Rilke wrote two poems about angels in almost a single sitting, and he knew that he had begun his most important work, but then he got stuck. He eventually left the castle, the First World War broke out, and he struggled to write anything for years. Finally, in February of 1922, he managed to finish in a single month what he’d started a decade before. The result was a cycle of 10 long poems that he called The Duino Elegies, about the difference between angels and people, and the meaning of death, and his idea that human beings are put on earth in order to experience the beauty of ordinary things.
First Sight
Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.
As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth’s immeasurable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.
“First Sight” by Philip Larkin, from Collected Poems. © Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004. Reprinted with permission.
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 
Dec 05, 2017 @ 10:17:06
Reblogged this on The Vibrant Channeled Creator and commented:
When a war interferes, sometimes it creates the best art!
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