POEMS

by

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Translated by Jessie Lamont

With an Introduction by H.T.

New York

Tobias A. Wright

1918

TO THE MEMORY OF

AUGUSTE RODIN

THROUGH WHOM I CAME TO KNOW

RAINER MARIA RILKE

POEMS OF RAINER MARIA RILKE

INTRODUCTION

Acknowledgment

To the Editors of Poetry—A magazine of Verse, and Poet Lore, the translator is indebted for permission to reprint certain poems in this book—also to the compilers of the following anthologies—Amphora II edited by Thomas Bird Mosher—The Catholic Anthology of World Poetry selected by Carl van Doren.

CONTENTS

Introduction:
The Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
First Poems:
Evening
Mary Virgin
The Book of Pictures:
Presaging
Autumn
Silent Hour
The Angels
Solitude
Kings in Legends
The Knight
The Boy
Initiation
The Neighbour
Song of the Statue
Maidens I
Maidens II
The Bride
Autumnal Day
The Book of Pictures:
Moonlight Night
In April
Memories of a Childhood
Death
The Ashantee
Remembrance
Music
Maiden Melancholy
Maidens at Confirmation
The Woman who Loves
Pont du Carrousel
Madness
Lament
Symbols
New Poems:
Early Apollo
The Tomb of a Young Girl
The Poet
The Panther
Growing Blind
The Spanish Dancer
Offering
Love Song
Archaic Torso of Apollo
The Book of Hours: The Book of a Monk's Life
I Live my Life in Circles
Many have Painted Her
In Cassocks Clad
Thou Anxious One
I Love My Life's Dark Hours
The Book of Pilgrimage
By Day Thou Art The Legend and The Dream
All Those Who Seek Thee
In a House Was One
Extinguish My Eyes
In the Deep Nights
The Book of Poverty and Death
Her Mouth
Alone Thou Wanderest
A Watcher of Thy Spaces

THE POETRY OF RAINER MARIA RILKE

εἶσὶ γὰρ οὖν, οἳ ἐν ταῖς ψυχαῖς κυοῦσιν

Plato

The supreme problem of every age is that of finding its consummate artistic expression. Before this problem every other remains of secondary importance. History defines and directs its physical course, science cooperates in the achievement of its material aims, but Art alone gives to the age its spiritual physiognomy, its ultimate and lasting expression.

The process of Art is on the one hand sensuous, the conception having for its basis the fineness of organization of the senses; and on the other hand it is severely scientific, the value of the creation being dependent upon the craftsmanship, the mastery over the tool, the technique.

Art, like Nature, its great and only reservoir for all time past and all time to come, ever strives for elimination and selection. It is severe and aristocratic in the application of its laws and impervious to appeal to serve other than its own aims. Its purpose is the symbolization of Life. In its sanctum there reigns the silence of vast accomplishment, the serene, final, and imperturbable solitude which is the ultimate criterion of all great things created.

To speak of Poetry is to speak of the most subtle, the most delicate, and the most accurate instrument by which to measure Life.

Poetry is reality's essence visioned and made manifest by one endowed with a perception acutely sensitive to sound, form, and colour, and gifted with a power to shape into rhythmic and rhymed verbal symbols the reaction to Life's phenomena. The poet moulds that which appears evanescent and ephemeral in image and in mood into everlasting values. In this act of creation he serves eternity.

Poetry, in especial lyrical poetry, must be acknowledged the supreme art, culminating as it does in a union of the other arts, the musical, the plastic, and the pictorial.

The most eminent contemporary poets of Europe have, each in accordance with his individual temperament, reflected in their work the spiritual essence of our age, its fears and failures, its hopes and high achievements: Maeterlinck, with his mood of resignation and his retirement into a dusky twilight where his shadowy figures move noiselessly like phantoms in fate-laden dimness; Dehmel, the worshipper of will, with his passion for materiality and the beauty of all things physical and tangible; Verhaeren, the visionary of a new vitality, who sees in the toilers of fields and factories the heroic gesture of our time and who might have written its great epic of industry but for the overwhelming lyrical mood of his soul.

Until a few years ago, known only to a relatively small community on the continent but commanding an ever increasing attention which has borne his name far beyond the boundary of his country, the personality of Rainer Maria Rilke stands to-day beside the most illustrious poets of modern Europe.

The background against which the figure of Rainer Maria Rilke is silhouetted is so varied, the influences which have entered into his life are so manifold, that a study of his work, however slight, must needs take into consideration the elements through which this poet has matured into a great master.

Prague, the city in which Rilke was born in 1875, with its sinister palaces and crumbling towers that rose in the early Middle Ages and have reached out into our time like the threatening fingers of mighty hands which have wielded swords for generations and which are stained with the blood of many wounds of many races; the city where amid grey old ruins blonde maidens are at play or are lost in reverie in the green cool parks and shady gardens with which the Bohemian capital abounds, this Prague of mingled grotesqueness and beauty gave to the young boy his first impressions.

There is a period in the life of every artist when his whole being seems lost in a contemplation of the surrounding world, when the application to work is difficult, like the violent forcing of something that is awaiting its time. This is the time of his dream, as sacred as the days of early spring before wind and rain and light have touched the fruits of the fields, when