R. M. Rilke: Letter
to a young poet
From:
R. M. Rilke, Letters to a young poet,
tr. by Stephen Mitchell
Page 13
Rilke : We
don't know ourselves!
From
Rilke's Elegies of Duino, The Fourth Elegy, tr. by
A. E. Flemming
O trees
of life, oh, what when winter comes?
We are
not of one mind. Are not like birds
in unison migrating. And overtaken,
overdue, we thrust ourselves into the wind
and fall to earth into indifferent ponds.
Blossoming
and withering we comprehend as one.
And
somewhere lions roam, quite unaware,
in their magnificence, of any weaknesss.
But we,
while wholly concentrating on one thing,
already feel the pressure of another.
Hatred
is our first response. And lovers,
are they not forever invading one another's
boundaries? -although they promised space, hunting and homeland. Then, for a
sketch drawn at a moment's impulse, a ground of contrast
is prepared, painfully, so that we may see.
For they
are most exact with us. We do not know
the contours of our feelings. We only know what shapes them from the outside.
Who has
not sat, afraid, before his own heart's
curtain? It lifted and displayed the scenery
of departure. Easy to understand. The well-known
garden swaying just a little. Then came the dancer.
Rilke wrote his first letter to a young poet (the original
title is "Briefe an einen jungen Dichter") in the February
of 1903 and the last one in the December of 1908. He had already
written the "Book of Images". Read
more... Cf. Plato, Books
can be your worst enemies *
Jaspers, Truth is in
communication *
Kierkegaard, My work as an author
*
Emerson, Reading and writing as
self-knowledge *
Francis Bacon, Reading & writing as
moral activities *
Tom Schulman, Dead Poets
Society
*
Gibson - MacRury, The man without a face
*
J. M. Lefévre, The White Thinking
*
Dostoevsky, The dream of ridiculous
man
