You are the future, the great sunrise red
above the broad plains of eternity.
You are the cock-crow when time’s night has fled,
You are the dew, the matins, and the maid,
the stranger and the mother, you are death.
You are the changeful shape that out of Fate
rears up in everlasting solitude,
the unlamented and the unacclaimed,
beyond describing as some savage wood.
You are the deep epitome of things
that keeps its being’s secret with locked lip,
and shows itself to others otherwise:
to the ship, a haven — to the land, a ship.
– Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from the Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Translated by Babette Deutsch.
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One of my friends like Rilke’s poems and novels since the days he was studying German in Humboldt University in Berlin. I remember him telling me about how delighted he was with Rilke’s expressions and that was probably the first time I realized that there is some beauty in German language I was not aware of. The only German I’ve heard in my youth was of German tourists and in WWII movies. Nothing very poetic in it 😀
Strange how we come into contact with other cultures sometimes! My first exposure to German (basically German anything) was the Octoberfest picnics my family would go to once a year at German Park in Indianapolis. Lots of brats and potato salad, German dancers and accordion music, and of course the beer flowing very freely (my dad’s favorite part).
As for Rilke, didn’t come across his poetry until my first college days in the 70s. He is not the easiest poet to read, even in translation. But I kept at it over the years, and now can approach him with a bit more ease, mostly downwind. 🙂
Incidentally, the boat in the photo is a Hallberg-Rassy 42E, the ketch version.