Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (1918)/The Book of Poverty and Death
The Book of Poverty and Death
Her mouth is like the mouth of a fine bust
That cannot utter sound, nor breathe, nor kiss,
But that had once from Life received all this
Which shaped its subtle curves, and ever must
From fullness of past knowledge dwell alone,
A thing apart, a parable in stone.
Alone Thou wanderest through space,
Profound One with the hidden face;
Thou art Poverty's great rose,
The eternal metamorphose
Of gold into the light of sun.
Thou art the mystic homeless One;
Into the world Thou never came,
Too mighty Thou, too great to name;
Voice of the storm, Song that the wild wind sings,
Thou Harp that shatters those who play Thy strings!
A watcher of Thy spaces make me,
Make me a listener at Thy stone,
Give to me vision and then wake me
Upon Thy oceans all alone.
Thy rivers' courses let me follow
Where they leap the crags in their flight
And where at dusk in caverns hollow
They croon to music of the night.
Send me far into Thy barren land
Where the snow clouds the wild wind drives,
Where monasteries like gray shrouds stand—
August symbols of unlived lives.
There pilgrims climb slowly one by one,
And behind them a blind man goes:
With him I will walk till day is done
Up the pathway that no one knows . . .