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Musings of Poets on Poetry
By RAINER MARIA RILKE
FOR
THE SAKE OF A SINGLE POEM
...Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too
early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness
for a whole lifetime and a long one if possible, and then, at the
very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For
poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions
early enough)-they are experiences. For the sake of a single poems
you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must
understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture
which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be
able to think back to
streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to
partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose
mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when
they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant
for somebody else-); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely
with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in
quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea
itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead
and went flying with all the stars,-and it is still not enough to be
able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of
love, each one different from all the others, memories of women
screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just
given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been
beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the
open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to
have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many,
and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return.
For the memories themselves are not important.
 Only
when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture,
and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-only
then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a
poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
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