If you had really wanted to be strong,
you would not have come from a woman's womb.
For messiahs are quarried from mountains
where the sturdy and strong comes from stone.
Are you not sorry to have despoiled your land
by such limitations? I am weak, don't you see;
I only had streams of milk or tears to offer,
and you were ever so much more than me.
So much ado when your birth to me was announced.
You could have been born fierce and wild from the start.
If you only needed tigers to tear you to pieces,
why did I learn gentleness as an art
by which I wove for you a soft, pure gown
without even the slightest seam
for comfort--: that's how my life has been,
which you now have turned upside down.
Rainer Maria Rilke (1912)
(From the Life of the Virgin Mary)
2 comments:
Thanks for the thanks! I wasn't sure if you were really that interested in Wilbur, so I'm glad you like his poetry. It can be a dangerous thing to compare one poet to another!
I'm continuing to enjoy your work.
Thanks, Catherine, for stopping by. Yeah, I like Richard Wilbur. He is a wizard with words. He is the real poet. I, on the other hand, only string a few words together, break the sentence up and throw in some punctuation marks here and there and think that is poetry. And that is not much of a poetry. Sad but true!
By the way, I like the new look of your blog.
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