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A Tradition
Sep. 1st, 2025 08:54 pmAutumn Day
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Lord, it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows
and on the meadows let the wind go free.
Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine:
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one
whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening
and wander on the boulevards up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.
* * * * * *
What is it that brings me back to this poem every year, other than the wish to offer some sort of honour to the world in its cycles? (And to poetry.)
Rilke was intolerably self-indulgent in a number of ways, but nobody ever wrote the pure grief of existence so well. I suppose I mean that he was probably depressed and so am I.
Here's what I like: that the opening address is to the creator, and is either an acknowledgement and submission, or a gentle reminder, or both.
I like -- and I don't know where or with whom this device originates, but it is beloved of many modern poets, including me (the psalms? does it come from the psalms?) -- the way the speaker exhorts everything to do what it would do anyway. His will is irrelevant to the vine and the wind, but that makes his instructions a kind of radical acceptance -- I enter so completely into the wish for things to be exactly as they are, as they are intended to be, even as they wound me with their beauty and their ephemerality, that my will becomes identical with their actions.
And the turn of course, between the radiant second stanza and the stark third; from the fruit as almost heroes of the journey into wine, to the "whoever" who seems to have no place in harvest or celebration, but is already among the dry leaves.
It is, as they say, me: "whoever" is me. I wish I wrote long letters. Rilke's journals and letters are extraordinary. I wish I had some consolation for you now other than the world, but so far as I can see there never was any consolation other than the world.
§rf§
Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Stephen Mitchell
Lord, it is time. The huge summer has gone by.
Now overlap the sundials with your shadows
and on the meadows let the wind go free.
Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine:
grant them a few more warm transparent days,
urge them on to fulfillment then, and press
the final sweetness into the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now, will never have one
whoever is alone will stay alone,
will sit, read, write long letters through the evening
and wander on the boulevards up and down,
restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.
* * * * * *
What is it that brings me back to this poem every year, other than the wish to offer some sort of honour to the world in its cycles? (And to poetry.)
Rilke was intolerably self-indulgent in a number of ways, but nobody ever wrote the pure grief of existence so well. I suppose I mean that he was probably depressed and so am I.
Here's what I like: that the opening address is to the creator, and is either an acknowledgement and submission, or a gentle reminder, or both.
I like -- and I don't know where or with whom this device originates, but it is beloved of many modern poets, including me (the psalms? does it come from the psalms?) -- the way the speaker exhorts everything to do what it would do anyway. His will is irrelevant to the vine and the wind, but that makes his instructions a kind of radical acceptance -- I enter so completely into the wish for things to be exactly as they are, as they are intended to be, even as they wound me with their beauty and their ephemerality, that my will becomes identical with their actions.
And the turn of course, between the radiant second stanza and the stark third; from the fruit as almost heroes of the journey into wine, to the "whoever" who seems to have no place in harvest or celebration, but is already among the dry leaves.
It is, as they say, me: "whoever" is me. I wish I wrote long letters. Rilke's journals and letters are extraordinary. I wish I had some consolation for you now other than the world, but so far as I can see there never was any consolation other than the world.
§rf§
