the first elegy

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'

hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me

suddenly against his heart:  I would be consumed 

in that overwhelming existence.  For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us.  Every angel is terrifying.

And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note

of my dark sobbing.  Ah, whom can we ever turn to

in our need?  Not angels, not humans,

and already the knowing animals are aware

that we are not really at home in

our interpreted world.  Perhaps there remains for us

some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take 

into our vision;  there remains for us yesterday's street

and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease

when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.

Oh and night:  there is night, when a wind full of infinite space 

gnaws at our faces.  Whom would it not remain for - that longed-after,

mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart

so painfully meets.  Is it any less difficult for lovers?

But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.

Don't you know yet?   Fling the emptiness out of your arms 

into the spaces we breathe;  perhaps the birds

will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Yes - the springtimes needed you.  Often a star

was waiting for you to notice it.  A wave rolled toward you

out of the distant past, or as you walked

under an open window, a violin

yielded itself to your hearing.  All this was mission.

But could you accomplish it?  Weren't you always

distracted by expectation, as if every event

announced a beloved?  (Where can you find a place

to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you

going and coming and often staying all night.)

But when you feel longing, sing of women in love;

for their famous passion is still not immortal.  Sing

of women abandoned and desolate (you envy them, almost)

who could love so much more purely than those who were gratified.

Begin again and again the never-attainable praising;

remember:  the hero lives on; even his downfall was

merely a pretext for achieving his final birth.

But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back

into herself, as if there were not enough strength

to create them a second time.  Have you imagined

Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any girl

deserted by her beloved might be inspired

by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love

and might say to herself, "Perhaps I can be like her"?

Shouldn't this most ancient of sufferings finally grow

more fruitful for us?  Isn't it time that we lovingly

freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured:

as the arrow endures the bowstring's tension, so that 

gathered in the snap of release it can be more than

itself.  For there is no place where we can remain.

Voices.  Voices.  Listen, my heart, as only

saints have listened:  until the gigantic call lifted them

off the ground; yet they kept on, impossibly,

kneeling and didn't notice at all:

so complete was their listening.  Not that you could endure

God's voice - far from it.  But listen to the voice of the wind

and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of silence.

It is murmuring toward you now from those who died young.

Didn't their fate, whenever you stepped into a church

in Naples or Rome, quietly come to address you?

Or high up, some eulogy entrusted you with a mission,

as, last year, on the plaque in Santa Maria Formosa.

What they want of me is that I gently remove the appearance

of injustice about their death - which at times

slightly hinders their souls from proceeding onward.

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer,

to give up customs one barely had time to learn,

not to see roses and other promising Things

in terms of a human future; no longer to be 

what one was in infinitely anxious hands; to leave 

even one's own first name behind, forgetting it

as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.

Strange to no longer desire one's desires.  Strange

to see meanings that clung together once, floating away

in every direction.  And being dead is hard work

and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel

a trace of eternity. - Though the living are wrong to believe

in the too-sharp distinctions which they themselves have created.

Angels (they say) don't know whether it is the living 

they are moving among, or the dead.  The eternal torrent

whirls all ages along in it, through both realms

forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us:

they are weaned from earth's sorrows and joys, as gently as children 

outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers.  But we, who do need

such great mysteries, we for whom grief is so often

the source of our spirit's growth -: could we exist without them?

Is the legend meaningless that tells how, in the lament for Linus,

the daring first notes of song pierced through the barren numbness;

and then in the startled space which a youth as lovely as a god

had suddenly left forever, the Void felt for the first time

that harmony which now enraptures and comforts and helps us.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

from the  Duino Elegies

translation by Stephen Mitchell