Entrance

“Entrance,” an early Rilke poem, contains some of the imagery and symbols that he favored throughout his poetic career. During the same period in which he wrote “Entrance,” he also wrote the untitled poem that begins “I love the dark hours of my being,” which appeared in The Book of Hours (Das Stundenbuch) in 1905 (translation by Robert Bly in Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1981, p. 19). In those “dark hours,” his “senses drop into the deep” and an expansive sense of the infinite nature of life opens up for him. Another poem from the same collection begins, “You darkness, that I come from” and goes on to state that the darkness contains everything and makes the poet feel that “a great energy / is moving near me.” He concludes, “I have faith in nights” (Bly, p. 21). Those lines from both poems could serve almost as a gloss on “Entrance,” with its emphasis on stepping into the darkness; the poet sets out the conditions in which his being is most expanded and complete and in which poetry can arise within him.

Some years later, in January 1914, Rilke stared out at the vastness of the night through the window of his room in Paris, and he felt that the night befriended him: “Your breath passed over me.