Rilke: Evening

Like old retainers, trees
hold out day’s evening dress
while the fading view
wavers between heaven and earth

and leaves you not quite part of either
neither the quiet of the dark house
nor the grave certainty of light
of the rising star

that leaves you, voluble and dumb,
in the deserts and gardens of your life
alternating border with vista
and the stone in you with the star.

Rilke’s “haunting and penetrating sweetness” is  crucial in maintaining the balance between what he sees with his eyes and feels in his heart, so that if the music fails, the ideas, too, fall to bits. Since  Rilke’s verse draws in “a few clear but subdued colours, things whose hidden meaning must be delicately wooed . . . into the light of intelligence” the slightest tonal error risks straying towards the certainties he is in fact so careful to avoid.