René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, generally considered the German language's greatest poet of the 20th century. His writings include one novel, several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude and anxiety. These themes position him as a transitional figure between traditional and modernist writers.
Alternative Names:
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
•
René Maria Cäsar Rilke
•
Rainer Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
•
Li-erh-kʻo
•
Rainer Maria Rielke
•
René Rilke
•
Rainer Mariyah Rilḳeh
•
Rainŏ Maria Rilkʻe
•
Reiner Marie Rilke
•
Rene Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
•
Rene Rilke
There is probably no point in my going into your questions now; for what I could say about your tendency to doubt or about your inability to bring your outer and inner lives into harmony or about all the other thing that oppress you - : is just what I have already said: just the wish that you may find in yourself enough patience to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.
Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunny one, at the end of the path which I've only just begun. So we are grasped, by that which we could not grasp, at such great distance, so fully manifest— and it changes us, even when we do not reach it, into something that, hardly sensing it, we already are; a sign appears, echoing our own sign... But what we sense is the falling winds.
This difficult living, heavy and as if all tied up, moving through that which has been left undone, is like the not-quite-finished walk of the swan. And dying, this slipping away from the ground upon which we stand every day, is his anxious letting himself fall—: into the waters, which receive him gladly and which, as if happily already gone by, draw back under him, wave after wave; while the swan, infinitely calm and self-assured, opener and more magnificent and more serene, allows himself to be drawn on.
