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<div style="background:#fff;border:#bbb dashed 1px;padding:5px"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=480307" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><div style="margin:10px 0"><strong>Duino Elegies: The Fourth Elegy</strong></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=480307" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">O trees of life, oh, what when winter comes?<br>We are not of one mind. Are not like birds<br>in unison migrating. And overtaken,<br>overdue, we thrust ourselves into the wind<br>and fall to earth into indifferent ponds.<br>Blossoming and withering we comprehend as one.<br>And somewhere lions roam, quite unaware,<br>in their magnificence, of any weaknesss.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=480307" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">But we, while wholly concentrating on one thing,<br>already feel the pressure of another.<br>Hatred is our first response. And lovers,<br>are they not forever invading one another's<br>boundaries? -although they promised space,<br>hunting and homeland. Then, for a sketch<br>drawn at a moment's impulse, a ground of contrast<br>is prepared, painfully, so that we may see.<br>For they are most exact with us. We do not know<br>the contours of our feelings. We only know <br>what shapes them from the outside. </a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=480307" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Who has not sat, afraid, before his own heart's<br>curtain? It lifted and displayed the scenery<br>of departure. Easy to understand. The well-known<br>garden swaying just a little. Then came the dancer.<br>Not he! Enough! However lightly he pretends to move:<br>he is just disguised, costumed, an ordinary man<br>who enters through the kitchen when coming home.<br>I will not have these half-filled human masks;<br>better the puppet. It at least is full.<br>I will endure this well-stuffed doll, the wire,<br>the face that is nothing but appearance. Here out front<br>I wait. Even if the lights go down and I am told:<br>"There's nothing more to come," -even if<br>the grayish drafts of emptiness come drifting down<br>from the deserted stage -even if not one<br>of my now silent forebears sist beside me<br>any longer, not a woman, not even a boy-<br>he with the brown and squinting eyes-:<br>I'll still remain. For one can always watch.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=480307" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Am I not right? You, to whom life would taste<br>so bitter, Father, after you - for my sake -<br>slipped of mine, that first muddy infusion<br>of my necessity. You kept on tasting, Father,<br>as I kept on growing, troubled by the aftertaste<br>of my so strange a future as you kept searching<br>my unfocused gaze -you who, so often since<br>you died, have been afraid for my well-being,<br>within my deepest hope, relinquishing that calmness,<br>the realms of equanimity such as the dead possess<br>for my so small fate -Am I not right?</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=480307" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">And you, my parents, am I not right? You who loved me<br>for that small beginning of my love for you<br>from which I always shyly turned away, because<br>the distance in your features grew, changed,<br>even while I loved it, into cosmic space<br>where you no longer were...: and when I feel<br>inclined to wait before the puppet stage, no,<br>rather to stare at is so intensely that in the end<br>to counter-balance my searching gaze, an angel<br>has to come as an actor, and begin manipulating<br>the lifeless bodies of the puppets to perform.<br>Angel and puppet! Now at last there is a play!<br>Then what we seperate can come together by our<br>very presence. And only then the entire cycle<br>of our own life-seasons is revealed and set in motion.<br>Above, beyond us, the angel plays. Look:<br>must not the dying notice how unreal, how full<br>of pretense is all that we accomplish here, where<br>nothing is to be itself. O hours of childhood,<br>when behind each shape more that the past lay hidden,<br>when that which lay before us was not the future.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=480307" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">We grew, of course, and sometimes were impatient<br>in growing up, half for the sake of pleasing those<br>with nothing left but their own grown-upness.<br>Yet, when alone, we entertained ourselves<br>with what alone endures, we would stand there<br>in the infinite space that spans the world and toys,<br>upon a place, which from the first beginnniing<br>had been prepared to serve a pure event.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=480307" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none">Who shows a child just as it stands? Who places him<br>within his constellation, with the measuring-rod<br>of distance in his hand. Who makes his death<br>from gray bread that grows hard, -or leaves<br>it there inside his rounded mouth, jagged as the core<br>of a sweet apple?.......The minds of murderers<br>are easily comprehended. But this: to contain death,<br>the whole of death, even before life has begun,<br>to hold it all so gently within oneself,<br>and not be angry: that is indescribable.</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><a href="http://www.citatepedia.com/comments.php?id=480307" style="color:#000;text-decoration:none"><br>Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming</a></div><div style="margin:10px 0"><br /></a><a href="http://poems.citatepedia.com/">poem</a> by <strong><a rel="author" href="http://authors.citatepedia.com/by.php?a=Rainer+Maria+Rilke">Rainer Maria Rilke</a></strong></div>