“He sang above the vineyards of the world, / And after him the vines with woven hands / Clambered”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday:

Autumn Day, Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. William Gass

Lord, it is time. The summer was too long.
Lay your shadow on the sundials now,
and through the meadow let the winds throng.
Ask the last fruits to ripen on the vine;
give them further two more summer days
to bring about perfection and to raise
the final sweetness in the heavy wine.
Whoever has no house now will establish none,
whoever lives alone now will live on long alone,
will waken, read, and write long letters,
wander up and down the barren paths
the parks expose when the leaves are blown.


Rilke (1875-1926) was a Prague-born Austrian poet, and an influential Modernist. If you wish to compare the original and several other translations, this class handout has you covered.

---L.

Subject quote from The Singing Man, Josephine Preston Peabody.

Comments

[cmcmck]

I discovered his Duino elegies some years back and fell in love!

[larryhammer]

With reason. I hold them in higher regard as a Modernist artifact than, say, The Waste Land.