The Sonnets To Orpheus: I

Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke 1875–1926

A tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence! Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear! And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests; and it was not from any dullness, not from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,

but from just listening. Bellow, roar, shriek seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been at most a makeshift hut to receive the music,

a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing, with an entryway that shuddered in the wind- you built a temple deep inside their hearing.

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