You who never arrived

Beloved by Rainer Maria Rilke

Rainer Maria Rilke is a poet I've admired for a long time, mainly because of the intensity of emotions he could convey in his poems, even though I can only read his translated words. Most of his poems are almost mystical in spirit and bear a resemblance to Rumi's poems of divine love. Today I am sharing one of my favourite poems - not surprisingly it's one about an endless search, perhaps for a strangely familiar stranger. I especially love the last paragraph of this poem - those images of barely missed chances of meeting the beloved are so poignant and seem to find an echo somewhere within me.

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me - the far-off, deeply-felt
landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and
unsuspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods -
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house - and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon -
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and,
startled, gave back my too-sudden image.
Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...