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