Rilke Cheer

Painting by Maler Helmut Westhoff

Garrison Keillor and Tess Kincaid remind us that:

It's the birthday of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, born in Prague (1875), who made a career as a poet by seducing a series of rich noblewomen who would support him while he wrote his books. One princess let him live for a while in her Castle Duino near Trieste, a medieval castle with fortified walls and an ancient square tower. Rilke's room had a view of the gulf of Trieste, which he loved. In a letter from his room he wrote, "I am looking out into the empty sea-space, directly into the universe, you might say."

It was that winter of 1912, alone in the castle, that Rilke later said he heard the voice of an angel speaking to him about the meaning of life and death, and he started a poem that began with the lines, "And if I cried, who'd listen to me in those angelic / orders? Even if one of them suddenly held me / to his heart, I'd vanish in his overwhelming / presence. Because beauty's nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear, / and we adore it because of the serene scorn / it could kill us with. Every angel's terrifying."

Rilke wrote two poems about angels in almost a single sitting, and he knew that he had begun his most important work, but then he got stuck. He eventually left the castle, the First World War broke out, and he struggled to write anything for the next decade, while he was slowly beginning to suffer the symptoms of leukemia. Finally, in February of 1922, he managed to finish in a single month what he'd started a decade before. The result was a cycle of 10 long poems that he called The Duino Elegies, about the difference between angels and people, and the meaning of death, and his idea that human beings are put on earth in order to experience the beauty of ordinary things.

In the Ninth Elegy, Rilke wrote: "Maybe we're here only to say: house, / bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window — / at most, pillar, tower ... but to say them, remember, / oh, to say them in a way that the things themselves / never dreamed of existing so intensely."

One had to take some action against fear when once it laid hold of one.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.
Rainer Maria Rilke

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.
Rainer Maria Rilke

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens.
Rainer Maria Rilke

The only journey is the one within.
Rainer Maria Rilke

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.
Rainer Maria Rilke

There are no classes in life for beginners; right away you are always asked to deal with what is most difficult.
Rainer Maria Rilke

There are quantities of human faces, but there are many more faces, for each person has several.
Rainer Maria Rilke

There are so many things about which some old man ought to tell one while one is little; for when one is grown one would know them as a matter of course.
Rainer Maria Rilke

There may be good, but there are no pleasant marriages.
Rainer Maria Rilke

This is the miracle that happens every time to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Truly to sing, that is a different breath.
Rainer Maria Rilke

Who has not sat before his own heart's curtain? It lifts: and the scenery is falling apart.
Rainer Maria Rilke