Before Summer Rain

All of a sudden, outside in the park,

something we cannot identify

has gone from all the green. Quietly

it presses closer to the windows; looks

inside. Then from the copse, urgent and clear

a plover calls. You think of Saint Jerome,

such weight of solitude and zeal is there

within this voice which cries out for the storm

to hear! As if they thought it quite forbidden

for them to overhear what might be said

the pictures and the walls themselves recede,

the faded tapestry palely returns

the fickle light of all those afternoons

when we as children learned to be afraid.

*

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY STEPHEN COHN

From “New Poems: A Bilingual Edition” by Rainer Maria Rilke

(Northwestern University Press: 296 pp., $16.95)