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Rilke, Rainer Maria - 30 Seventh Elegy
Identifier
015342
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Henry Ryland
A description of the experience
Duino Elegies – Rainer Maria Rilke [The Seventh Elegy]
See, I was calling my lover.
But not only she would come......
Girls would come from delicate graves and gather.....
for, how could I limit the call, once called?
The buried always still seek the Earth. –
You, children, a single thing grasped here is many times valid.
Don’t think that Fate is more than a childhood across:
how often you overtook the beloved, panting,
panting after the blissful chase after nothing, into what’s free.
Being here is the wonder.
You knew it, girls, even you, you who seemed dispensable, sunken –
you, in the worst streets of the cities, festering, or open for refuse.
Since an hour was given – perhaps not so much as an hour,
one that was scarcely measurable by time’s measure,
between two moments, where you had a being.
Everything.
Veins filled with being.
But we forget so easily what our laughing neighbour neither acknowledges nor envies.
We want to visibly show it, while even the most visible of joys
can only display itself to us when we have changed it, from within.