Summer Solstice, Looking West




Evening
a poem by
Rainer Maria Rilke
         

Slowly the evening changes into the clothes
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you look: and two worlds grow separate from you,
one ascending to heaven, another, that falls;

and leave you, belonging not wholly to either one,
not quite as dark as the house that remains silent,
not quite as certainly sworn to eternity
as that which becomes star each night and rises—

and leave you (unsayably to disentangle) your life
with all its immensity and fear and great ripening,
so that, all but bounded, all but understood,
it is by turns stone in you and star.



                          Rainer Maria Rilke
                               (tr. Cliff Crego)











| go to the German text, Abend (or click on photo) |
| to see more of Rilke's work in translation together with the German originals, a concise hyperlinked biography,
as well as a guide to Rilke on the Internet, go to The Poetry of Ranier Maria Rilke |

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Texts © 1999 Cliff Crego   All Rights Reserved 
(Last update: III.9.2002) Comments to crego@picture-poems.com