Poems, passage 120

The darkness hung like richness in the room When like a dream the mother entered there And then a glass's tinkle stirred the air Near where a boy sat in the silent gloom.

Poems, passage 17

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.

Poems, passage 9

_The Book of Poverty and Death_ Her Mouth Alone Thou Wanderest A Watcher of Thy Spaces

Poems, passage 37

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Poems, passage 104

The maidens' doors of Life lead out Where the song of the poet soars, And out beyond to the great world-- To the world beyond the doors.

Poems, passage 75

Night, guardian of dreams, Now wanders through the land; The moon, a lily white, Blossoms within her hand.

Poems, passage 12

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.

Poems, passage 20

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Poems, passage 32

This might seem the appropriate place in which to speak of Rilke's monograph on the art of Rodin. To do so would, however, be an undue anticipation, for it will be necessary to trace Rilke's development through several transitions before the value of his contact with the work of Rodin can be fully measured.

Poems, passage 59

In our approach through the mystic we touch reality most deeply. It is because of this that all art and all philosophy culminate in their final forms in a crystallization of those values of life that remain forever inexplicable to pure reason; they become religious in the simple, profound sense of that word. Before the eternal facts of Life doubt and strife are reconciled into faith, will and pride change into humility. The realization of this truth expressed in the medium of poetry is the significance of Rilke's _Book of Hours_. A distinguished Scandinavian writer has pronounced _Das Stunden-Buch_ one of the supreme literary achievements of our time and its deepest and most beautiful book of prayer.

Poems, passage 168

You Hour! From me you ever take your flight, Your swift wings wound me as they whir along; Without you void would be my day and night, Without you I'll not capture my great song.

Poems, passage 212

Alone Thou wanderest through space, Profound One with the hidden face; Thou art Poverty's great rose, The eternal metamorphose Of gold into the light of sun.

Poems, passage 109

He loves the long paths where no footfalls ring, And he loves much the silent chamber where Like a soft whisper through the quiet air He hears your voice, far distant, vanishing.

Poems, passage 189

In cassocks clad I have had many brothers In southern cloisters where the laurel grows, They paint Madonnas like fair human mothers And I dream of young Titians and of others In which the God with shining radiance glows.

Poems, passage 65

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Poems, passage 199

All those who seek Thee tempt Thee, And those who find would bind Thee To gesture and to form.

Poems, passage 113

Lord! It is time. So great was Summer's glow: Thy shadows lay upon the dials' faces And o'er wide spaces let thy tempests blow.

Poems, passage 159

I walked the lane which presently With strung chords seemed to bend; Then Marie became Melody And danced from end to end.

Poems, passage 64

Almost all of the poems in these two volumes are short and precise. The images are portrayed with the sensitive intensity of impressionistic technique. The majestic quietude of the long lines of _The Book of Pictures_ is broken, the colours are more vibrant, more scintillating and the pictures are painted in nervous, darting strokes as though to convey the manner in which they were perceived: in one single, all-absorbing glance. For this reason many of these _New Poems_ are not quite free from a certain element of virtuosity. On the other hand, Rilke achieves at times a perfect surety of rapid stroke as in the poem _The Spanish Dancer_, who rises luminously on the horizon of our inner vision like a circling element of fire, flaming and blinding in the momentum of her movements. Degas and Zuloaga seem to have combined their art on one canvas to give to this dancer the abundant elasticity of grace and the splendid fantasy of colour.

Poems, passage 194

I love my life's dark hours In which my senses quicken and grow deep, While, as from faint incense of faded flowers Or letters old, I magically steep Myself in days gone by: again I give Myself unto the past:--again I live.

Poems, passage 62

In _New Poems_ (1907) and _New Poems, Second Part_ (1908) the historical figure, frequently taken from the Old Testament, has grown beyond the proportions of life; it is weightier with fate and invariably becomes the means of expressing symbolically an abstract thought or a great human destiny. _Abishag_ presents the contrast between the dawning and the fading life; _David Singing Before Saul_ shows the impatience of awakening ambition, and _Joshua_ is the man who forces even God to do his will. The antique Hellenic world rises with shining splendour in the poems _Eranna to Sappho_, _Lament for Antinous_, _Early Apollo_ and the _Archaic Torso of Apollo_.

Poems, passage 201

I ask of Thee no vanity To evidence and prove Thee. Thou Wert in eons old.

Poems, passage 47

It is a significant fact that Rilke dedicated this book to Gerhart Hauptmann, "in love and gratitude for his Michael Kramer." Hauptmann, like Rilke in these poems, has placed before us great epic figures and his art is so concentrated that often the simple expression of the thought of one of his characters produces a shudder in the listener or reader because in this thought there vibrates the suffering of an entire social class and in it resounds the sorrow of many generations.

Poems, passage 48

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Poems, passage 39

Broadly speaking, Russian art and literature may be described as springing from an ethical impulse and as having for their motive power and _raison d'etre_ the tendency toward socio-political reform, in contradistinction to the art and literature of Western culture, whose motives and aims are primarily of an aesthetic nature and seek in art the reconciliation of the dualism between spirit and matter.

Poems, passage 103

Others must by a long dark way Stray to the mystic bards, Or ask some one who has heard them sing Or touch the magic chords. Only the maidens question not The bridges that lead to Dream; Their luminous smiles are like strands of pearls On a silver vase agleam.

Poems, passage 42

The great symbols of Solitude and of Death enter into the poet's work.

Poems, passage 25

As one turns the pages of Rilke's first small book of poems, published originally under the title _Larenopfer_, in the year 1895, and which appeared in more recent editions under the less descriptive name _Erste Gedichte_, one realizes at once, in spite of a lack of plasticity in the presentation, that here speaks one who has lingered long and lovingly over the dream of his boyhood. As the title indicates, these poems are a tribute, an offering to the Lares, the home spirits of his native town. Prague and the surrounding country are the ever recurring theme of almost every one of these poems. The meadows, the maidens, the dark river in the evening, the spires of the cathedral at night rising like grey mists are seen with a wonderment, the great well-spring of all poetic imagination, with a well-nigh religious piety. Through all these poems there sounds like a subdued accompaniment a note of gratitude for the ability to thus vision the world, to be sunk in the music of all things. "Without is everything that I feel within myself, and without and within myself everything is immeasurable, illimitable."

Poems, passage 206

In the deep nights I dig for you, O Treasure! To seek you over the wide world I roam, For all abundance is but meager measure Of your bright beauty which is yet to come.

Poems, passage 80

The leaves fall, fall as from far, Like distant gardens withered in the heavens; They fall with slow and lingering descent.

Poems, passage 96

Strange violin! Dost thou follow me? In many foreign cities, far away, Thy lone voice spoke to me like memory. Do hundreds play thee, or does but one play?

Poems, passage 74

The bleak fields are asleep, My heart alone wakes; The evening in the harbour Down his red sails takes.

Poems, passage 63

The spirit of the Middle Ages with its religious fervour and superstitious fanaticism is symbolized in several poems, the most important among which are _The Cathedral_, _God in the Middle Ages_, _Saint Sebastian_ personifying martyrdom, and _The Rose Window_, whose glowing magic is compared to the hypnotic power of the tiger's eye. Modern Paris is often the background of the _New Poems_, and the crass play of light and shadow upon the waxen masks of Life's disillusioned in the Morgue is caught with the same intense realistic vision as the flamingos and parrots spreading their vari-coloured soft plumage in the warmth of the sun in the Avenue of the Jardin des Plantes.

Poems, passage 208

My bloody hands, with digging bruised, I've lifted, Spread like a tree I stretch them in the air To find you before day to night has drifted; I reach out into space to seek you there ...

Poems, passage 151

But in these weeks of the awakening Spring Something within me has been freed--something That in the past dark years unconscious lay, Which rises now within me and commands And gives my poor warm life into your hands Who know not what I was that Yesterday.

Poems, passage 93

Beneath the armour of the Knight Behind the chain's black links Death crouches and thinks and thinks: "When will the sword's blade sharp and bright Forth from the scabbard spring And cut the network of the cloak Enmeshing me ring on ring-- When will the foe's delivering stroke Set me free To dance And sing?"

Poems, passage 181

When from the past I draw myself the while I lose old traits as leaves of autumn fall; I only know the radiance of thy smile, Like the soft gleam of stars, transforming all.

Poems, passage 97

Are there in all great cities tempest-tossed Men who would seek the rivers but for thee,

Poems, passage 35

"How shall I go on tiptoe From childhood to Annunciation Through the dim twilight Into Thy Garden?"

Poems, passage 132

In the dusk of the shelves, embossed Shine the volumes in gold and browns, And you think of countries once crossed, Of pictures, of shimmering gowns Of the women that you have lost.

Poems, passage 119

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies; And cradled in the branches, hidden deep In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

Poems, passage 60

In his subsequent poetic work Rilke did not again reach the sustained high quality of this book, the mood and idea of which he incorporated into a prose work of exquisite lyrical beauty: _The Sketch of Malte Laurids Brigge_.

Poems, passage 169

I have no earthly spot where I can live, I have no love, I have no household fane, And all the things to which myself I give Impoverish me with richness they attain.

Poems, passage 157

And then a Princess I became To whom men bend their knees; To princes things are not the same As those a beggar sees.

Poems, passage 207

Over the road to you the leaves are blowing, Few follow it, the way is long and steep. You dwell in solitude--Oh, does your glowing Heart in some far off valley lie asleep?

Poems, passage 29

Throughout the entire work of Rilke, in his poetry as well as in his interpretations of painting and sculpture, there are two elements that constitute the cornerstones in the structure of his art. If, as has been said with a degree of verity, Nietzsche was primarily a musician whose philosophy had for its basis and took its ultimate aspects from the musical quality of his artistic endowment, it may be maintained with an equal amount of truth that Rilke is primarily a painter and sculptor whose poetry rests upon the fundaments of the pictorial and plastic arts.

Poems, passage 163

As when at times there breaks through branches bare A morning vibrant with the breath of spring, About this poet-head a splendour rare Transforms it almost to a mortal thing.

Poems, passage 11

[Greek: eisi gar oun, oi en tas phuchais kuousin]

Poems, passage 138

A young knight comes into my mind As from some myth of old.

Poems, passage 135

And what conjure you? Imprisoned is the song, It lingers and longs in the reeds where it lies; Your young life is strong, but how much more strong Is the longing that through your music sighs.