Change Your Life: Essential Poems

by Rainer Maria Rilke, Martyn Crucefix (translator)

A new translation and deluxe edition of Rilke's most essential poems, by acclaimed poet Martyn Crucefix

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Rainer Maria Rilke developed one of the most singular poetic styles of the twentieth century. Visionary yet always anchored in the real world, his poems give profound expression to fundamental questions of love and death, of the chaos of the modern world as well as the spiritual consolation of art and nature.

Change Your Life draws from across Rilke's career to offer a comprehensive view of his most essential poetry, featuring major selections from the great Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus alongside less frequently anthologised work. In these dazzling new translations by acclaimed poet Martyn Crucefix, Rilke's poems beguile with fresh insight and mystery.

Genres: Poetry

257 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 29, 2024

About the author

A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923).

People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.

His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .

He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.

Reviews

[Léa]

'this is what lacerates to the bone [grief] - it is what rasps like a saw. any reproach your ghost might bring me in the night, however harsh, as I retreat into my lungs, the workings of my guts, into my heart's, last, poorest chamber, any reproach could not be as dreadful as this pleading.' !!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Lucy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just beautiful.

“I have my dead and I have let them go
and was astonished to see them so at ease
in being dead, so right, so soon at home,
so at odds with what we're told. Only you
return, brushing by me, lingering, now
tap something to make it sound,
reveal your presence.”

[Cheryl · Rating 2 out of 5]

His way of life is one of ascent, continually setting out towards the ever-shifting constellation of constant danger.

I have a love-hate relationship with Rilke, some of his words I love love love, others I just hate, like I think he was so off about love it is noticeable and almost eradicates his wisdom and deep insight and descriptions of nature and living. But I fall into his worlds he is building and find myself editing out the stupid and immature love stuff and just holding his imagery.

Love:
You will inherit autumns spread like splendid robes, in remembrance of poets, and all winters, like countries long forsaken, will grow quiet beside you, nestling close.

Hate:
And so too with lovers, they harvest for you: they are the poets of the passing hour. They plant a kiss on an expressionless mouth to make it smile, to create beauty there, and pleasure too, and they accustom us to suffering which simply helps us mature.

Love:
I am a string, stretched and sounding, over whispering resonances. Things are violin-bodies.
Hate:
Yearnings that sleep, only to awaken in another’s breast, and it is there they cry. They gather such mysteries, and then die, as all creatures do, without comprehending, yet from them there may spring grandchildren…

Silent friend of many distances, now feel how space increases even as you breathe. From the wooden beams of a dark belfry, ring yourself out loud. For whatever feeds on you gains strength from such sustenance. Travel always towards transformation. What has been your most painful experience? If the draught tastes bitter, turn it to wine. In this night of excess, you must perform magic at the crossroads of your senses—show the meaning of their strange encounter. And if all that is earthly knows you no more, declare this to the stilled world: I flow.

[Scarlett Barnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

I feel like a rabid dog after reading this poetry collection like how am I meant to function anymore as a human being.


“What will you do, God, when I am gone?
I am your vessel (when I am shattered?)
l am your drink (if I am spilt and scattered?)
I am your business, the clothes you put on,
and in losing me you lose your purpose.

Once I am gone, you will have no house
where words welcome you, intimate and warm,
and the pair of velvet slippers that I am,
loosened, will be lost from your weary feet.

And your coat will no longer button up.
Your glance, that I would always meet
as a warm, consoling pillow for my cheek,
will turn and search, no longer finding me
and as the sun goes down, there in the lap
of alien stones your bed will be laid.

What will you do, God? I am afraid.”


😧😧😧😧 what on earth Rilke why do you have zero chill. This is from literally like the 4th page and I knew from there that i was in for it.

I just quite literally read the majority of this collection with this face 😧 and in a good way but still. He’s just so incredible at articulating things it’s absolutely crazy and his opinion and view on God and the connection between humanity and God is one that really resonates and I really appreciate the fact that he was able to put it into words and to make it digestible.

[Lindsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

I keep waiting to become more of a poetry fan, but that day never seems to come, no matter how much poetry I read.

I picked up this collection having read Rilke's quote: "Be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answers."

Since reading and resonating with that quote 15 years ago in high school, I've also explored Letters to a Young Poet, and found Rilke's words to be equally poetic and romantic in that slim volume. Still, nothing else he produced seems to resonate as much as that initial quote did, save for a handful of the poems in "Change Your Life."

2/5 stars for personal taste. I still acknowledge his talent as a poet.

[Charlie Swan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“You, darkness, out of which I came,
I love you more than the flame
That delineates the worlds edge,
With a glimmer,
On some sphere,
Beyond which no one has more knowledge,

Yet the darkness binds everything into itself:
All forms and flames, creatures and myself,
It seizes upon them,
All powers, all that is human…

And it may be there is an immense night
Stirring nearby —

I believe in the night”

[Miglė · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was so charmed by Letters to a Young Poet, and so excited to read this beautiful edition of Rilke's poems.

I had to accept that this selection of poems is not for me - expertly constructed and yet not making me feel much. My partner liked it even less and yet indulged me as we kept reading it together on tired evenings - we finished it more out of dedication than delight. And maybe that's one way to change your life.

[Lauren · Rating 3 out of 5]

"why then
the need to be human and, avoiding fate,
why keep longing for fate?...
oh, not because happiness exists,
that hasty profit we snatch from impending loss.
Not for curiosity's sake, nor as practice for the heart,
which could as well exist as laurel...
But truly because being here is so much--because
everything in this fleeting world seems to need us,
calls to us strangely. Us--the most fleeting of all."

[Haley · Rating 3 out of 5]

“You, beloved, lost in advance, never arrived
I do not know what sounds are sweet to you.
No longer do I try to discern you in the waves of what is to come..”

“Then you, who drop down a hundred times a day, with the kind of bruising only unripened fruit knows, out of the tree of your collaborative efforts..”

[Scott Kuffel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rilke’s elegies in this compilation are masterful. Balancing the lightness and darkness of life. Compelling thought and reflection without overburdening deep thinking. His ability to create metaphor is nonpareil.

[cmoney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do like Rilke, but not his long form poems & the selection in this book was not it imo.

[Frederick Gault · Rating 2 out of 5]

Doesn't sing to me.

[Allison Hibbs · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Never absent from my thoughts for long,
(...)laid wide open as the gaze
of a herdsman as he wakes contentedly
into the rich silence of bee-drunk days"

[Ishaan Kumar · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would recommend songs of Orpheus - some of his earlier work didn't quite do it for me.

[Alice Joy Reynolds · Rating 3 out of 5]

This did not change my life.

[Jiwon Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this at the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. The words he chose made sense when you say them out loud even though they read funny at times. Maybe it was the rhythm, the specific sounds - but his poetry made sense, which I enjoyed.

Favorites:
1. And it was a girl almost who then arose out of this happy union of song and lyre and gleamed clearly through her spring veils and made herself a bed in my ear.
2. Dance the orange. The warmer landscape, fling it from you, so that its ripeness shines in our native air!
3. Do you know me, air, fully of places once mine? You - once the smooth rind, the rounding-out and leaf of my every word.
4. Silent friend of many distances, now feel how space increases even as you breathe.
5. a letter torn to pieces, yet written moments before, while the one intended to read it hesitated at the door.