply.
Angels (it's said) often don't know whether they move among
the living or the dead. The eternal current
bears all the ages with it through both kingdoms
forever and drowns their voices in both.
In the end, those torn from us early no longer need us;
they grow slowly unaccustomed to earthly things, in the gentle manner
one outgrows a mother's breasts. But we, who need
such great mysteries, for whom so often blessed progress
springs from grief --: could we exist without them?
Is it a tale told in vain, that myth of lament for Linos,
in which music first pierced the shell of numbness:
shocked Space, which an almost divine youth
had suddenly left forever; then, in the void, vibrations --
which in us now are rapture and solace and help.
Walk away from Omelas.