Post by FOR WHIPPER SNIPPER on Dec 20, 2005 7:42:28 GMT 10
"... Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in
your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a
whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end,
you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not,
as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)--they
are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many
cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel
how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they
open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in
unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you
had long seen coming;to days of childhood whose mystery is still
unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a
joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody
else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many
profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained
rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to
nights of travel that rushed along overhead and went flying with all
the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all
that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one
different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor,
and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are
closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have
sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered
noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to
forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience
to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not
important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into
glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished
from ourselves-- only then can it happen that in some very rare hour
the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from
them."
-Rainer M. Rilke
your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a
whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end,
you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not,
as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)--they
are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many
cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel
how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they
open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in
unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you
had long seen coming;to days of childhood whose mystery is still
unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a
joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody
else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many
profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained
rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to
nights of travel that rushed along overhead and went flying with all
the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all
that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one
different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor,
and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are
closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have
sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered
noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to
forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience
to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not
important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into
glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished
from ourselves-- only then can it happen that in some very rare hour
the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from
them."
-Rainer M. Rilke
