Jan Schreiber ~ Brookline Poet Laureate 2015-17
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  • Shakespeare et al.
    • Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
    • Fulke Greville (1554-1628)
    • William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
    • Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
    • John Donne (1572-1631)
    • George Herbert (1593-1633)
  • 20th Century Poems
    • William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
    • Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
    • Robert Frost (1874-1963)
    • Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
    • T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
    • Louise Bogan (1897-1970)
    • Stevie Smith (1902-1971)
    • W. H. Auden (1907-1973)
    • Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
    • Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
    • Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000)
    • Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
    • Robert Creeley (1926-2005)
  • Poems in Translation
    • Bai Juyi (772–846)
    • J. W. von Goethe (1749-1832)
    • Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837)
    • Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)
    • Paul Valéry (1871-1945)
    • Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
    • Ho Chi Minh (1890-1969)
    • Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956)
  • Poems by Jan Schreiber
    • Acoustics
    • Now Winter Nights Enlarge
    • A Little Patter
    • The Inventory
    • Cormorants
    • The Road to Nowhere
    • The Birds
  • Contact
Picture
R A I N E R   M A R I A   R I L K E  (1875-1926)

Sonnet to Orpheus XIV 

We walk past blossom, leaf, fruit-laden tree.
They speak a speech that isn't just the year’s.
Up from the darkness something bright appears
betraying perhaps a glint of jealousy

that marks the dead who strengthen all the earth.
What do we know about their ancient home?
Their loosened marrow marries with the loam
to seed it with their elemental worth.

And do they love what time affords?…
To toil oppressed like slaves to force this fruit
englobed to us above, their overlords?

Are they the lords, who sleep there at the root
and grant their excess power to us in this:
this middle thing, half mute strength and half kiss?

 
                                             Translated by Jan Schreiber



Picture
​Archaic Torso of Apollo
 
We never knew his unimagined head
in which the eyes were apples ripening,
and yet his torso radiates a ring
of light as if a now-dimmed streetlamp shed
 
a constant glow. How else could the convex
curve of his breast dazzle, and the soft turn
of loins become a smile you might discern
reaching that center that once bore his sex?
 
And how else could this stone, disfigured, scant
beneath the shoulders’ smooth translucent slant,
still flicker like a momentary trace
 
of wolf’s fur, burst its boundaries like the knife-
beams of a star? No, there is not a place
that doesn’t see you. You must change your life.

 
                                       Translated by Jan Schreiber

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