Rainer Maria Rilke. 6 poems to celebrate your birthday

Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet and novelist who I was born in Prague on a day like today in 1875. One of the most important German-language writers of his time and then worldwide. These are 6 of his poems to remember it.

Rainer Maria Rilke

La childhood of Rilke was marked by a family full of conflicts. After leaving military school due to health problems, he did courses in literature, art history and philosophy in Munich and Berlin. He devoted himself fully to writing and vtraveled to several countries of Europe. Resided in Paris, where he published works such as New poems, Requiem, and the novel The notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

During the first World War estuvo in munich, where he served as a clerk. He ended up in Switzerland, where he published his most prominent titles: Sonnets to Orpheus and Elegies of Duino.

poems

Fall day

Sir: it's time. Long was the summer.
Put your shadow on the sundials,
and release the winds across the plains.

Make the last fruits season;
give them two more days from the south,
Urge them to maturity and put
in thick wine the last sweetness.

He who does not have it now will not make a home,
the one who is now alone will always be,
He will watch, read, write long letters,
and will roam the avenues,
restless as the rolling of leaves.

***

The roses

If your freshness sometimes surprises us so much
blissful rose,
is that in yourself, inside,
petal against petal, you rest.

Wide awake set whose center
sleep, while they touch, innumerable,
the tenderness of that silent heart
that go up to the extreme mouth.

***

The lover

Yes, I long for you. I slip
hand in hand, losing myself,
no hope to dispute that
that, as from your side, reaches me
serious, not diverted, unrelated.

… Those times: How I was One Single Thing,
nothing that would cry out, and that would betray me;
my silence. It was just like that of a stone
through which the river drags its murmur!

But inside of me, in these weeks
of spring, there is something that has opened slowly
coming out of the dark year unconscious.
Something has given up my hot life
in the hand of someone who does not know
that I existed yesterday.

***
Home

Whoever you are: at sunset come out
of your room, in which you know everything;
in the distance is your house
like the end: whoever you are.
Like your eyes that hardly, tired,
from the consumed threshold they can get rid of,
you pick up a black tree very slowly
putting him before the sky: slim, alone.
And you have made the world. And it's big, and it's like
a word that even in silence matures.
And according to your want, understand its meaning
your eyes are tenderly dislodged ...

***

The Panther

His gaze has gotten tired of watching so much
those bars before him, in incessant parade,
that nothing else could enter it.
It seems to him that there are only thousands of bars
and that behind them no world exists.

As he goes on drawing again and again
narrow circles with their footsteps,
the movement of its deft, smooth paws
is showing a resounding dance,
around a center where he is still alert
an imposing will.

Only sometimes, allow in silence, the opening
of the curtains that hid his pupils;
and cross an image inward,
slides through tense muscles
falls into his heart, fades and dies.

***

Love song

How to hold my soul to
that does not touch yours?
How should i raise it
even the other things, about you?
I would like to shelter it under any lost object,
in a strange and silent corner
where your shudder could not spread.

But everything we touch, you and me,
unites us, like a bow strike,
that a single voice starts from two strings.
On what instrument did they strain us?
And what hand beats us making that sound?


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