ranier maria rilke
From a childhood
Rich darkness round the room was streaming
where the boy sat, quite hidden in himself.
His mother came, a dream within his dreaming,
and a glass quivered on a silent shelf.
Feeling the room had given her away,
she kissed him — "So it's you" — and let him be...
Then both glanced at the piano timidly,
for often of an evening she would play,
and had a song that drew him deep and clung.
going blind
She'd sat just like the others there at tea.
And then I'd seemed to notice that her cup
was being a little differently picked up.
She'd smiled once. It had almost hurt to see.
And when eventually they rose and talked
and slowly, and as chance led, were dispersing
through several rooms there, laughing and conversing,
I noticed her. Behind the rest she walked
subduedly, like someone who presently
will have to sing, and with so many listening;
on those bright eyes of hers, with pleasure glistening,
played, as on pools, an outer radiancy.
She followed slowly and she needed time,
as though some long ascent were not yet by;
and yet: as though, when she had ceased to climb,
she would no longer merely walk, but fly.
PONT DU Carrousel
That blind man standing by the parapet,
gray as some nameless empire's boundary stone,
he is perhaps that something unbeknown
to which the planetary clock is set,
the silent center of the starry ways;
for all around him strives and struts and strays.
He keeps his movelessly inerrant station
where manifold perplexing crossways go;
the somber entrance to the world below
among a superficial generation.
the reader
Who knows him, he who's let his face descend
to where a new existency engages,
only the rapid turn of crowded pages
will sometimes violently suspend?
Even his mother could not feel quite sure
it's he, there reading something saturated
with his own shadow. And, clock-regulated,
can we know how much ebbed from him before
he laboringly uplooked: thereby upheaving
all the book's deepness to the light of day,
with eyes which, now outgiving, not receiving,
impinged upon a filled environment:
as quiet children, after lonely play,
will suddenly perceive the situation;
his features, though, in full coordination,
remained forever different.