From Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes, By RAINER MARIA RILKE

This woman who was loved so much, that from

one lyre

more mourning came than from women in mourning;

that a whole world was made from mourning, where

everything was present once again: forest and valley

and road and village, field, river, and animal;

and that around this mourning-world, just as

around the other earth, a sun

and a silent star-filled sky wheeled,

a mourning-sky with displaced constellations--:

this woman who was loved so much . . .

But she walked alone, holding the god’s hand,

her footsteps hindered by her long graveclothes,

faltering, gentle, and without impatience.

She was inside herself, like a great hope,

and never thought of the man who walked ahead

or the road that climbed back toward life.

She was inside herself. And her being dead

filled her like tremendous depth.

As a fruit is filled with its sweetness and darkness

she was filled with her big death, still so new

that it hadn’t been fathomed.

“Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes,” the poem from which this is an excerpt, appears in “The Unknown Rilke,” expanded edition, translated by Franz Wright (Field Translation Series, Oberlin College Press: $12.95; 176 pp.). 1990 by Oberlin College.