Poems to Night Read online

  Yet what remains undeniable in this tantalizing web of confusion and enigma is that something significant dwells here, something of permanence, a clear sense of the sacred hovers palpably over these poems whatever their connective tissue, Rilke’s personal trials and the outflow from previous works. To seek consistency and reinforcement of a theme in Rilke’s poetic oeuvre is to attempt to net shadows, for it is this ephemeral design which allows the poet to keep his vision malleable, on the move, to continually question and divine possibilities, to reach out, but not smother what he seeks as soon as he encounters it, for catching a glimpse is enough. As Rilke writes in the poem “Nocturnal Walk”, composed in Capri in 1908: “And whoever knows too much / the eternal will slip away from.” The Poems to Night confirm that it is this willed ambiguity, this patient tending of mystery which lends the poetry its surviving radiance in radically different atmospheres and epochs, such as our own. In this vein, Rilke’s extraordinary and sublime proposition, “Is night the sole reality / of a thousand years…” surely deserves no more than our consensual silence.

  Will Stone,

  Exmoor, 2020

  * Anthony Stephens, Rainer Maria’s Gedichte an die Nacht: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1972).

  POEMS TO NIGHT

  The Siblings

  O now we have, with what whimpering,

  caressed ourselves, shoulders and eyelid.

  And night has withdrawn into the rooms

  like a wounded beast, in pain through us.

  Were you elected from all for me,

  was the sister not sufficient?

  Lovely as a valley to me was your essence,

  and now, too, from the prow of the heavens

  it bows down an unfailing apparition

  and he takes possession. Where to go?

  Alas, with the gesture of mourning

  you incline towards me, unconsoled.

  (Paris, end of 1913)

  When your face consumes me

  like tears the one who weeps,

  my brow, my mouth propagates

  around the features I know for you.

  (Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)

  Once I took into my hands

  your face. The moon fell upon it.

  Most unfathomable of things

  beneath an overflowing of tears.

  Like a willing thing, quietly subsisting,

  it was almost like holding something

  and yet was no entity in the cold

  night that infinitely eludes me.

  Oh we stream towards these places,

  pressing in on the narrow surface

  all the waves of our heart;

  yearning and weakness,

  and to whom finally do we bear them?

  Alas, to the stranger, who misunderstood us,

  alas to the other, whom we never found,

  to those servants, bound to us,

  springtime winds, that with it vanished

  and the loser, silence.

  (Paris, end of 1913)

  From face to face

  what rising up.

  From the guilty breaks out

  sacrifice and forgiveness.

  Does the night not blow cool,

  splendidly distant,

  moving across the centuries.

  Raise the area of feeling.

  Suddenly the angels

  see the harvest.

  (Paris, turn of the year 1913/14)

  Look, angels sense through space

  their infinite feelings.

  Our incandescence would be their coolness.

  Look, angels glow through space.

  Whilst we, who know nothing more,

  resist one thing, whilst another occurs in vain,

  they stride on, enraptured by their intention,

  across their fully formed domain.

  (Paris, end of 1913)

  Did I not breathe out of midnights,

  on such a flood, for the love of you,

  that someday you’d come?

  For I hoped to appease your countenance

  with almost unblemished magnificence,

  when in eternal supposition

  it rested awhile against mine.

  Soundless the space in my outline;

  in order to sate your great upward gaze

  my blood was mirrored, deepened.

  When through the olive trees’ pale separation

  the night made me stronger with stars,

  I rose, stood and turned back,

  mastered the realization

  I never referred to you later.

  Oh what utterance was sown in me

  should your smile ever come,

  that I survey world space upon you.

  But you don’t come, or you come too late.

  Fall, angels, over this blue

  flax field. Angels, angels, reap.

  (Paris, end of 1913)

  So, now it will be the angel

  who drinks slowly from my features

  the wine-enlightened face.

  Thirsting, who signalled you to come?

  How thirsty you are. God’s cataract

  plunges through every vein. How

  you can be so thirsty. Abandon

  yourself to thirst. (How you have grasped me.)

  And I feel, on the current, how your gaze

  was parched, and towards your blood

  so inclined that I overflow your brows,

  those pure ones, completely.

  (Paris, end of 1913)

  Away, I asked you finally to taste my smile

  (if it was not delectable),

  in its irresistible approach behind the stars in the East

  the angel waits that I make myself limpid.

  That no look, no trace of yours limits him,

  when he steps into the clearing;

  let him be the suffering that afflicted me, wild nature:

  and trust in the watering place.

  Was I green or sweet to you, let us forget all,

  or the shame will overtake us.

  Whether I flower or expiate he will calmly appraise,

  whom I did not tempt, who came…

  (Paris, end of 1913)

  Strong, silent, candelabra placed

  on the edge: above the night becomes distinct;

  we drain ourselves in unlit wavering

  before your foundation.

  Ours is: not to know the outcome

  in the mad inner domain,

  you appear out of our impediments

  and glow like a high mountain range.

  Your desire lies above our kingdom,

  and we barely grasp what falls upon us;

  like the pure night of the spring equinox

  you are there, dividing day and day.

  Who could ever infuse you

  with the mixture that secretly dulls us?

  You win glory from all that is monumental,

  and we exist in the most trivial.

/>   When we weep, we are nothing but touching,

  where we look, we are at the highest awakening;

  our smile is far from seducing,

  and even when it does seduce, to whom does it attach?

  (Anyone.) Angel, is this lament, is this lament?

  What is it then, this lament of mine?

  Alas, I shriek, with two pieces of wood I strike

  without hope anyone will hear.

  That I am noisy does not make you louder,

  when you don’t feel me, because I am.

  Light, light! Have the stars survey me

  more ardently. For I am fading.

  (Ronda, beginning of 1913)

  Out of this cloud, see: the one that so wildly obscures

  the star that was a moment past – (and me),

  out of those mountainous lands there, which now have night,

  night winds for a time – (and me),

  out of this river on the valley floor, which catches

  the gleam of a torn sky-clearing – (and me)

  out of me and all of that, to make

  a single thing, Lord: out of me and the feeling

  with which the flock, returned to the pen,

  in acquiescence breathe out the immense black

  no-longer-being of the world – me and every light

  in the darkness of so many houses, Lord:

  to make one thing; out of strangers, for

  there is not one I know, Lord, and me and me

  to make one thing; out of the sleepers,

  the old men in the hospice, those strangers

  who cough gravely in their beds, and out of

  sleep-drunk infants at a foreign breast,

  out of so much ill-defined and always me,

  of nothing but me and all I do not know,

  to make the thing, Lord Lord Lord, the thing

  which, world-earthly like a meteor,

  gathers in its heaviness only the sum

  of flight: weighs nothing but arrival.

  (Ronda, January 1913)

  Why must one go out and take alien things

  upon oneself, rather like the porter

  who lifts the market basket filled by strangers

  from stall to stall, and follows on, loaded down,

  and cannot enquire: Lord, why the feast?

  Why must one stand there like a shepherd,

  so exposed to the excess of influence,

  so much part of this space full of happening,

  that by leaning against a tree in a landscape

  and nothing more, his destiny is fulfilled.

  And yet, in his far too widening gaze, he lacks

  the calm abatement of the flock. He has

  only the world, world in every glance uplifted,

  in every inclining world. In him penetrates what

  involuntarily belongs to others, inhospitable like music

  and blind in his blood, transforming, passes.

  There in the night he rises, and already from outside

  has the bird call inside his being

  and feels inspirited, because he gathers all the stars

  into his vision, heavy – O not like someone

  who makes a gift of this night to a beloved,

  and regales her with the deeply felt heavens.

  (Ronda, January 1913)

  But for myself, when I find myself back in the cities’

  tangled barbs of turmoil and the flurry

  of vehicles around me, solitary,

  but for myself, through this impenetrable commotion

  I recall the sky and the earthy feet of the mountains,

  the homebound herd entered.

  Let me feel of stone,

  and let the shepherd’s day labour seem possible,

  how he roams there, ever browner, and with well-judged stone

  gathers his flock where it has frayed.

  With slow step, not light, his body ruminative,

  but when stood, his wonderful bearing. Even now a God

  could furtively enter that figure and be no less.

  Now he lingers, now moves on, as the day

  and shadows of clouds

  pass through him, as though the space were slowly

  thinking thoughts for him.

  Let him be what you will, like the quivering night light

  in the mantle of the lamp I place myself inside him.

  A glow becomes steady. More pure

  might Death find its passage.

  (Ronda, January 1913)

  Straining so hard against the powerful night

  they cast their voices into laughter,

  that badly burns. O world in revolt,

  so replete with refusal. And yet breathe space,

  where the stars drift. Look, all of this has no need

  and could surrender to the distance,

  move away into the beyond, far from us.

  Now, it returns and touches our faces with a look

  like the glance of the beloved; it unfurls

  before us and perhaps scatters in us

  its existence. And we are not worthy.

  Perhaps the angels lose some strength,

  when after us the starry firmament yields

  and hangs here within our mournful fate.

  Futility. For who can know? And where

  one might become aware: who yet wills

  to rest his brow against the nocturnal space

  as upon his own window? Who has not renounced this?

  Who has not dragged into his primordial element

  fakery, falsified, counterfeit nights?

  We have abandoned our gods for mouldering waste,

  for gods do not beguile. They have being

  and nothing but being, abundance of being,

  but not a scent, not a sign. Nothing is so mute

  as a god’s mouth. Sublime as a swan

  on its eternity of fathomless surface:

  so goes the god, and dives, safeguards his whiteness.

  Everything seduces. Even the little bird

  coerces us from within his pure foliage,

  the flower lacks space and forces a way to us;

  what does the wind not crave? Only the god,

  like a column, permits passage, distributing

  on high where he bears on each side

  the light arch of his equanimity.

  (Paris, February 1914)

  Overflowing skies of squandered stars

  splendour over grievance. Rather than into pillows,

  weep upwards. Here, at the weeping,

  at the ending face,

  proliferating, begins

  the enraptured world space. Who will interrupt,

  if you thrust that way,

  the flow? No one. Unless

  you suddenly wrestle with the epic course

  of those stars approaching you. Breathe.

  Breathe the darkness of the earth, and again

  look up! Again. Light and faceless,

  the depth leans in on you from on high. In co
ntained night

  the dispersed face grants yours space.

  (Paris, April 1913)

  Where I once was, or am: there you are treading

  over me, you infinite darkness out of light.

  And the sublime that you prepare in space,

  I draw, unknowable, to my fugitive face.

  O Night, take note, the way I regard you,

  how my being attempts to go back, give way,

  that it dares to launch itself close to you;

  can I conceive, that the twice-taken brow

  extends over the same streams of upward glance?

  Be this nature, be only one,

  the one bolder nature: this life and

  that star I lament unawares:

  so will I apply myself, composed like stones

  in the purest figure.

  (Paris, autumn 1913)

  Thoughts of night, raised from intuited experience,

  that already passed into the questioning child with silence,