Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
THE PANTHER His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed. Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly--. An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone. (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER AS A YOUNG MAN In the eyes: dream. The brow as if it could feel something far off. Around the lips, a great freshness--seductive, though there is no smile. Under the rows of ornamental braid on the slim Imperial officer's uniform: the saber's basket-hilt. Both hands stay folded upon it, going nowhere, calm and now almost invisible, as if they were the first to grasp the distance and dissolve. And all the rest so curtained within itself, so cloudy, that I cannot understand this figure as it fades into the background--. Oh quickly disappearing photograph in my more slowly disappearing hand. (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
LAMENT Everything is far and long gone by. I think that the star glittering above me has been dead for a million years. I think there were tears in the car I heard pass and something terrible was said. A clock has stopped striking in the house across the road... When did it start?... I would like to step out of my heart an go walking beneath the enormous sky. I would like to pray. And surely of all the stars that perished long ago, one still exists. I think that I know which one it is-- which one, at the end of its beam in the sky, stands like a white city... (translated by Stephen Mitchell)
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Revised: March 9, 1997