Rainer Maria Rilke on a really good sentence! | Anita Mathias: Dreaming Beneath the Spires

Rilke on a really good sentence

“Alas, those verse one writes in youth aren’t much. One should wait and gather meaning and sweetness all his life, a long one if possible, and then maybe at the end he might write ten good lines. For poetry isn’t, as people imagine, merely feelings (these come soon enough); it is experiences. To write one line, a man ought to see many cities, people, and things; he must learn to know animals and the way of birds in the air, and should be aware of the gesture with which little flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back the way to unknown places, to unexpected encounters and to partings long foreseen, to days of childhood…and to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought us joy (it was joy for another), to days on the sea, yes to the sea, to nights of travel that flew with the stars, and one must have memories of many nights of love, no two alike…and the screams of women in childbed…one must have sat by the dying, one must have sat by the dead in a room with open windows and intermittent noises…But it is not enough to have memories. One must be able to forget them and have much patience until they come again, and memories as such are not enough:only when they become blood within us, and glances and gestures nameless and no longer differentiated from us, only then it can happen that in a rare hour the first word of a verse may arise and come forth…”

Malte Laurids Brigge