Und wo eben kaum eine Hütte war…da schufst du ihnen Tempel im Gehör.
- Rilke
Here is a piece of intellectual treason
(it’s not so much a theory as a guess):
Life plants its garden in nonsense, not in reason.
But nonsense games with sense in its unstructured chess.
And Art is the Athenaeum of sense.
The poet Rilke builds a temple in his ear
and an inner Plato comes to warn him against
that great hope of youth – the desire to “hear
a calling.” Plato urges him to defy it.
But acceptance is the name of his defiance.
Soon all subsides into muddled quiet –
the quiet that is the scourge of self-reliance.
So as to be able to make this silence clear,
I’ve had to put this cadence in my ear –
a metrical tool, a stanzaic appliance.
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