You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing

by Rainer Maria Rilke

English version by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy
Original Language German

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.
Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:
You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;
for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.
Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

-- from In Praise of Mortality: Rilke's Duino Elegies & Sonnets to Orpheus, by Rainer Maria Rilke / Translated by Joanna Macy

<<Previous Poem | More Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke | Next Poem >>


/ Image by Stephen Leonardi /


View All Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

Commentary by Ivan M. Granger

You who let yourselves feel: enter the breathing
that is more than your own.


Even in translation Rilke's gift for an unusual turn of phrase always makes me pause in a moment of wonder and reassessment of reality.

Let it brush your cheeks
as it divides and rejoins behind you.


This stanza reminds us to breathe, and not in a limited way, but with a full breath that opens us up. To breathe, first we must be willing to feel. We are surrounded and filled by a breath that is much larger than we are, a universal breath. We exist within an openness, an airiness, an expanse that balances against the reflex to contract into something small.

Blessed ones, whole ones,
you where the heart begins:


Isn't that a wonderful phrase?

You are the bow that shoots the arrows
and you are the target.


This sounds like the formulation from a Hindu or Buddhist text. Subject and object, observer and observed. We are both and one at the same time.

Fear not the pain. Let its weight fall back
into the earth;


As lovely as the preceding lines are, it is this phrase here that I find the most healing. Physical pain, psychic pain, the wounds we carry through our lives, we spend so much time fearing them, trying not to feel them, trying to get past them. And we exhaust ourselves carrying those unacknowledged burdens. When we stop running and set them down, we discover the deep soils of the earth can draw in an weight and support it for us.

for heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

...And the earth bears them with ease.

The trees you planted in childhood have grown
too heavy. You cannot bring them along.


These are interesting lines. What do you suppose the poet is saying here? Something about the aspirations or dreams we first conceived of in our youth? Why would they become too heavy? What did we create or imagine when we were younger that now holds us back? What do we need to let go of in order to be free?

Give yourselves to the air, to what you cannot hold.

There is a tendency, especially as we grow older, to endlessly refine our definitions as a way to concretize our understanding of how the world works and how we can be effective within it. And that generally works well until we find we have also trapped ourselves in those definitions. Sometimes we just need to step beyond everything we've built up and give ourselves into the open, intangible air.

Images of earth and weight and support, air and breath and liberation...



Recommended Books: Rainer Maria Rilke

The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke The Soul is Here for its Own Joy: Sacred Poems from Many Cultures Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God In Praise of Mortality: Rilke's Duino Elegies & Sonnets to Orpheus
More Books >>



You who let