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Home  »  A Harvest of German Verse  »  Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)

Margarete Münsterberg, ed., trans. A Harvest of German Verse. 1916.

By Glimpse of a Childhood

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)

THE DARKNESS in the room is pregnant, seeming

To fold about the boy who hides himself;

And when his mother enters, as if dreaming,

A glass is trembling on the quiet shelf.

She feels that now her entrance is betrayed,

And kisses her small boy: “Oh, you are there!”…

They glance at the piano where she played

On many evenings the beloved air

That strangely on the child its magic laid.

He sits quite still. With wondering eyes he sees

Her hand, weighed down beneath the ring, and slow,

As if it walked against a gale through snow,

Move on the snow-white keys.