The Panther by Rilke
Sein Blick ist vom Vorubergehn der Stabe
so mud geworden, dass er nichts mehr halt.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stabe gabe
und hinter tausend Staben keine Welt.
Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betaubt ein grosser Wille steht.
Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf--. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille--
und hort im Herzen auf zu sein.
[Im Jardin des Plantes, Paris, 1903]
*
His gaze is so restless, pacing behind bars,
he can't keep gazing.
To him it is as if a thousand bars existed
and behind a thousand bars no world.
The soft gait of supple-strong steps,
that turns him in ever smaller circles,
is like a dance of power around a center,
in which a larger will lies.
Sometimes an eyelid silently lifts--
then an image appears and rushes
through his tense limbs--
and stops in his heart.
--Translated by Renee Zepeda
*
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Again and again, no matter how well we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names
again and again we walk out under the stars
and lie down, face to face with heaven
I love Rilke. One of my favorite poets. This love started in my teen years. The Panther was my favorite of Rilkes.
I like a poem very much that he wrote about birth. does any one know the title? In it he thanks his mother for the gift of his life, which was quite a feat considering how she treated him.
I saw a cougar close up from my car window. So lucky to be in the car.
Lucy, who is so happy to be on Rennee's blog this morning. Thank you!!
Sorry, here it is in full:
Again and again, however we know the landscape of love
and the little churchyard there, with its sorrowing names,
and the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others
have fallen
Again and again the two of us walk out together
under the ancient trees, lie down again and again
among the flowers, face to face with heaven.
More importantly.... what a true poem, no? It's impossible to give up the idea of romance, no matter what, and each time you try there is a time, sometimes brief, sometimes longer, that you feel yourself face to face with heaven. OK maybe not EACH TIME, but often enough that you'll always try to find that feeling again.
Yeah, the dream. But is it only another attachment, one of the many that the Buddhists suggest we let go of? I'll be happy when I /own x/ make x amount of money / have a girlfriend.... There's no security, anywhere, and you have to find a way to be happy anyway, they say. Me, I still hope for romance.
As for the other meaning of romance.....A professor I know says we're still in the Romantic era - arguably, even in music, where the 'revolutionary' composers of a hundred years ago defined themselves largely by their oppositeness from Brahms et al. (and of course if you define yourself as the opposite of x, you're still defining yourself by x). But more generally, the lonely individual with extreme talent/ability working away, perhaps hopelessly, against the arrayed forces of nature and society, is obviously still a defining archetype for us - just go see a Bruce Willis movie if you want a Romantic (if not romantic) hero. We still expose ourselves to the power of untamed nature for entertainment, and revere its elemental unstructuredness, see Outward Bound, Eco-tourism, etc.