Poems from Rilke on love

These poems all come from a collection, translated and compiled by John J.L. Mood, of poems and essays of Rainer Maria Rilke. They are all on the subject of love.





You declare you know love's nights? Have not bud
and sepal of soft words blossomed in your blood?
Are there not on your beloved body places
which recollect like open faces?
. . . . . . . . these soft
nights hold me like themselves aloft
and I lie without a lover.


Summer, 1909





What fields are fragrant as your hands?
You feel how external fragrance stands
upon your stronger resistance.
Stars stand in images above.
Give me your mouth to soften, love;
ah, your hair is all in idleness.

See, I want to surround you with yourself
and the faded expectations lift
from the edge of your eyebrows;
I want, as with inner eyelids sheer,
to close for you all places which appear
by my tender caresses now.

Summer, 1909






WOMAN'S LAMENT I

And the last perhaps will not return
and knows me not although I burn.
Ah the trees overhang glowingly
and I feel no one feeling me.

Early 1911






WOMAN'S LAMENT II

So like a door which won't stay closed,
my moaning embraces open in sleep
again and again. Oh nights of woe.

Outside grows the garden gently in the moonlight
and the blossoms dim my window
and the nightingale is not in vain.

Early 1911