I believe in all that has never yet been spoken by Rainer Maria Rilke
I believe in all that has never yet been spoken
by Rainer Maria Rilke
trans. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning, I
will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
I love the earnestness of this piece, the beautiful arrogance, the unfettered will here — that what one does it just available, “the way it is with children”. When confronted with vocation, I have often felt like this. his is from the Book of Hours, written by Rilke in his mid-twenties in the voice of a fictional Russian Orthodox monk addressing God. The poem articulates vocation as receptivity — the longing to free what waits within me so that what no one has dared to wish for may for once spring clear without my contriving.
