By-Now-Daily Rilke

from Rilke's Book of Hours 
from "The Book of Pilgrimage"
Rainer Maria Rilke
tr. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy 


Extinguish my eyes, I'll go on seeing you.
Seal my ears, I'll go on hearing you.
And without feet I can make my way to you,
without a mouth I can swear your name.

Break off my arms, I'll take hold of you
with my heart as a hand.
Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.
And if you consume my brain with fire,
I'll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.

II, 7

The mystical strain of this poetry follows the common ground of a mysticism.  There is a mysterious and serious violence that seems to follow "And from the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force."  This seems to be the strain we are entertaining here. The violence of this poem suggests the violence of the love that will transport the individual. This love is transformative--"stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat."  This is a fire that burns but not with a burning that is destructive.  Rather it is a fire that is reconstructive.

I don't know that it is possible for me to recommend this book highly enough to those interested in the mystical in poetry or mysticism in general.  I tend to think of it as something parallel to Omar Khayyam in what it has to say to us about the expression of faith in poetry.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were sp...
Read more

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take...
Read more