By Rainer Maria Rilke
It is one thing to sing the beloved. Another, alas,
to invoke that hidden, guilty river-god of the blood.
Her young lover, whom she knows from far away-what
does he know of
the lord of desire who often, up from the depths of his
solitude,
even before she could soothe him, and as though she didn’t
exist,
held up his head, ah, dripping with the unknown,
erect, and summoned the night to an endless uproar.
Oh the Neptune inside our blood, with his appalling trident.
Oh the dark wind from his breast out of that spiraled conch.
Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow. O stars,
isn’t it from you that the lover’s desire for the face
of his beloved arises? Doesn’t his secret insight
into her pure features come from the pure constellations?
Not you, his mother: alas, you were not the one
who bent the arch of his eyebrows into such expectation.
Not for you, girl so aware of him, not for your mouth
did his lips curve themselves into a more fruitful expression.
Do you really think that your gentle steps could have shaken
him
with such violence, you who move like the morning breeze?
Yes, you did frighten his heart; but more ancient terrors
plunged into him at the shock of that feeling. Call him . . .
but you can’t quite call him away from those dark
companions.
Of course, he wants to escape, and he does; relieved, he
nestles
into your sheltering heart, takes hold, and begins himself.
But did he ever begin himself, really?
Mother, you made him small, it was you who started him;
in your sight he was new, over his new eyes you arched
the friendly world and warded off the world that was alien.
Ah, where are the years when you shielded him just by
placing
your slender form between him and the surging abyss?
How much you hid from him then. The room that filled
with suspicion
at night: you made it harmless; and out of the refuge of your
heart
you mixed a more human space in with his night-space.
And you set down the lamp, not in that darkness, but in
your own nearer presence, and it glowed at him like a friend.
There wasn’t a creak that your smile could not explain,
as though you had long known just when the floor would do
that…
And he listened and was soothed. So powerful was your
presence
as you tenderly stood by the bed; his fate,
tall and cloaked, retreated behind the wardrobe, and his
restless
future, delayed for a while, adapted to the folds of the
curtain.
And he himself, as he lay there, relieved, with the sweetness
of the gentle world you had made for him dissolving beneath
his drowsy eyelids, into the foretaste of sleep-:
he seemed protected . . . But inside: who could ward off,
who could divert, the floods of origin inside him?
Ah, there was no trace of caution in that sleeper; sleeping,
yes but dreaming, but flushed with what fevers: how he
threw himself in.
All at once new, trembling, how he was caught up
and entangled in the spreading tendrils of inner event
already twined into patterns, into strangling undergrowth,
prowling
bestial shapes. How he submitted-. Loved.
Loved his interior world, his interior wilderness,
that primal forest inside him, where among decayed
treetrunks
his heart stood, light-green. Loved. Left it, went through
his own roots and out, into the powerful source
where his little birth had already been outlived. Loving,
he waded down into more ancient blood, to ravines
where Horror lay, still glutted with his fathers. And every
Terror knew him, winked at him like an accomplice.
Yes, Atrocity smiled . . . Seldom
had you smiled so tenderly, mother. How could he help
loving what smiled at him. Even before he knew you,
he had loved it, for already while you carried him inside you,
it
was dissolved in the water that makes the embryo weightless.
No, we don’t accomplish our love in a single year
as the flowers do; an immemorial sap
flows up through our arms when we love. Dear girl,
this: that we loved, inside us, not One who would someday
appear, but
seething multitudes; not just a single child,
but also the fathers lying in our depths
like fallen mountains; also the dried-up riverbeds
of ancient mothers-; also the whole
soundless landscape under the clouded or clear
sky of its destiny-: all this, my dear, preceded you.
And you yourself, how could you know
what primordial time you stirred in your lover. What
passions
welled up inside him from departed beings. What
women hated you there. How many dark
sinister men you aroused in his young veins. Dead
children reached out to touch you . . . Oh gently, gently,
let him see you performing, with love, some confident daily
task,-
lead him out close to the garden, give him what outweighs
the heaviest night . . . . . .
Restrain him . . . . . .
From Ahead of All Parting:
The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke
Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Read more poems from Rainer Maria Rilke
Index of poets on Allspirit