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Duino Elegies, 1st & 2nd, Rainer Maria Rilke

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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, Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have listened: Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer, In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us: The Second Elegy Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you, Early successes, Creation's pampered favorites, But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we breathe ourselves out and away; Lovers, if they knew how, might utter strange, marvelous words in the night air. For it seems that everything hides us. Look: trees do exist; the houses that we live in still stand. We alone fly past all things, as fugitive as the wind. And all things conspire to keep silent about us, half out of shame perhaps, half as unutterable hope. Lovers, gratified in each other, I am asking you about us. You hold each other. Where is your proof? Look, sometimes I find that my hands have

Duino Elegies, 1st & 2nd, Rainer Maria Rilke Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992 Translated by Stephen Mitchell 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 are still 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.

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