Sunday Poetry - Rainer Maria Rilke
Originally published at biblio + chic {infatuated with books}. Please leave any comments there.
Now that I will be blogging regularly again, I wanted to revive my weekly themed posts. So today, I’d like to again talk about some of my favorite poetry, and this week I’ll be discussing the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. I first learned of this poet while reading Shiver by Maggie Stiefvater. In this beautiful novel, which I discussed here, Sam introduced Grace to this German poet. I researched Rilke on the Internet, and here is one of my favorite poems:
Love Song
How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn’t touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn’t resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin’s bow,
which draws one voice out of two seperate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh sweetest song.
Rilke was a German poet in the late 19th and early 20th century. His poems have been translated in to many languages, and I think that part of the beauty of his poetry is the translation-the slight unhinged wording that is used as a result of these words being translated into English. His words are simple, yet powerful with feeling.
His poetry is very lyrical, haunting, intense (which is, I’m sure, why Stiefvater chose to use it for Shiver). “How can I keep my soul in me, so that it doesn’t touch your soul?” he asks, in Love Song. What does this line mean to you? To me, its a yearning of the heart, someone that can’t contain their love for someone else, so that the person’s heart and soul is threatening to break out of their core, reaching out to touch that other person.
These are the type of beautiful words that resonate with people with all ages, especially young people (like myself) and teenagers. Feelings are amplified, thoughts and words are big. Every word glues something together or cuts it apart.
This is the type of beauty that I would like to show in my life, the words I would love to write, but since they have already been written, I can appreciate them and smile at their amazing vivacity.
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