The Third Elegy

One thing is to sing of the beloved. One thing—alas—
is that hidden, guilty blood-river god.
The one she recognizes from afar, her young lover—what does he know
himself of the lord of desire, who from solitude often,
before the girl can soften him, often as though she were not there at all,
ah, dripping from some unknowable source, lifts his
Godhead, calling the night to endless tumult.
O Neptune of the blood, O his terrible trident.
O the dark wind of his chest blown from a twisted shell.
Listen how the night hollows and deepens. You stars,
does not the lover’s longing for his beloved’s face
come from you? Did he not draw that inward vision
into her pure face from a pure constellation?
Not you, alas—not his mother
drew his brows into such an arc of expectation.
Not because of you, feeling girl, not because of you
did his mouth bend toward fuller utterance.
Do you truly believe your light step
shook him so deeply, you who move like the wind of spring?
Yes, you startled his heart; yet older terrors
plunged into him at your touch.
Call him… you cannot call him wholly out
of those dark consorts.
Certainly, he wants to; he springs toward you; relieved, he
accustoms himself to your secret heart and takes hold and begins himself.
But did he ever begin?
Mother, you made him small; it was you who began him;
to you he was new; you bent over his new
eyes a kindly world and kept the foreign away.
Where, ah, have those years gone when you simply
with your slender form stood in for surging chaos?
So much you hid from him; the room at night,
suspicious with darkness, you made harmless; from your heart, full of refuge,
you blended a more human space into his night-space.
Not into darkness, no, into your nearer being
you placed the night-light, and it shone as if from
friendship.
There was no creak you did not explain with a smile,
as though you had long known when the floorboards would behave that way…

And he listened and was eased. So much your tender rising could accomplish;
behind the wardrobe, tall in his coat, his fate stepped back,
and into the folds of the curtain, barely stirring,
his restless future fit itself.
And he himself, as he lay there, relieved, beneath
the drowsing lids of your gentle shaping,
loosening sweetness into the tasted pre-sleep—
seemed protected… But within, who held back,
who stemmed within him the floods of origin?
Ah, there was no caution in the sleeper; sleeping,
yet dreaming, yet fevered: how he surrendered.
He, the new one, the shy one, how he was entangled
already in the onward-thrusting tendrils of inner happening,
braided into patterns, into strangling growth, into animal
hunting forms. How he gave himself over—loved.
Loved his interior, the wilderness of his interior,
that primeval forest in him on whose mute collapse
his light-green heart stood. Loved. Left it, went out along
his own roots into vast origin,
where his small birth had already been outlived. Loving,
he descended into older blood, into ravines
where the Terrible lay, still sated from the fathers. And every
horror knew him, winked, as though informed.
Yes, the dreadful smiled… Rarely
have you smiled so tenderly, Mother. How could
he not love it, since it smiled at him? Before you
he loved it; for while you carried him already,
it was dissolved in the waters that make the germinating one light.
See, we do not love like flowers, from a single
year; when we love, sap rises in our arms
from time immemorial. O girl,
this: that when we loved within ourselves, not one thing, not something future,
but the countless fermenting; not a single child,
but the fathers who rest in our depths like mountain
rubble; but the dry riverbed of former mothers; but the whole
soundless landscape beneath a clouded or
a clear fate—this came before you, girl.

And you yourself, what do you know—you summoned
prehistory upward in the lover. What feelings
burrowed up from transformed beings. What women
hated you there. What dark men
you stirred in the young man’s veins. Dead
children wanted toward you… O gently, gently,
do something kind before him, some faithful daily task—lead him
near the garden, give him the nights’
that even out the scales…

Hold him back…

This translation aims to make Rilke’s classic work available in contemporary English without losing the uniqueness of his voice. It also seeks to keep the emotional and mythic intensity of the original, while smoothing the flow so that it moves naturally.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was a Bohemian-Austrian poet widely regarded as one of the great lyrical voices of modern European literature. Writing in German, he is best known for Duino Elegies, Sonnets to Orpheus, and Letters to a Young Poet. His work explores love, solitude, art, death, and spiritual transformation, blending intense inwardness with visionary imagery that continues to influence contemporary poetry.