Rainer Maria Rilke Duino Elegies

Shambhala Publications, Inc., 1992
Converted by Stephen Mitchell

The Very First Elegy
Whom, easily cried aside, would hear me personally among the list of angels' hierarchies?

and even if a person of these pressed myself abruptly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which our company is nevertheless just able to withstand,
therefore we are incredibly awed since it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
Therefore I hold myself as well as swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, who can we ever seek out in our need?
Maybe not angels, maybe not humans, and already the once you understand pets are aware
that individuals are not actually yourself inside our interpreted world.
Possibly there stays for us some tree on a hillside, which day-after-day we could take into our vision;
there stays for all of us yesterday's street therefore the respect of a habit such comfortable
when it stayed around it relocated in and do not left.
Oh and evening: there is certainly evening, when a wind packed with infinite area gnaws at our faces.
Who wouldn't it continue to be for-that longed-after, averagely disillusioning existence,
that the individual heart so painfully fulfills.
Can it be any less difficult for enthusiasts?
However they keep on using one another to disguise their particular fate.
Right understand yet?
Fling the emptiness from your arms into the areas we breathe;
perhaps the wild birds will feel the expanded environment with increased passionate flying.

Yes-the springtimes required you. Frequently a star had been available to note it.
a wave rolled toward you out of the distant last,

or as you moved under an available window, a violin yielded it self towards hearing.
All this was mission. But could you accomplish it?
Were not you always distracted by hope, as though every occasion launched a beloved?
(Where can you discover a spot to help keep this lady, with all the huge odd ideas inside you
going and coming and frequently keeping all-night.)
But once you're feeling longing, sing of women crazy; for their famous passion is still maybe not immortal.
Sing of females abandoned and desolate (you envy them, virtually)
which could love a lot more strictly than those have been gratified.
Begin again and again the never-attainable praising; keep in mind: the hero life on;
even his downfall was merely a pretext for achieving their last beginning.
But Nature, invested and exhausted, takes fans back in by herself,
just as if there have been not enough energy generate them an additional time.
Perhaps you have thought Gaspara Stampa intensely enough
so that any woman deserted by the woman beloved could be influenced by that brutal exemplory case of soaring, objectless love and could say to herself, "Perhaps I'm able to be like this lady?"
Should never this many old of sufferings finally grow much more fruitful for us?
Actually it time that people lovingly freed ourselves from beloved and,