Rainer Maria Rilke - Duino Elegies : The Fourth Elegy lyrics

O trees of life, O when are you wintering? We are not unified. We have no instincts like those of migratory birds. Useless, and late, we force ourselves, suddenly, onto the wind, and fall down to an indifferent lake. We realise flowering and fading together. And somewhere lions still roam. Never knowing, as long as they have their splendour, of any weakness. We, though, while we are intent on one thing, wholly, feel the loss of some other. Enmity is our neighbour. Aren't lovers always arriving at boundaries, each of the other, who promised distance, hunting, and home? And when, for the sketch of a moment, a contrasting background is carefully prepared so that we can see it: then this is clear to us. We do not know the contours of feeling, only what forms it from outside. Who has not sat, scared, before his heart's curtain? It drew itself up: the scenery was of Departure. Easy to comprehend. The familiar garden swaying a little: then the dancer appeared. Not him. Enough! However lightly he moves he is in costume, and turns into a citizen, and goes through the kitchen into his house. I don't want these half-completed masks, rather the Doll. That is complete. I will suffer its shell, its wire, its face of mere appearance. Here. I am waiting. Even if the lights go out, even if someone says to me: ‘No more' - , even if emptiness reaches me as a grey draught of air from the stage, even if none of my silent forefathers sits by me any more, not one woman, not even the boywith the brown, squinting, eyes. I'll still be here. One can always watch. Am I not right? You, to whom life tasted so bitter, father, tasting mine, that first clouded infusion of my necessities, you kept on tasting, as I grew, and preoccupied by the after-taste of such a strange future, searched my misted gaze – you, my father, who since you were dead, have often been anxious within my innermost hopes, and giving up calm, the kingdoms of calm the dead own, for my bit of fate, am I not right? And you women, am I not right, who would love me for that small beginning of love, for you, that I always turned away from, because the space of your faces changed, as I loved, into cosmic space, where you no longer existed......When I feel like waiting in front of the puppet theatre, no, rather gazing at it, so intently, that at last, to balance my gaze, an Angel must come and take part, dragging the puppets on high. Angel and Doll: then there's a play at last. Then what we endlessly separate, merely by being, comes together. Then at last from our seasons here, the orbit of all change emerges. Over and above us, then, the Angel plays. See the dying must realise that what we do here is nothing, how full of pretext it all is, nothing in itself. O hours of childhood, when, behind the images, there was more than the past, and in front of us was not the future. We were growing, it's true, and sometimes urged that we soon grew up, half for the sake of those others who had nothing but their grown-up-ness. And were, yet, on our own, happy with Timelessness, and stood there, in the space between world and plaything, at a point that from first beginnings had been marked out for pure event. Who shows a child, just as they are? Who sets it in its constellation, and gives the measure of distance into its hand? Who makes a child's d**h out of grey bread, that hardens, - or leaves it inside its round mouth like the core of a shining apple? k**ers are easy to grasp. But this: d**h, the whole of d**h, before life, to hold it so softly, and not live in anger, cannot be expressed.