Rainer Maria Rilke - Duino Elegies: The Third Elegy lyrics

To sing the beloved is one thing, another, oh, that hidden guilty river-god of the blood. What does he know, himself, of that lord of desire, her young lover, whom she knows distantly, who often out of his solitariness, before the girl soothed him, often, as if she did not exist, held up, dripping, from what unknowable depths, his godhead, oh, rousing the night to endless uproar? O Neptune of the blood, O his trident of terrors. O the dark storm-wind from his chest, out of the twisted conch. Hear, how the night becomes thinned-out and hollow. You, stars, is it not from you that the lover's joy in the beloved's face rises? Does he not gain his innermost insight, into her face's purity, from the pure stars? It was not you, alas, not his mother that bent the arc of his brow into such expectation. Not for you, girl, feeling his presence, not for you, did his lips curve into a more fruitful expression. Do you truly think that your light entrance rocked him so, you who wander like winds at dawn? You terrified his heart, that's so: but more ancient terrors plunged into him with the impetus of touching. Call him...you can't quite call him away from that dark companion. Of course he wants to, and does, escape: relieved, winning his way into your secret heart, and takes on, and begins himself. Did he ever begin himself, though? Mother you made his littleness: you were the one who began him: to you he was new, you hung the friendly world over new eyes, and defended him from what was strange. Oh where are the years when you simply repelled the surging void for him, with your slight form? You hid so much from him then: you made the suspect room harmless at night, from your heart filled with refuge mixed a more human space with his spaces of night. Not in the darkness, no, in your nearer being you placed the light, and it shone as if out of friendship. There wasn't a single creaking you couldn't explain with a smile, as if you had long known when the floor would do so.... And he heard you and was soothed. Your being was so tenderly potent: his fate there stepped, tall and cloaked, behind the wardrobe, and his restless future, so easily delayed, fitted the folds of the curtain. And he himself, as he lay there, relieved, dissolving a sweetness, of your gentle creation, under his sleepy eyelids, into the sleep he had tasted - : seemed protected.....But inside: who could hinder, prevent, the primal flood inside him? Ah, there was little caution in the sleeper: sleeping, but dreaming, but fevered: what began there! How, new, fearful, he was tangled in ever-spreading tendrils of inner event: already twisted in patterns, in strangling growths, among prowling bestial forms. How he gave himself to it -. Loved. Loved his inward world, his inner wilderness, that first world within, on whose mute overthrow his heart stood, newly green. Loved. Relinquished it, went on, through his own roots, to the vast fountain where his little birth was already outlived. Lovingly went down into more ancient bloodstreams, into ravines where Horror lay, still gorged on his forefathers. And every Terror knew him, winked, like an informant. Yes, Dread smiled.........Seldom have you smiled so tenderly, mothers. How could he help loving what smiled at him. Before you he loved it, since, while you carried him, it was dissolved in the waters, that render the embryo light. See, we don't love like flowers, in a single year: when we love, an ancient sap rises in our arms. O, girls, this: that we loved inside us, not one to come, but the immeasurable seething: not a single child, but the fathers: resting on our depths like the rubble of mountains: the dry river-beds of those who were mothers - : the whole silent landscape under a clouded or clear destiny - : girls, this came before you. And you yourself, how could you know – that you stirred up primordial time in your lover. What feelings welled up from lost lives. What women hated you there. What sinister men you roused up in his young veins. Dead children wanted you.....O, gently, gently, show him with love a confident daily task - lead him near to the Garden, give him what outweighs those nights........ Be in him...............