Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened by Rainer Maria Rilke
Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened
by Rainer Maria Rilke
English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Original Language German
Be ahead of all parting, as if it had already happened.
like winter, which even now is passing.
For beneath the winter is a winter so endless
that to survive it at all is a triumph of the heart.
Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing.
Climb praying as you return to connection.
Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient,
be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings.
Be. And, at the same time, know what it is not to be.
The non-being inside you allows you to vibrate
in full resonance with your world. Use it for once.
To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable
numbers of beings abounding in Nature,
add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost.
This is one of my very favorite pieces of all time, as Rilke is probably my first poetic love so his poetry will be liberally dispensed here. For me, this encapsulates the Zen tradition “Be…and not to be, the non-being inside you allows you to vibrate in full resonance with your world. Use it for once.” There’s this imperative, urgent and bright and fierce, to just live with this fullness of consequentiality feels like it rings me. I was memorizing this poem while hiking the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, and I had this strange moment that the words were shaping the landscape shaping me and my witnessing as I walked along this ancient Incan road, “…among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient…”.
This is late Rilke at his most brilliant, come fully into his own. The Sonnets to Orpheus were composed in February 1922 at Château de Muzot in a sustained burst of writing during which Rilke also completed the Duino Elegies. The fifty-five sonnets are dedicated to Vera Ouckama Knoop, a young dancer who had died of leukemia.
