I have my dead, and I have let them go,
and was amazed to see them so contented,
so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,

Now shall I praise the cities, those long-surviving
(I watched them in awe) great constellations of earth.
For only in praising is my heart still mine, so violently

You who never arrived
in my arms, beloved, who were lost
from the start,

We are not permitted to linger, even with what is most
intimate. From images that are full, the spirit’s
stream plunges down to others that suddenly must be filled;

Often I gazed at you in wonder: stood at the window begun
the day before, stood and gazed at you in wonder. As yet the new town
seemed denied to me, and the unpersuaded landscape kept darkening

There stands death, a bluish distillate
in a cup without a saucer. Such a strange
place to find a cup: standing on

What birds plunge through is not the intimate space
in which you see all forms intensified.
(Out in the Open, you would be denied

World was in the face of the beloved.
Suddenly it poured out and was gone:
world is outside, world cannot be grasped.

Oh the losses into the All, Marina, the stars that are falling!
We can’t make it larger, wherever we fling ourselves, to whatever
star we may go! In the Whole, all things are already numbered.

Oh tear-filled one who, like a sky held back,
grows heavy above the landscape of her sorrow.
And when she weeps, the gentle raindrops fall,

Our road’s no wider than yours. We often fall from the height. We’re broken too, but our lack of attention doesn’t force us to climb the rope again. Your slightest mistake can kill you. 

“My hands rest open and empty, like half shells from which the pearl has been removed.”

Throughout his life, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 -1926) wrote letters to close friends as well as individuals who had read his poetry but did not know him personally. At the time of his death in 1926 at the age of 51, Rilke had written over…

Rilke wrote this essay after having viewed the dolls of Lotte Pritzel at a Munich exhibition in 1913. They were not designed for children. These elongated and emaciated dolls were mounted on small baroque stands and dressed for the most part in weir…

  Never before translated into English, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Painter is a surprising companion to his earlier and far more famous Letters to a Young Poet. In eight intimate letters written to a teenage Balthus—who would go on…

You must have seen them: these small towns and tiny villages of my homeland. They have learned one day by heart and they scream it out into the sunlight over and over again like great gray parrots. Near night though they grow preternaturally pensive.