351

RAINER MARIA RILKE

Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes

That was the strange mine of souls.

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Like silent silver ore they went
as though veins through its darkness. Between roots
welled up the blood that continues on to mankind,
and heavy like porphyry it seemed in the darkness.
Otherwise nothing was red.

Rocks were there

and unsubstantial forests. Bridges over emptiness
and that large gray blind pool,
that hung over its distant floor
like rainy heavens over a landscape.
And between meadows, soft and full of patience,
appeared the pale streaks of the one path,
like a long length of bleached whiteness laid down.

And by this one path they came.

In front the slender man in blue cloak

who, mute and impatient, stared ahead.
Without chewing, his stride devoured the path
in great bites; his hands hung down
heavy and closed out of the drape of folds
and knew no more the lightsome lyre,
which into his left side had grown
like scrolls of roses in a bough of olive.
And his senses were as if divided:
while his glance like a dog ran ahead,
turned around, came back and ever again far away
stood waiting at the next turn of the path,—
his hearing remained behind him like a scent.
Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached
even to the passage of those other two,
who should be following this whole ascent.
Then once more there was only the resonance of his own climb

Literary Imagination, volume 9, number 3, pp. 351–353

doi:10.1093/litimag/imm065

ß The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars
and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
352

and the wind in his cloak that were behind him.

But he said to himself, they are still coming;
said it loud and heard it fade away.
They are still coming, but they were two
that went fearfully lightly. Could he
but once turn (were the backward glance
not the dissolution of this whole enterprise

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that first was to be accomplished), he must see them,
both of those so light ones, who were following him silently:

The god of passage and of distant tidings,

the traveling hood over shining eyes,
the slender staff held out before his body
and wings beating at his ankles;
and at his left hand entrusted: she.

The one so beloved, that from a lyre

more mourning came than ever from the hired woman mourners;
that a world out of mourning rose, in which
all was there again: forest and valley
and path and village, field and brook and beast;
and so that round this mourning-world, exactly
as around the other earth, a sun
and a star-filled silent heaven turned,
a mourning-heaven with disfigured stars—:
The one so beloved.

She however went at that god’s hand,

her pace curtailed by long shrouds,
uncertain, soft and without impatience.
She was within herself, like one of higher hope,
and did not think of the man, who went ahead,
nor of the path, which rose up into life.
She was within herself. And her death being
filled her like fullness itself.
Like a fruit of sweetness and darkness,
so full was she with her great death,
which thus was new, that she grasped nothing.

She was within a new maidenhood

and not touchable; her sex was closed
like a young flower toward evening,
and her hands had now been made so unaccustomed
to marriage that even the light god’s
endlessly gentle, guiding touch
grieved her like a too great intimacy.
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Already she was no longer the blond woman

who had sometimes echoed in the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide bed’s scent and isle
and that man’s property no more.

She was already unknotted like long hair

and surrendered like fallen rain

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and parceled out like a copious provision.

She was already root.

And when suddenly

the god halted her and with pain in his outcry
spoke the words: He has turned around—,
she grasped nothing and said faintly: Who?

But far away, dark before the bright exit,

stood someone, whose countenance
was not to be discerned. He stood and saw,
how on a strip of path through meadow
with a look full of sorrow the god of tidings
turned silently, to follow the shape,
which was already going back by the same path,
its step curtailed by long shrouds,
uncertain, soft and without impatience.

—translated by Peter Joseph Belfiore