The most beautiful poems by Rainer Maria Rilke

Every thing is exhausted and explained down to the last fiber in comparisons. Rilke, like Hofmannsthal's hero, has forgotten how to 'simply feel things'. And he understands them only as images, as a constant remembrance of things, and so the whole life around him becomes a tremendous union, an eternal refinement, a mutual intertwining. Nothing can be individual or meaningless to the poet, who always sees it quite unconsciously in relation to other things, who has a mysterious transparency of essence, so that he can peel away color, tone, gesture and history from people and things like leaves, Arrange and layer them one by one according to his will.
In the afterword