Lament

translated from the German by Jessie Lamont

Oh! All things are long passed away and far.
A light is shining but the distant star
From which it still comes to me has been dead
A thousand years . . . In the dim phantom boat
That glided past some ghastly thing was said.
A clock just struck within some house remote.
Which house?—I long to still my beating heart.
Beneath the sky’s vast dome I long to pray . . .
Of all the stars there must be far away
A single star which still exists apart.
And I believe that I should know the one
Which has alone endured and which alone
Like a white City that all space commands
At the ray’s end in the high heaven stands.

Credit

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on December 8, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“Lament” appears in Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (Tobias A. Wright, 1918), translated by Jessie Lamont. In the book’s introduction, H. T. wrote, “Poetry is reality’s essence visioned and made manifest by one endowed with a perception acutely sensitive to sound, form, and colour, and gifted with a power to shape into rhythmic and rhymed verbal symbols the reaction to Life’s phenomena. The poet moulds that which appears evanescent and ephemeral in image and in mood into everlasting values. In this act of creation he serves eternity. […] Poetry, in especial lyrical poetry, must be acknowledged the supreme art, culminating as it does in a union of the other arts, the musical, the plastic, and the pictorial. […] In The Book of Pictures, Rilke’s art reaches its culmination on what might be termed its monumental side. The visualization is elevated to the impersonal objective level which gives to the rhythm of these poems an imperturbable calm, to the figures presented a monumental erectness.”