Make Light Real

Neil December 3rd, 2008

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Things ar not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are enexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.

….Therefore save yoruself from these general themes and seek those which your own everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, passing thoughts and the belief in some sort of beauty–describe all these with loving, quiet, humble sincerity, and use, to express yourself, the things in your environment, the images from your dreams, and the objets of your memory.  If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.  And even if you were in some prision the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses–would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories?  Turn your attention thither.  Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away.  And if out of this turning inward, out of this absorption into your own world verses come, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses.  Nor will you try to interest magazines in your poems: for you will see in them your fond natural possession, a fragment and a voice of your life.  A work of art is good if it has sprung from necessity.  In this nature of its origin lies the judgment of it:  there is no other.  Therefore, my dear sir, I know no advice for you save this:  to go into yourself and test the deeps in which your life takes rise; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create.  Accept it, just as it sounds, without inquiring into it.  Perhaps it will turn out that you are called to be an artist.  Then take that destiny upon yourself and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what recompense might come from outside.  For the creator must be a world for himself and find everything in himself and in Nature to whom he has attached himself.

 

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