monday poem #273: Rainer Maria Rilke, "Fall Day"

[heresluck]

Without abandoning his exalted sense of calling, the dedication that filled his life and took him away from many normal human contacts, [Rilke] renewed his sense of the artist as craftsman and laborer, sustained by a tradition stretching back through the middle ages and into the classical world. The artist and poet were priests, perhaps, but they were workers too, who had to use their hands, put in long hours, and exhaust themselve with physical effort. . . . [Rilke's] utmost delight is to mix the earthly and the otherworldly inextricably together.
- David Young, from the introduction

Fall Day

Lord: it's time. Summer was very large.
Lay your shadow on the sundials now
and let the winds loose in the meadows.

Tell the last fruits they must be full;
give them two more perfect southern days,
force them to completion and then chase
their last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Who has no house now won't be building one.
Who is alone will stay that way for long,
will waken, read, write lengthy letters
and wander, restless, up and down
the avenues when leaves are blowing.

- Rainer Maria Rilke
from The Book of Fresh Beginnings: Selected Poems
translated by David Young

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