The Sixth Elegy

Rainer Maria Rilke

Fig-tree, for such a long time now, there has been meaning for me,

in the way you almost wholly omit to flower

and urge your pure secret, unheralded,

into the early, resolute fruit.

Like the jet of a fountain, your arched bough

drives the sap downward, then up: and it leaps from its sleep

barely waking, into the bliss of its sweetest achievement.

See: like the god into the swan

                                            ..........We, though, linger,

ah, our pride is in flowering, and, already betrayed,

we reach the late core of our final fruit.

In a few the urge to action rises so powerfully,

that they are already waiting and glowing with their heart’s fullness

when the temptation to flower, like the mild night air,

touches their tender mouths, touches their eyelids:

heroes perhaps, and those chosen to vanish prematurely,

in whom Death the gardener wove different veins.

These plunge ahead: they go before their own smile,

like the team of horses in the slightly

hollowed-out relief of Karnak’s victorious pharaoh.

The hero is strangely close to those who died young. Lasting

doesn’t contain him. Being is his ascent: he moves on,

time and again, to enter the changed constellation

his risk entails. Few could find him there. But

Destiny, that darkly hides us, suddenly inspired,

sings him into the tempest of his onrushing world.

I hear no one like him. All at once I am pierced

by his darkened sound carried on streaming air.

Then, how gladly I would hide from the yearning: O if I,

if I were a boy, and might come to it still, and sit,

propped on the future’s arms, and reading about Samson,

how his mother first bore nothing, and then all.

Was he not a hero already, O mother, in you, did not

his imperious choice begin inside you?

Thousands seethed in the womb and willed to be him,

but see: he grasped and let go, chose and achieved.

And if he shattered pillars, it was when he burst

out of the world of your flesh into the narrower world,

where he went on choosing, achieving. O mothers of heroes,

O sources of ravening rivers! Ravines into which

weeping girls have plunged

from the high heart’s edge, future offerings to the son.

Because, whenever the hero stormed through the stations of love,

each heartbeat, meant for him, lifting him onward,

he turned away, stood at the end of the smiles, someone other.

Translated by  A. S. Kline