The First Elegy
(excerpt)

Who, if I cried out, would hear me
among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them
pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be
consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For
beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we
still are just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely
disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is
terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and
swallow the call-note
of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we
ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
and already the knowing animals are
aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world. Perhaps there
remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every
day we can take
into our vision; there remains for us
yesterday's street
and the loyalty of a habit so much
at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved
in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when
a wind full of infinite space
gnaws at our faces. Whom would it
not remain for - that longed-after,
mildly disillusioning presence, which
the solitary heart
so painfully meets. Is it any less
difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other
to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet? Fling the
emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps
the birds
will feel the expanded air with more
passionate flying.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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