Featured Poem: Evening by Rainer Maria Rilke
This week’s Featured Poem comes from Rainer Maria Rilke, an influential Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, thought to be one of the most lyrically-intense German-language writers.
Our featured poem today comes from Bohemian-Austrian Rainer Maria Rilke. The poet tries to make light of the darkness in his poem Evening.
Evening
The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;
and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes
a star each night, and rises;
and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.
Rainer Maria Rilke
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