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+--- Thread: Rilke : Duino Elegies, elegy #8 (/showthread.php?tid=5363)
Rilke : Duino Elegies, elegy #8 - jomo - 08-16-2012
Hi ! my name is Will,
I'd like to share with you a poem that I encountered that really resonated with me, and was a great source of inspiration for me to seek.
i've been reading the wanderer's handbook, and i find it resonates profoundly with me. I feel very human. for sure I have felt alienation from family. It seems to me that they like television too much. enough said I think ?
but that does not mean that I feel so much like I come from somewhere else. I feel a great deal of love for this planet. the trees across the street from me in the little park, make a beautiful filtered light that flows into my place. sometimes when I emerge from a particular feeling of sweetness that comes in meditation, I open my eyes and look at this dancing pattern caused by the layering of the leaves, there is a feeling of being gently spoken too, a language buried in that dance of leaves, because the leaves are yielding so gracefully in the wind. and what I see on my floor is this little intimate patch, for my eyes only of this loving dancing light, and my little teeny heart bottoms out, walls and floors and ceilings vanish for only a teeny instance, this tiny little just for me moment, so fleeting....so sweet
i one had the thought, reading about this idea of life in our dimension being veiled vs being unveiled. I love music and am a musician, and the thought hit me, how utterly beautiful sad songs are. Can one write sad songs about a broken heart unveiled? I think not. Not all songs are sad, of course, but those of deep longing for love, or loves lost, are they not our souls?
i am not so gifted with words, and often poetry escapes me.
but I love life on the planet, and love the animals and their freedom.
the leaves that filter the hot sun and make the afternoon dappled and lazy in a hammock.
so today I wanted to share this lovely poem from a series of 12 elegies by Rilke.
The Eighth Elegy
The creature gazes into openness with all
its eyes. But our eyes are
as if they were reversed, and surround it,
everywhere, like barriers against its free passage.
We know what is outside us from the animal’s
face alone: since we already turn
the young child round and make it look
backwards at what is settled, not that openness
that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.
We alone see that: the free creature
has its progress always behind it,
and God before it, and when it moves, it moves
in eternity, as streams do.
We never have pure space in front of us,
not for a single day, such as flowers open
endlessly into. Always there is world,
and never the Nowhere without the Not: the pure,
unwatched-over, that one breathes and
endlessly knows, without craving. As a child
loses itself sometimes, one with the stillness, and
is jolted back. Or someone dies and is it.
Since near to death one no longer sees death,
and stares ahead, perhaps with the large gaze of the creature.
Lovers are close to it, in wonder, if
the other were not always there closing off the view.....
As if through an oversight it opens out
behind the other......But there is no
way past it, and it turns to world again.
Always turned towards creation, we see
only a mirroring of freedom
dimmed by us. Or that an animal
mutely, calmly is looking through and through us.
This is what fate means: to be opposite,
and to be that and nothing else, opposite, forever.
If there was consciousness like ours
in the sure creature, that moves towards us
on a different track – it would drag us
round in its wake. But its own being
is boundless, unfathomable, and without a view
of its condition, pure as its outward gaze.
And where we see future it sees everything,
and itself in everything, and is healed for ever.
And yet in the warm waking creature
is the care and burden of a great sadness.
Since it too always has within it what often
overwhelms us – a memory,
as if what one is pursuing now was once
nearer, truer, and joined to us
with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance,
there it was breath. Compared to that first home
the second one seems ambiguous and uncertain.
O bliss of little creatures
that stay in the womb that carried them forever:
O joy of the midge that can still leap within,
even when it is wed: since womb is all.
And see the half-assurance of the bird,
almost aware of both from its inception,
as if it were the soul of an Etruscan,
born of a dead man in a space
with his reclining figure as the lid.
And how dismayed anything is that has to fly,
and leave the womb. As if it were
terrified of itself, zig-zagging through the air, as a crack
runs through a cup. As the track
of a bat rends the porcelain of evening.
And we: onlookers, always, everywhere,
always looking into, never out of, everything.
It fills us. We arrange it. It collapses.
We arrange it again, and collapse ourselves.
Who has turned us round like this, so that,
whatever we do, we always have the aspect
of one who leaves? Just as they
will turn, stop, linger, for one last time,
on the last hill, that shows them all their valley - ,
so we live, and are always taking leave.
RE: Rilke : Duino Elegies, elegy #8 - Lycen - 08-19-2012
Welcome Will,
I found you're writing to be as a poem itself, thus you're concern of lacking talent in that regard brings a sweet smile to this face
I did not really understand the poem by Rilke wholly, but it did leave a nostalgic feeling
So... THANKS like a mountain and a few ducks! O.O
Have a Great stay ,)
RE: Rilke : Duino Elegies, elegy #8 - jomo - 08-21-2012
thanks for note!
I appreciate your compliment!
for me the poem is a kind-of response to the idea that Man is the highest pinnacle of life here.
I say Man specifically in the sense that it might have been meant at the time, that "this is a Man's world"
animals are presented as being in the open, something that modern culture has alienated us from. so we are are 'turned around' facing the past, the known.
and thus the nostalgia for something deep and without words, really.
thanks again for reading!
I deeply appreciate it
RE: Rilke : Duino Elegies, elegy #8 - Dekalb_Blues - 09-19-2012
RE: Rilke : Duino Elegies, elegy #8
Jomo posted:
1. "... Free from death.
We alone see that: the free creature
has its progress always behind it,
and God before it, and when it moves, it moves
in eternity, as streams do."
Apropos, two poems by Ursula K. Le Guin:
GRACE
The kitten no bigger than a teacup growls
true threat at interference with his food;
will bite the hand that feeds him and draw blood.
He is Tiger Entire in his soul!
He shames the monkeyness in us, that howls
and grins and chatters and, knowing bad from good,
claims to be other than the animals
and nearer than the tiger to the grace of God.
THE BODY OF THE WORLD
[on the train between Seattle and Portland, October 2009]
I am this body and the leaves I see
blown from the brassy cottonwoods
beside the road. The body of the world,
the mountain and the clouds above it, that is me.
I breathe the autumn wind that is my breath
and in my body lives my brother, dead
two days ago. The one thing I am not
and he is not nor can we be is Death.
2. "... [T]here is a feeling of being gently spoken to, a language buried in that dance of leaves..."
THOUGHT-BIRD SONG
The birds outside my window
Are your thoughts sent to me
They come flying; fledglings.
I feed them bread crumbs
So they do not go hungry,
Then they perch on the tree branch
With beaks open, singing:
We come from the nest
Of yesterday and tomorrow.
God bless our journey.
We have flown from the inside
To the outside
World of your knowledge.
The cage door is wide open.
We burst out singing.
We fill all the treetops.
Splendid and glowing.
Tiny as tree bells
We dance on the tree branches
Night and day always.
Listen to us. Feed us.
We are your thoughts winging
Out of the nest of the birth-cage
Into summer and winter.
We perch on the branches
Of the minutes and seconds.
Our song is your heartbeat.
We move with your pulses.
You send us out perfect and shining,
Each living and different
To populate your kingdom.
We sing outside your window
And line up on the rooftops.
Separate and knowing
We peer through the branches,
Surveying the inner
Land of enchantment,
The skyless and timeless
World of our birth.
We fly from our perches
Back and forth to our first nest,
Vanishing inside
The cage of your head,
Then we fly out again
And sing at your window
While you feed us bread crumbs
From your hand.
-- Jane Roberts
“In poetry the Sumari songs, sung or written, delineate the metaphysics of the inner self. And that metaphysics is, I believe, truer to reality than the exterior dogmas and sciences that we accept as ‘truth’.”
--- from Roberts' Adventures in Consciousness: An Introduction to Aspect Psychology (NY: Prentice Hall, 1978)
Learn about Sumari art & listen to "The Thought-Bird Song"