a deathless, inexhaustible wine

I didn't post a poem yesterday because it has been a hell of a week and I was too exhausted; but yesterday I watched the season finale of The Magicians, and today I went to see Hadestown on Broadway, and you know what that means? That means it's time for Rilke. Here are two sonnets from Sonnets to Orpheus, one for yesterday and one for today; normally I post the German as well as the translation, but I'm tired and I don't want to type it up, so I'm going straight to the excellent Stephen Mitchell translations. (I recommend his editions—they're usually bilingual and very good.) 

A god can do it. But will you tell me how

a man can penetrate through the lyre's strings? 

Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing

of heart-roads, there is no temple for Apollo. 

Song, as you have taught it, is not desire, 

not wooing any grace that can be achieved; 

song is reality. Simple, for a god. 

But when can we be real? When does he pour

the earth, the stars, into us? Young man, 

it is not your loving, even if your mouth 

was forced wide open by your own voice—learn

to forget that passionate music. It will end. 

True singing is a different breath, about

nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind. 

*

Praising is what matters! He was summoned for that, 

and came to us like the ore from a stone's 

silence. His mortal heart presses out 

a deathless, inexhaustible wine. 

Whenever he feels the god's paradigm grip

his throat, the voice does not die in his mouth. 

All becomes vineyard, all becomes grape, 

ripened on the hills of his sensuous South. 

Neither decay in the sepulchre of kings

nor any shadow that has fallen from the gods

can ever detract from his glorious praising. 

For he is a herald who is with us always, 

holding far into the doors of the dead

a bowl with ripe fruit worthy of praise. 

—Rainer Maria Rilke, I, 3 and I, 7 from The Sonnets to Orpheus, 1922; translated by Stephen Mitchell.