Duino Elegies Quotes

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.

Every angel is terrifying.

Look: the trees exist; the houses we dwell in stand there stalwartly. Only we pass by it all, like a rush of air. And everything conspires to keep quiet about us, half out of shame perhaps, half out of some secret hope.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me 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.

Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future lessens . . . . Superabundant existence wells in my heart.

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.)…

For our part, when we feel, we evaporate; ah, we breathe ourselves out and away; with each new heartfire we give off a fainter scent. True, someone may tell us: you're in my blood, this room, Spring itself is filled with you . . . To what end? He can't hold us, we vanish within him and around him.

A kind of memory that tells us that what we're now striving for was once nearer and truer and attached to us with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance, there it was breath. After the first home the second one seems draughty and strangely sexed.

Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem: they might point to the catkins hanging from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain descending on black earth in early spring. --- And we, who always think of happiness rising, would feel the emotion that almost baffles us when a happy thing falls.

And we, spectators always, everywhere, looking at, never out of, everything! It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses. We re-arrange it, and collapse ourselves. Who's turned us round like this, so that we always, do what we may, retain the attitude of someone who's departing? Just as he, on the last hill, that shows him all his valley for the last time, will turn and stop and linger, we live our lives, for ever taking leave.

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.

We only pass everything by like a transposition of air.

Isn’t it time that, loving, we freed ourselves from the beloved, and, trembling, endured: as the arrow endures the bow, so as to be, in its flight, something more than itself?

How I will cherish you then, you grief-torn nights! Had I only received you, inconsolable sisters, on more abject knees, only buried myself with more abandon in your loosened hair. How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

How we squander our sorrows, gazing beyond them into the sad wastes of duration, to see if maybe they have a limit.

Our own heart always exceeds us.

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For beauty's nothing but the beginning of terror we're still just able to bear.

But not you, O girl, nor yet his mother, stretched his eyebrows so fierce with expectation. Not for your mouth, you who hold him now, did his lips ripen into these fervent contours. Do you really think your quiet footsteps could have so convulsed him, you who move like dawn wind? True, you startled his heart; but older terrors rushed into him with that first jolt to his emotions. Call him . . . you'll never quite retrieve him from those dark consorts. Yes, he wants to, he escapes; relieved, he makes a home in your familiar heart, takes root there and begins himself anew. But did he ever begin himself?

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its home. Speak and attest. More than ever the things we can live with are falling away, and ousting them, filling their place, a will with no image. Will beneath crusts which readily crack whenever the act inside swells and seeks new borders.

And so I check myself and swallow the luring call of dark sobs. Alas, whom can we turn to in our need? Not angels, not humans, and the sly animals see at once how little at home we are in the interpreted world. That leaves us some tree on a hillside, on which our eyes fasten day after day; leaves us yesterday’s street and the coddled loyalty of an old habit that liked it here, stayed on, and never left.

O trees of life, O when are you wintering? We are not unified. We have no instincts like those of migratory birds. Useless, and late, we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind, and fall down to an indifferent lake. We realise flowering and fading together. And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing, as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness.

Isn't it time that, in love, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, trembling, endured: as the arrow endures the string, collecting itself to be more than itself as it shoots?

Rainer Maria Rilke greeted and wrestled with the angels of his Duino Elegies in the solitude of a castle surrounded by white cliffs tall trees and the sea. I greeted most of mine in the solitude of a house that still vibrated with the throbs of a singular life that had helped shape many lives and with the ache of attempts to render useful service to that life. The River of Winged Dreams was therefore constructed as a link between dimensions of past and future emotions and intellect and matter and spirit.

Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight, let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels. Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful, or a broken string. Let my joyfully streaming face make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights of anguish. Why didn't I kneel more deeply to accept you, inconsolable sisters, and surrendering, lose myself in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end. Though they are really our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen, our season in our inner year--, not only a season in time--, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.

O smile, going where? O upturned look: new, warm, receding surge of the heart--; alas, we are that surge. Does then the cosmic space we dissolve in taste of us? Do the angels reclaim only what is theirs, their own outstreamed existence, or sometimes, by accident, does a bit of us get mixed in? Are we blended in their features like the slight vagueness that complicates the looks of pregnant women? Unnoticed by them in their whirling back into themselves? (How could they notice?)

You, still the squanderers of the empty hall — when the twilight comes, wide as woods… And the chandelier, like a sixteen-pointer, vaults where nothing can set foot.

Truly being here is glorious.

Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utter strange things in the midnight air. For it seems that everything's trying to hide us. Look, the trees exist; the houses we live in still stand where they were. We only pass everything by like a transposition of air. And all combines to suppress us, partly as shame, perhaps, and partly as inexpressible hope.

Like the curved pipe of a fountain, your arching boughs drive the sap downward and up again: and almost without awakening it bursts out of sleep, into its sweetest achievement. Like the god stepping into the swan.

Yes, the Springs needed you. Many a star was waiting for your eyes only. A wave swelled toward you out of the past, or as you walked by the open window a violin inside surrendered itself to pure passion. All that was your charge. But were you strong enough? Weren't you always distracted by expectation, as though each such moment presaged a beloved's coming? (But where would you keep her, with all those big strange thoughts in you going and coming and sometimes staying all night?)

Though he works and worries, the farmer never reaches down to where the seed turns into summer. The earth grants.

Angels (it is said) are often never quite sure whether they pass among the living or the dead.

Beauty is but the beginning of terror. We can barely endure it and are awed when it declines to destroy us.

Jubilation knows and Longing grants — only Lament still learns; with girlish hands she counts the ancient evil through the nights. But suddenly, unpracticed and askant, she lifts one of our voice’s constellations Into the sky unclouded by her breath.

Who shows a child, just as they are? Who sets it in its constellation, and gives the measure of distance into its hand? Who makes a child’s death out of grey bread, that hardens, - or leaves it inside its round mouth like the core of a shining apple? Killers are easy to grasp. But this: death, the whole of death, before life, to hold it so softly, and not live in anger, cannot be expressed.

Who has turned us around like this, so that whatever we do, we find ourselves in the attitude of someone going away? Just as that person on the last hill, which shows him his whole valley one last time, turns, stops, lingers - so we live, forever taking our leave.

Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer need your springtimes to win me over - one of them, ah, even one, is already too much for my blood. Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.

Praise the world to the angel, not what can’t be talked about. You can’t impress him with your grand emotions. In the grand cosmos where he so intensely feels, you’re just a novice. So show him some simple thing shaped for generation after generation until it lives in our hands and in our eyes, and it’s ours. Tell him about things. He’ll stand amazed, just as you did beside the ropemaker in Rome or the potter on the Nile. Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours; how even grief’s lament purely determines its own shape, serves as a thing, or dies in a thing — and escapes In ecstasy beyond the violin.

Only in the realm of Praising should Lament walk, the naiad of the wept-for fountain, watching over the stream of our complaint, to keep it clear upon the very stone that bears the arch of triumph and the altar.—

But if the endlessly dead awakened a symbol in us, perhaps they would point to the catkins hanging from the bare branches of the hazel-trees, or would evoke the raindrops that fall onto the dark earth in springtime.-- And we, who have always thought of happiness as rising, would feel the emotion that almost overwhelms us whenever a happy thing falls.

Even when the lights go out, even when someone says to me: "It's over---," even when from the stage a gray gust of emptiness drifts toward me, even when not one silent ancestor sits beside me anymore---not a woman, not even the boy with the brown squint-eye: I'll sit here anyway. One can always watch.

How we squander our hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration to see if they have an end. Though they are really our winter-enduring foliage, our dark evergreen, one season in our inner year—, not only a season in time—, but are place and settlement, foundation and soil and home.

It’s true enough, of course, no longer to live on earth is strange, to abandon customs barely mastered yet, not to interpret roses and other auspicious things, not give them meaning in a human future. No longer to be as we have always been, in those endlessly anxious hands – to leave even our name behind us as a child leaves off playing with a broken toy. Strange, no longer to know desires desired – strange to witness the involvement of all things lost suddenly, each drifting away singly into space. And truly, to be dead is hard, so full of making up lost ground, till little by little we find a trace of eternity. Yet, the living are wrong to draw such distinctions so clearly: angels (it is said) are often never quite sure whether they pass among the living or the dead,

think: the hero prolongs himself, even his falling was only a pretext for being, his latest rebirth.

Nothing which is, is static.

that young man, like the son of a neck and a nun

Duino Elegies

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.

Oh trees of life, when will your winter come? We're not in tune. Not like migratory birds. Outmoded, late, in haste, we force ourselves on winds which let us down upon indifferent ponds. Though we've had to learn how flowering is fading, somewhere lions still roam, unaware, in their majesty, of any weakness. — Rainer Maria Rilke, from the “Fourth Elegy,” Duino Elegies. Trans. by David Young. (W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition, June 17, 2006) Originally published 1923.

(from Rilke's Duino Elegies) In the end, those who were carried off early no longer need us, he writes, 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?

We’re involved with flower, fruit, grapevine. They speak more than the language of the year. Out of the darkness a blaze of colors appears, and one perhaps that has the jealous shine Of the dead, those who strengthen the earth. What do we know of the part they assume? It’s long been their habit to marrow the loam with their own free marrow through and through. Now the one question: Is it done gladly? The work of sullen slaves, does this fruit thrust up, clenched, toward us, its masters? Sleeping with roots, granting us only out of their surplus this hybrid made of mute strength and kisses — are they the masters?

But if they, the infinitely dead, were awakening an image within us, see, they would perhaps point to the catkins hanging from the bare hazels, or mean the rain pelting the dark earth in spring.— And we, who think of happiness as rising, would feel an emotion that almost startles when a happy thing falls.

How we waste our afflictions! We study them, stare out beyond them into bleak continuance, hoping to glimpse some end. Whereas they're really our wintering foliage, our dark greens of meaning, one of the seasons of the clandestine year -- ; not only a season --: they're site, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

Not wooing, no longer shall wooing, voice that has outgrown it be the nature of your cry; but instead, you would cry out as purely as a bird when the quickly ascending season lifts him up, nearly forgetting that he is a suffering creature and not just a single heart being flung into brightness, into the intimate skies.

How oddly akin is the hero to the early dead. Duration doesn't interest him. For him, only ascent matters, steadfastly he drives on and enters the altered constellation of his constant danger. There few would find him. But fate, which grimly shuts us in silence, suddenly inspired sings him into the storm of his uproaring world.

Does the cosmic space, we dissolve into, taste of us then?

if he demolished pillars, it was when he burst from the world of your body into the narrower world.

This, a world seen no longer from the human point of view, but inside the angel, is perhaps my real task.

And we, who have always thought of happiness as rising, would feel the emotion that almost overwhelms us whenever a happy thing falls.

Alone he climbs on, up the mountains of primal grief. And not once do his footsteps echo from the soundless path.

Pues cerca de la muerte uno ya no ve la muerte y mira fijamente hacia afuera, quizás con una gran mirada de animal.

The sunken are always seeking the earth again.

The sunken are always seeking earth again

Earth, isn't this what you want: to arise in us invisible?—Isn't your dream one day to be invisible?

Und wir: Zuschauer, immer, überall, dem allen zugewandt und nie hinaus! Uns überfüllts. Wir ordnens. Es zerfällt. Wir ordnens wieder und zerfallen selbst.

Çünkü ölüme yakın, görmez olur ölümü insan, dışa diker gözünü, iri hayvan bakışıyla belki de.

Cherished earth, I say yes to you.

we don’t love like the flowers, with just the force of a single year; when we love, ancient sap is rising.

we don’t love like the flowers, with just the force of a single year; when we love ancient sap is rising.

Temples are no longer known. It is we who secretly save up these extravagances of the heart. Where one of them still survives, a Thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before-- just as it is, it passes into the invisible world. Many no longer perceive it, yet miss the chance to build it inside themselves now, with pillars and statues: greater.

Rainer Maria Rilke sacrificed everything For his art he dedicated himself To the Great Work I admired his single-mindedness All through my twenties I argued his case Now I think he was a jerk For skipping his daughter's wedding For fear of losing his focus He believed in the ancient enmity Between daily life and the highest work Or Ruth and the Duino Elegies It is probably a middle-class prejudice Of mine to think that Anna Akhmatova Should have raised her son Lev Instead of dumping him on her husband's mom Motherhood is a bright torture she confessed I was not worthy of it Lev never considered it sufficient For her to stand outside his prison Month after month clutching packages And composing Requiem for the masses

Look, the trees are; the houses we live in still stand. We alone go past them like an exchange of vapors. And things conspire to tell us nothing, half in shame, perhaps, half in unspoken hope.

Si ahora se acercara el arcángel, el peligroso, detrás de las estrellas, si bajara dando un paso sólo y viniendo de allí: hacia arriba latiendo, nuestro propio corazón nos mataría. ¿Quién sois?

So much it availed, you coming to him at night; his destiny, tall in its cloak, stepped back behind the cupboard, and his unquiet future, easily shifting, fitted itself into the folds of the curtain.

N'est-il pas temps que ceux qui aiment se libèrent de l'objet aimé et le surmontent, frémissants ? Ainsi le trait vainc la corde pour être, rassemblé dans le bond, plus que lui-même. Car nulle part il n'est d'arrêt.

Perfection’s firsts, creation’s pampered favourites, the peaks and summits we look to where they redden in the first touch of the created world – spilt pollen of flowering Godhead, knots of light, passageways, stairs, thrones, spaces of life, the blazoned shields of bliss, tumults of ecstasy and as suddenly, solely – mirrors, scooping up that flood of beauty that pours from them and re-directing it back into themselves. For we, even as we feel, evaporate in the act of breathing ourselves out and beyond, ember after ember, we burn away to nothing. We give off an ever-diminishing scent. Though somebody might come and say, ‘Yes! You are in my blood now. This room, the whole of spring is full of your presence . . .’ What’s the use? He cannot preserve us. We still disappear in him or around him. Even the truly beautiful – who holds them? Nothing but appearance

It's strange, of course, no longer to inhabit the earth, no longer to practice barely learned customs, not to give roses and other auspicious things the meaning of a human future; to be no longer what one was in infinitely anxious hands, and even to put aside one's own name like a broken toy. Strange, to no longer keep wishing our wishes. Strange, to see elements, once related, flutter loosely in space. And being dead is toilsome, and full of the retrieving needed if little by little we're to feel a bit of eternity.

Why, if our time on earth could be spent as laurel, its green darker than all others, its leaves edged with little waves (like the smile of a wind) —: then why do we have to be human—and avoiding destiny, long for destiny? . . . Oh not because there is happiness, that rash profit taken just prior to impending loss, Not out of curiosity, or to give the heart practice, reasons that would hold for the laurel too . . . But because being here is so much, and because everything in this fleeting world seems to need us, and strangely speaks to us.

We were once," she says, "a great clan, we laments. Our forefathers worked mines up in those tall mountains; among humans occasionally a cut stone of primal sorrow turns up, or a slag of petrified wrath from an ancient volcano. Yes, those came from up there. We were rich once.

A ella sólo nosotros la vemos; el animal libre tiene siempre su ocaso detrás de si y ante sí tiene a Dios, y cuando anda, anda en la eternidad, como andan las fuentes. Nosotros nunca tenemos, ni siquiera un solo día, el espacio puro ante nosotros, al que las flores se abren infinitamente.

He can't take it all in, dazed from early death. But their looking flashes an owl from behind the rim of the crown. And brushing downwards slowly along the great cheek, the one of ripest roundness, the bird limns into the dead youth's new hearing, across a double open page, the indescribable contour. And, higher, the stars.

I think of published poets that you could know of...I think [Rainer Maria Rilke] probably has the most great published poems of any poet [...] but Rilke himself was an asshole. If you look at his biography, he was probably misogynist; he was a liar, a cheat; he was a terrible father; he was selfish; he put people down; he had no consideration for anyone [...] yet, he transcends that in his greatest poems. There's that ineffable, spiritual quality - that he himself couldn't reach! But somewhere underneath that reptilian exterior, that asshole exterior of Rainer Maria Rilke, there was some good that came through – like these little sunbursts coming through clouds – that had that moment. And he'd write the Duino Elegies, he'd write the New Poems, and somewhere, that came through. And that's an amazing thing: you can have a lot of great people who are great individuals, who are loving and caring – and they can't do that. And that's not to say that their lives are meaningless, but they will never be able to affect anyone past the propinquity of their existence. They are never going to be able to affect someone in China; they are never going to be able to affect someone in 2132 the way Rilke can. And that specialness needs to be acknowledged; that specialness needs to be upheld; it needs to be rewarded, and people need to say, 'Goddamn – that's a good thing! It's a good thing that people make art!

Freilich ist es seltsam, die Erde nicht mehr zu bewohnen, kaum erlernte Gebräuche nicht mehr zu üben, Rosen, und andern eigens versprechenden Dingen nicht die Bedeutung menschlicher Zukunft zu geben; das, was man war in unendlich ängstlichen Händen, nicht mehr zu sein, und selbst den eigenen Namen wegzulassen wie ein zerbrochenes Spielzeug. Seltsam, die Wünsche nicht weiterzuwünschen. Seltsam, alles, was sich bezog, so lose im Raume flattern zu sehen. Und das Totsein ist mühsam und voller Nachholn, daß man allmählich ein wenig Ewigkeit spürt.—Aber Lebendige machen alle den Fehler, daß sie zu stark unterscheiden. Engel (sagt man) wüßten oft nicht, ob sie unter Lebenden gehn oder Toten. Die ewige Strömung.

Si hubiera consciencia como la nuestra en el seguro animal que viene a nuestro encuentro en otra dirección, nos cogería violentamente y nos haría dar la vuelta con su cambio. Pero su ser es para él infinito, suelto y no mira a su estado, puro como su mirada hacia adelante. Y donde nosotros vemos futuro, allí ve él Todo y a sí mismo en Todo y a salvo para siempre.

If you were to give yourself over to this angel, Rilke tells the reader, some day, some night, the angel’s light hands kämen denn … dich ringender zu prüfen, und gingen wie Erzürnte durch das Haus und griffen dich als ob sie dich erschüfen und brächen dich aus deiner Form heraus. would come more fiercely to interrogate you, and rush to seize you blazing like a star, and bend you as if trying to create you, and break you open, out of who you are.

How dear will you be to me then, you nights of affliction. Why couldn't I kneel more deeply and accept you, inconsolable sisters, or lose myself more freely in your loosened hair. We spendthrifts of sorrows. How we scan beyond them ahead into sad duration to see if perhaps they might have an end. But they are truly our winter-hardy foliage, the dark green of our life's meaning, one season of our secret year—, not only time—, but also place, settlement, shelter, soil, abode.

As for myself, what has died for me has died, so to speak, into my own heart: when I looked for him, the person who vanished has collected himself strangely and so surprisingly in me, and it was so moving to feel he was now only there that my enthusiasm for serving his new existence, for deepening and glorifying it, took the upper hand almost at the very moment when pain would otherwise have invaded and devastated the whole landscape of my spirit. When I remember how I—often with the utmost difficulty in understanding and accepting each other—loved my father! Often, in childhood, my mind became confused and my heart grew numb at the mere thought that someday he might no longer be; my existence seemed to me so wholly conditioned through him (my existence, which from the start was pointed in such a different direction!) that his departure was to my innermost self synonymous with my own destruction …, but so deeply is death rooted in the essence of love that (if only we are cognizant of death without letting ourselves be misled by the uglinesses and suspicions that have been attached to it) it nowhere contradicts love: where, after all, can it drive out someone whom we have carried unsayably in our heart except into this very heart, where would the “idea” of this loved being exist, and his unceasing influence (: for how could that cease which even while he lived with us was more and more independent of his tangible presence) … where would this always secret influence be more secure than in us?! Where can we come closer to it, where more purely celebrate it, when obey it better, than when it appears combined with our own voices, as if our heart had learned a new language, a new song, a new strength! (To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923)

Why [...] must we still be human and long for further fate? [...] because to be here means so very much. Because this fleeting sphere appears to need us [...], us… the most fleeting of all. Once and once only for each thing – then no more. For us as well. Once. Then no more… ever. But to have been as one, though but the once, with this world, never can be undone. So we persevere, attempting to resolve it and contain it in our grasp [...] We cannot take our insight with us into the other realm, no matter how painfully gathered. Nor anything which happened. Not one thing; neither suffering nor the heaviness of our lot. Not the hard earned lore of love, nor that which is beyond speaking. What can these things matter, later, underneath the stars? Better these things remain unsaid. When the rambler returns from the mountain to the vale, he carries no esoteric clump of soil, but some hard won word, pure and simple: a blossom of gentian, yellow and blue. Could it not be that we are here to say: house, bridge, cistern, gate, pitcher, flowering tree, window-or at most: monolith… skyscraper? But to say them in a way they, themselves, never knew themselves to be? [...]

I flipped through the Duino Elegies

The source of Rilke’s “eternal current” is nothing other than this. Appointed a university professor at just twenty-five years old; received at court by the emperor at the apex of his success; severely criticized by the majority of the academic world, which did not understand his ideas; always precariously balanced between enthusiasm and depression: the “dear sweet chubby one,” Ludwig Boltzmann, will end his life by hanging himself. He does so at Duino, near Trieste, while his wife and daughter are swimming in the Adriatic. The same Duino where, just a few years later, Rilke will write his Elegy.

the end of Rilke’s Duino Elegies: Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too, just once. And never again. But to have been this once, completely, even if only once: to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.' Clare sighs, a little soft sigh that means I don't speak German remember? 'Huh?' Every angel is terrifying'. It's part of a series of poems called the Duino Elegies, by a poet named Rilke. He's one of our favorite poets.