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A tree ascended there. Oh pure
transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree
in the ear!
And all
things hushed. Yet even in that silence a new
beginning, beckoning, change appeared.
Creatures
of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound
forest, out of their lairs and nests;
and it was
not from any dullness, not
from fear,
that they were so quiet in
themselves,
but from
simply listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed
small inside their hearts.
And where
there had been
just a
makeshift hut to receive the music,
A shelter
nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an
entryway that shuddered in the wind-
you built a
temple deep inside their hearing.
From The Sonnets to Orpheus
by Rainer Maria Rilke
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