The Falling Stars: “Not Diminishing the Sacred Number” of Rilke’s Uncollected Poems

The almond trees in blossom: all we can do here is to recognize ourselves completely in our earthly appearance.

I am endlessly amazed at your bearing, blessed ones,

how you wear modest adornment in an eternal way.

Oh, who knows how to bloom: our hearts would be above all

lesser dangers and at ease in the singular great one.

Ronda, December 1913–January 1914*

I came late to Rilke’s Uncollected Poems. I came of age at the time when J. B. Leishman and M. D. Herter Norton were preeminent translators, an age when we didn’t have the translations of Stephen Mitchell and Edgar Snow. Besides, beginning to get to know the lyric poems, the poems from The Book of Pictures, and even before that The Book of Hours, which were poems written to God by a monk Rilke invented, as his alter ego, brilliantly exhibiting his early genius at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, even before he had the good fortune and the significant experience of working as Rodin’s secretary.

Of course, there were the books of prose, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, containing that remarkable paragraph, among other remarkable paragraphs, regarding what it was to be a poet, that caught the eye of the great artist Ben Shahn, who illustrated it, and which became a whole book of its own. Not to mention the petite Stories to God, fragrant with 19th-century musk, and the posthumous Letters to a Young Poet, gathered by the poet’s daughter, which became a bestseller but was even smaller a book than Stories to God.

Then there were the two pillars of Rilke’s canon which loomed over the reader like the broad strokes of his pen, written in a white heat, which was often his way of creative release: The Duino Elegies, mirroring T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land both in chronological time as well as in its modernist’s mark on 20th-century literature, as well as the surprise of Mozot, in Switzerland, where Rilke composed these two masterpieces, including The Orpheus Sonnets, both works leaving their uncanny resonances well after his early death from leukemia only less than a handful of years later.

Yet there were also the voluminous letters, which W. W. Norton so wonderfully published in multiple volumes. Rilke wrote letters nearly every day, in which he revealed his penchant for poetry, becoming entwined with both the everyday occurrences in his life as well as the ample wisdom he shared with friends and intimates. These share an aspect of Rilke’s Uncollected Poems in that he writes about what regularly filled his life without pretense, not that The Duino Elegies, whose first lines he heard in a storm wind near Castle Duino in 1912, a decade before he could finish the poem cycle (in my own opinion due to the trauma of the Great War both for himself—he was spared the front lines—and for Europe and the world, bringing a more romantic way of life to an end). Not that The Orpheus Sonnets isn’t a masterwork that also takes the reader into realms of inner mystery and the mystic journey—it absolutely does.

However, for a writer who was productive but also suffered protracted periods when he couldn’t write what he wanted to, such as The Elegies, his prolific nature did spill not only into his letters but into what also became a bridge for all of his books from The Book of Hours through to his Orpheus cycle, which are his Uncollected Poems, which are, perhaps, less self-conscious of his impeccable craft (Rilke is so difficult to translate because he often enough invented words and, as Stephen Mitchell pointed out to me decades ago, his end rhymes were not only beautiful but elusive to replicate or to intimate especially in English) but as in his letters as well as in Rilke’s uncollected poetry he is more at ease with being himself, with even being more rhapsodic, at least on occasion, in these Uncollected Poems.

Rilke’s poems, for instance, after his having worked for and with Rodin, exhibit “the thingness of things,” written even a few years before the 1912 Armory Show, an art exhibit which launched the Objectivist Movement and William Carlos Williams and his own interest in “no ideas but in things.” Of course, Rodin always loomed in Rilke’s life, at least early on, as a master who was a mentor and sometimes friend. But in Uncollected Poems, we see Rilke bring together the best of his written correspondence with his lyric voice in poems written over two decades or more, creating a bridge between his masterworks. What I believe to be one of his foremost examples of this is a poem written just before Rilke’s death (he resisted doctor’s orders in taking prescribed medication that would possibly have extended his life), and as I observe we see what we would come to miss in such a mature Rilke poem as his “Elegy to Marina Tsveteava,” which I quote in full below.

To Marina Tsvetaeva-Efron

O the losses in the universe, Marina, the falling stars!

We do not increase it wherever we throw ourselves, to whichever

star we add! In the Whole, everything is already counted.

So too, whoever falls does not diminish the sacred number.

Every renounced fall plunges into the origin and heals.

Would everything then be a game, a change of the same, a displacement,

nowhere a name, and hardly anywhere a native gain?

Waves, Marina, we’re sea! Depths, Marina, we’re firmament.

Earth, Marina, we’re earth, we’re a thousand times spring, like larks,

that an erupting song casts into invisibility.

We begin as jubilation, already it surpasses us completely;

suddenly, our weight turns the song downward into lament.

But even so: lament? Would it not be: younger jubilations downward.

Even the lower gods want to be praised, Marina.

Gods are so innocent, they wait for praise like students.

Praise, dearest, let us lavish praise.

Nothing belongs to us. We place our hands a little around the stems

of unplucked flowers. I saw it on the Nile in Kom-Ombo.

For sure, Marina, the kings sacrifice the offering, renouncing themselves.

As the angels walk and mark the doors of those to be saved,

so you touch this and this, seemingly tender things.

Ah, how already detached, ah, how distracted, Marina,

even under the most intimate pretext. Sign-givers, nothing more.

Translator’s Notes: Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was one of the great Russian poets. She wrote a long poem, “Novogodnee,” in early January 1927, a loving homage to Rilke with uncanny directness, in a refusal to grieve.  

In a letter to Katharina Kippenberg, Rilke explains that the sacrificers on the Egyptian reliefs dedicated and preserved their flowers to the gods by not picking them, but by holding their hands as in meditation around the living stems.

The poem is incantatory in ways Whitman would have loved. Rilke announces to Marina, “we’re sea” and “we’re earth,” but “Nothing belongs to us,” that we’re eventually only “sign-givers, nothing more.”  Rilke is quite aware he is dying, but he presents Tsvetaeva with what he actually strove to forge in his own life, in a lifelong quest for realization and understanding, being his own rejection of Christian doctrine, but I also believe Roman Catholic doctrine, in order to reconcile his own trajectory of harmony and beauty with that of suffering, life, and death. This poem, anyway, is the apparent result of his own perennial philosophy.

There is yet another poem, much shorter, but whose resonance mystifies with what might be termed “an agility” in its feeling and vision. Feeling?  Yes, just listen to Rilke’s voice rise as his body does, as ours do, in feeling our way into what is both real and mystic at once. Our world suffers today from its authoritarian die-cut mentality, its obtuse bluntness, and its inhuman opacity. Rilke leaves us, with yet another uncollected poem, untitled, as many of them are, written just about two years before his death, as a gift to us, so that we may be bequeathed with what is our true inheritance: entering upon the land as we enter our true home as we open ourselves to what is mystical about living itself. The first poem translated that provides the lead to this essay and the last, below, echo each other, as do many of the poems in Uncollected Poems. As Rilke writes, “Who knows how to bloom?”  He asks first but also tells us: “being at ease in the singular great one” in order to inhale the almond blossoms takes great humility as well as gratitude and then “our hearts,” as in the first quoted translation and as in the last below, it is in there that we practice to open ourselves out toward what “intimately” is our inheritance, what “belongs to us: as Rilke relays: “abandoned space” — what we rightfully relinquish so that we can “belong,” as in the proverb from Matthew 19:24 about it being easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven.

The land revealed: on all paths there is a return home

through the thinning trees one sees the house, how it endures.

The sky recedes from us. Now, oh hearts, warm the earth,

so that it may intimately belong to us in this abandoned space.

Muzot, end of October 1924

*Author’s Note: The first translation from Rilke’s Uncollected Poems was first published in Kestrel: A Journal of Literature & Art. The other translations appear here for the first time. All translations are by Wally Swist from a book project which was initially honored by Green Linden Press with an honorable mention listing in 2025, entitled Wild Rose Bush: The Life of Mary and Other Poems, but has been simplified since as two book-length manuscripts: Wild Rose Bush: Uncollected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke and The Life of Mary and Other Poems.