21 March 2025

Dear friends of Rilke,

How wonderful that you were able to join us for Thursday’s craft talk, “Everything Matters:

Exploring the Creative Imagination with Rainer Maria Rilke.” I’ve been grateful to hear from quite a

number of you following the event, reflecting on what they gathered from our exploration of Rilke’s

visionary writings.

Each of us carries within us the poetic impulse, that deep longing to discover what he called our

“innerness” as a way of grounding ourselves in our lives. In her memoir that explores her life with

RMR, Lou Andreas Salomé put it this way: “Each one of us leads an imaginative existence, from

the most elemental to the most sophisticated levels of our experience, from our waking thoughts to

the deepest dreams that come to us in the night. And the more removed we are from our

controlling consciousness and the more immersed we become in what arises within us from the

soul’s darkness, the more convinced we are of the poet within us, indeed

the poet within every person.”

Below, please find the poems I shared, in my translation and in the order presented. Several are not

available in print and I would appreciate it if you would not circulate them at this point as they are

part of a larger volume scheduled for publication in several years. The two selections from Rilke’s

Sonnets to Orpheus are from my recent (award-winning) bilingual version, published last year by

Monkfish Book Publishing and readily available in bookstores and online. I’ll also include the

quotations we explored together. You might also be interested in the book I wrote with the

Australian bestselling author (and Rilke scholar), Stephanie Dowrick, which was published several

months ago:

You Are the Future: Living the Questions with Rainer Maria Rilke. Also from

Monkfish and available wherever books are sold. This one explores life-questions we all face with

short pieces Stephanie and I wrote, each of which draws on a poem of Rilke’s.

Finally, if you’d like to be in touch with me, you can find a link to do so on my website

(www.msburrows.com). I’d be glad to include you in occasional mailings about other events I’ll be

leading, Rilke retreats/workshops/talks among them, if you wish. Or you can write to me directly

at: mark.s.burrows@gmail.com

In the meantime, my thanks for your interest and participation in my craft talk.

With best wishes,

POEMS IN THE ORDER CITED, FOLLOWED BY QUOTATIONS

I worry so much for the words that they use,

for all that they say is so certain and clear:

this they call dog, and that one is house;

here it begins and it ends over there.

Their intention unsettles with their fill of disdain,

presuming to know what will be and what’s gone;

the mountains no longer hold mystery for them,

yet their gardens, estates, all border on God.

I want always to resist and to warn—to steer clear.

The singing of things is what I most want to claim.

You touch them: they’re stiff and mute they’ll remain.

You kill for me all of the things that are here.

—RMR, from

In Celebration of Myself (

Mir zur Feier)

*

Fullness of apple, pear and banana,

gooseberry . . . All this speaks

death and life in the mouth . . . I sense . . .

Read it on a child’s face

when it tastes them. This comes from afar.

Is it being slowly rendered nameless in your mouth?

Where words once were discoveries now flow,

startled in being freed from the fruit’s flesh.

Dare to say what you call apple.

This sweetness that first deepens

so that, quietly formed in our tasting,

it becomes clear, alert, and transparent,

ambiguous, sunny, earthy, here-and-now –:

O experience, sensation, joy –, immense!

—RMR,

Sonnets to Orpheus I.13 (1922/1923); in my recently published

translation

*

Already the barberries are ripening red,

and the garden’s wilting asters breathe their last.

Whoever’s not rich now as summer has passed

will wait and wait and never know themselves.

Those who can’t now close their eyes,

certain that a harvest of faces still lies

waiting within them until night falls,

to rise within their darkness: –

for them it’s over as if they’re already old.

Nothing more will come for them, no new day unfold,

and everything that happens to them deceives;

even you, my God. For you’re like a stone

that pulls them daily down into the deep.

—RMR, from “The Book of Pilgrimage” in

The Book of Hours, II

*

Sing the gardens, my heart, that you don’t know; like gardens

poured into glass, clear and unattainable.

Fountains and roses of Isfahan or Shiraz:

sing them blissfully and praise them, each incomparable.

Show, my heart, that you can never be without them.

That their ripening figs have you in mind.

That you consort with their winds that rise

to your face among the blooming branches.

Avoid the mistaken notion that anything is lacking

in the decision you’ve made: to be!

Silken thread, you’re woven into the weave.

Whatever image you’re inwardly joined to,

(if only a moment in this anguished life),

feel that the whole, the praiseworthy carpet is meant.

—RMR,

Sonnets to Orpheus II.19

*

We knew nothing of his amazing head

in which his eyes ripened like apples. But

his body still glows like a streetlamp

in which his gaze, now extinguished,

continues and shines. Otherwise, his curving

chest couldn’t have blinded you, and the quiet twist

of his loins wouldn’t have brought a smile

to the groin where his begetting lay.

Otherwise, this stone would’ve been marred

there where the shoulders seem to fall,

and wouldn’t shimmer like a predator’s hide,

couldn’t have burst forth from all its edges like

an exploding star—because here there is no place

that doesn’t see you. You must change your life.

—RMR, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” in

New Poems, II

“Imagination is not, as its etymology would suggest, the faculty of forming images of reality. It is rather the faculty

of forming images which go beyond reality, which

sing reality…In the realm of the imagination, every immanence

takes on a transcendence. The very law of poetic expression is to be beyond thought.”

—Gaston Bachelard,

On Poetic Imagination and Reverie

*

“I am learning to see. I don’t know what causes this, but everything now goes deeper within me and does not remain

in the place where it was once always at an end. I have an innerness [

ein Inneres] of which I knew nothing.

Everything now goes there. I don’t know what happens there.”

—RMR, from

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

*

“Most people do not realize how beautiful the world is and how much radiance reveals itself in the tiniest things—in

some flower, in a stone, in tree bark, or in a birch leaf. Grownups, being preoccupied with business and worries and

tormenting themselves with all kinds of petty things, gradually lose the capacity to see the riches that children, when

they are attentive and good, immediately notice and love with their whole heart. And yet the greatest beauty would be

achieved if everyone could remain like such children, simple and innocent in feeling, and if they did not lose

the capacity for delighting as tenderly in a birch leaf or a peacock’s feather or the wing of a hooded crow as in a great

mountain range or a magnificent palace. What is small is not small in itself, just as that which is great is not—great.

A vast and eternal beauty passes through the entire world and is justly distributed over small and large things

alike…”

—RMR, letter to Helmut Westhoff (November 12, 1901)

“I’d like to believe that Rainer Maria Rilke’s lifelong and overarching need had to do with his learning to prove

himself in the simplest of workaday matters, in the ongoing loyalty to the least of things, in the respectful treatment

of the poor and unblessed hours of this existence. But this did not mean that he merely functioned as an apprentice

during the gaps in his mastery. Rather, these were the substance of the matter: to be allowed to live forth from the

most negligible no less than from the greatest of things, and to know that we cannot fall from

that sense of being

held. . .”

—Lou Andreas-Salomé on Rilke’s character

*

“Allow your judgments their own quiet, undisturbed development, which like every measure of progress arise from

deep within you and can be neither forced nor hurried. Everything is about carrying to term and then giving birth.

To live as an artist, in your understanding as in your creative life, depends on letting each impression and each seed

of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, in the unconscious, beyond the reach

of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born.”

—RMR, from

Letters to a Young Poet (April 23, 1903)