1
It wasn't his, it wasn't my fault, we both had nothing except patience, but Death has none. I saw him come (how meanly! )and I watched him as he took and took:none of it I could claim as mine.Rainer Maria Rilke
2
The SolitaryAs one who has sailed across an unknown sea, among this rooted folk I am alone;the full days on their tables are their own, to me the distant is reality. A new world reaches to my very eyes, a place perhaps unpeopled as the moon;their slightest feelings they must analyze, and all their words have got the common tune. The things I brought with me from far away, compared with theirs, look strangely not the same:in their great country they were living things, but here they hold their breath, as if for shame.Rainer Maria Rilke
3
I would like to sing someone to sleep, to sit beside someone and be there. I would like to rock you and sing softlyand go with you to and from sleep. I would like to be the one in the housewho knew: The night was cold. And I would like to listen in and listen outinto you, into the world, into the woods. The clocks shout to one another striking, and one sees to the bottom of time. And down below one last, strange man walks byand rouses a strange dog. And after that comes silence. I have laid my eyes upon you wide;and they hold you gently and let you gowhen something stirs in the dark.Rainer Maria Rilke
4
They all have tired mouthsand bright seamless souls. And a longing (as for sin)sometimes haunts their dreams. They are almost all alike; in God's gardens they keep still, like many, many intervalsin his might and melody. Only when they spread their wingsare they wakers of a wind:as if God with his broad sculptor-hands leafed through the pagesin the dark book of the beginning.Rainer Maria Rilke
5
Girls, there are poets who learn from youto say, what you, in your aloneness, are;and they learn through you to live distantness, as the evenings through the great starsbecome accustomed to eternity.Rainer Maria Rilke