Thursday, December 5, 2013

The King of Time by Rainer Marie Rilke




"And God said to me, Paint:

Time is the canvas
stretched by my pain:
the wounding of woman,
the brothers’ betrayal,
the city’s sad bacchanals,
the madness of kings.

And God said to me, Go forth:

For I am king of time.
But to you I am only the shadowy one
who knows with you your loneliness
and sees through your eyes.

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
Going far ahead of the road I have begun.

(So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance--
and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave.)

Rainer Marie Rilke

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (German pronunciation: [ˈʁaɪnɐ maˈʁiːa ˈʁɪlkə]), better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian-Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety: themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets. He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. Among English-language readers, his best-known work is the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.

(Especially for a painter/writer/mystic soul-mate far away
and for a batik-painter soul-mate closer by.)

Image above from Judith Reeve found http://attentiveequations.com/2010/07/09/rilke-and-rodin-contemplating-a-work-of-art/

7 comments:

robert said...

Greetings,

Thank you for this nice post. I very much like Rilke.

I like where it says:

"So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp..." That whole last bit hints at much.

All good wishes,

robert

CN said...

YES. And reminds me so much of HAFIZ

Akhtar Wasim Dar said...

"My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
Going far ahead of the road I have begun."

There is such a potential in us to see ahead once we believe and that believe gives us not only to see far ahead but also far inside, because our dilemma is that we know very less about ourselves and our own faults, the believe makes us realize what we lack and that molds us for what we need.

Thanks very much for sharing this wonderful piece which is beautiful reading and a reminder.

CN said...

This that you point out is a new clear wisdom to me that our faith and His reality gives us far ahead and far inside vision.

CN said...

I also need and so appreciate that this wide and deep sight comes with tasks that are more delineated for us with plans divinely marked to do and to transform with the Giver's ongoing guidance.

You are a rare authentic trustworthy mystic. Thanx for coming by.

Khurram Ali Shafique said...

Thanks for sharing :-)

CN said...

So glad to see your name here, Shafique Sahib. Plz come by more often.
:-)