Wednesday: Rilke

This poem tends toward the dramatic in the first stanza (excessively so, for what I mean to say), but within its second stanza nestles an image and a set of lines that have run like a refrain today. The poem is "Lament."

Lament

Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,

your path struggles on through incomprehensible

mankind. All the more futile perhaps

for keeping to its direction,

keeping on toward the future, 

toward what has been lost.

Once. You lamented? What was it? A fallen berry

of jubilation, unripe.

But now the whole tree of my jubilation

is breaking, in the storm it is breaking, my slow

tree of joy.

Loveliest in my invisible

landscape, you that made me more known

to the invisible angels.

When the following lines are threaded out of context to stand alone, the poem stands on its head. 

A fallen berry of jubilation, unripe--

Loveliest in my invisible

landscape, you that made me more known 

to the invisible angels.

This may mean something. Or nothing. But I do find it beautiful. And the invisible angels don't seem quite as invisible as they once did.