Duino Elegies and other Selected Poems

First Elegy

<>Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? and what if one of them would suddenly
take me to his heart: I would fade away in his
stronger presence. Because beauty is nothing else
but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to bear,
and we are stunned by it because it so serenely disdains
to destroy us. Each Angel is terrifying.
And so I restrain myself and swallow the call-note
of darkened sobs. Oh, who then will have the ability to be
of use to us? Not Angels, not men,
and the resourceful animals already sense
that we do not feel very much at home in
this elucidated world. There, perhaps, remains for us
some tree on a slope that we can return to and see
every day; there may remain for us the street from yesterday
and the distorted allegiance of a habit,
that feels comfortable with us, and thus it remains and does not leave.
Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of cosmic space gnaws at our faces —, for whom would she not stay, that yearned-for, <>mildly disappointing she, whom the abandoned heart
tiredly awaits. Is she easier on lovers?
Ah, they conceal their fate only with one another.
Don’t you know it yet? Hurl the emptiness out of your arms
into the cosmic spaces that we breathe; perhaps the birds
can feel the expanded air with a more contemplative flight.
<>

The Panther
In the Jardin des Plantes, Paris  <>

His gaze has been so worn by the procession
of bars, that there is nothing it can hold.
A thousand bars comprise his sole impression,
a thousand bars, and the world beyond’s a void.

 <>The supple gait that yields the forceful strides
which draws him into ever smaller circles and
like a dance of power about the center glides
in which a mighty will stands, impotent.

<>Only sometimes do the pupils’ curtains
draw silently apart —. An image then gains entry
and, passing along the limbs' certain
stillness, stops in the heart and ceases to be.