Table of contents

1 Rainer Maria Rilke 2 Sourced: 2.1 Duino Elegies(1922) 2.2 Sonnets to Orpheus (1922) 3 Attributed: 4 External links

Rainer Maria Rilke

(1875-1926) German Poet

Sourced:

• Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
  • Letters to a Young Poet Letter Four (July 16, 1903)
  • Variant: Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer. (as translated by Stephen Mitchell )

• You who never arrived
  in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
  from the start,
  I don't even know what songs
  would please you. I have given up trying
  to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
  moment.
  • You who never arrived (as translated by Stephen Mitchell )

• You, Beloved, who are all
  the gardens I have ever gazed at,
  longing. An open window
  in a country house-, and you almost
  stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
  Streets that I chanced upon,—
  you had just walked down them and vanished.
  And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
  were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
  gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
  perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
  yesterday, separate, in the evening...
  • You who never arrived (as translated by Stephen Mitchell )

• The work of the eyes is done. Go now and do the heart-work on the images imprisoned within you.
  • Turning Point (Wendung) (as translated by Stephen Mitchell )

Duino Elegies(1922)

• Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
  hierarchies? and even if one of them suddenly
  pressed me against his heart, I would perish
  in the embrace of his stronger existence.
  For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror
  which we are barely able to endure and are awed
  because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
  Each single angel is terrifying.
  • First Elegy (as translated by Stephen Mitchell )

• Yes, the springtime was in need of you. Often a star
  waited for you to espy it and sense its light.
  A wave rolled toward you out of the distant past,
  or as you walked below an open window,
  a violin gave itself to your hearing.
  All this was trust. But could you manage it?
  Were you not always distraught by expectation,
  as if all this were announcing the arrival
  of a beloved?

Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)

• A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence!
  Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
  And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
  a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.
  • Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Attributed:

• Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

• Everywhere I am folded, there I am a lie.

External links