The Great PoetsKenneth WebbApril 24, 2024Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke 1875-1926, Austrian Poet, Letters to a Young Poet, It Was As Though a Girl Came ForthComment

RILKE ~ It Was As Though a Girl Came Forth (1904)

The Great PoetsKenneth WebbApril 24, 2024Rainer Maria Rilke, Rilke 1875-1926, Austrian Poet, Letters to a Young Poet, It Was As Though a Girl Came ForthComment

The Great Poets

It Was As Though a Girl Came Forth

by

Rainer Maria Rilke (1904)

It was as though a girl came forth

from the marriage of song and lyre,

shining like springtime.

She became inseparable from my own hearing.

She slept in me. Everything was in her sleep:

The trees I had loved, the distances

that had opened, the meadows –

all that had ever moved me.

She slept in me…
She slept the world…
See: she took form and slept.

She slept the world. Singing god, how

have you fashioned her, that she does not long

to have once been awake? See: she took form and slept.

Where is her death? Will you discover

the answer before your song is spent?

If I forget her, will she disappear?

Sonnets to Orpheus I, 2

Das ist ein außergerwöhnlich schönes Gedicht. This is an exceptionally beautiful poem.

The Great Poets

Poetry can go where sacred text dare not tread. This realisation gave us the great poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is the line that underpins Visitation ~ Its Foundation and Visitation ~ the Revised Edition

Poets have the freedom to enter into that realm to which religious text hints at, but in many countries forbids any interpretation except handed down by priests, imams, rabbis or whoever.

With the Agricultural Revolution in the 17th-19th centuries then leading society into the even greater upheaval of the Industrial Revolution, the Word that reported literal knowledge slipped out of the hands of mystics and into the hands and minds of men and women well able to see beyond the veil, to question, to probe, and to enlighten.

Written in Rome, Italy on 14 May 1904 – Rilke focuses this letter on love and relationships, specifically on the necessity of aloneness.

Kenneth Webb

Ken Webb is a writer and proofreader. His website, kennwebb.com, showcases his work as a writer, blogger and podcaster, resting on his successive careers as a police officer, progressing to a junior lawyer in succession and trusts as a Fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives, a retired officer with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and latterly, for three years, the owner and editor of two lifestyle magazines in Liverpool.

He also just handed over a successful two year chairmanship in Gloucestershire with Cheltenham Regency Probus.

Pandemic aside, he spends his time equally between his city, Liverpool, and the county of his birth, Gloucestershire.

In this fast-paced present age, proof-reading is essential. And this skill also occasionally leads to copy-editing writers’ manuscripts for submission to publishers and also student and post graduate dissertations.