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"You dark air full of summer pollen."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Seven Phallic Poems (VI), 1915.

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Rainer Maria Rilke and Baladine Klossowska in Beatenberg (Switzerland), summer 1922.

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"Oh, if only I could use the voice already within you, without it passing through my mouth, to tell you the story of our love, you would be washed in a flood of bliss… for it is far more beautiful than we can even imagine it; our memory, so swollen by the manifold harvest of this year of blessings, is yet insufficient to hold the entire crop: three quarters of which, you may be sure, remain outside, on the open wind."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Merline, december 1920, from Berg-am-Irchel.

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Rainer Maria Rilke: Lettres sur Cézanne, traduites et préfacées par Maurice Betz, Éditions Corréa, 1944.

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— Rainer Maria Rilke, "Schöne Aglaja", Aus dem Nachlaß des Grafen C. W. (1921)

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Rainer Maria Rilke: Zwei Prager Geschichten ("Two Prague Stories"), Stuttgart, A. Bonz, 1899.

The first edition of 1000 copies printed by Bonz could only be sold partially. In 1909, the Insel-Verlag took over the remainder of the stock and had it bound more elegantly in a vellum jacket with a colored paper cover.

[robert-hadley]

The Garden Room Fresco at the Villa di Livia, Rome. Painted c. 30-20 BC. Photo by  Marco Mansi

[duino-elegies]

"Time and again you have stood there marveling over the sheer size of the fruit, over its wholeness, its smooth and unmottled skin, and that the lightheaded bird or the jealous worm under the ground had not snatched it away from your hands."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus (II, 17).

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“What fields are as fragrant as your hands?”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Paris, summer 1909.

[allthingseurope]

Bern, Switzerland (by Miroslawa)

[duino-elegies]

"First I had a little to do with the cities: Geneva . . . then Bern: and that was very very lovely. An old, enduring city, still quite unspoiled in many parts, with all the characteristics of a dependable and active citizenry, even to quite a high self-assurance expressing itself in like-minded houses that toward the street bear themselves with a certain reserve above their arcades, but toward the Aar in their pretty garden fronts are of more communicative and open mind. Luckily I had Bernese friends there with fine old inherited houses of this sort, and that removed at one stroke the hotel atmosphere for me and helped me very much to experience the nature of the country, even where, as now once more displaced among strangers, I have to find myself to rights again from their level."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to the Countess Aline Dietrichstein, from Soglio (Bergell, Graubünden) August 6, 1919.

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Und unten hellt und verdunkelt / deine nächtliche sich, die heilig erschrockene Landschaft, / die du in Abschieden fühlst.

"And underneath brightens and darkens the nocturnal landscape, the holy, the terrified landscape, which you feel in departures."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, To Hölderlin (from Uncollected Poems, translated by Stephen Mitchell).

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The grave of Rainer Maria Rilke in Raron, from Du: kulturelle Monatsschrift (Switzerland, 1946).

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"Earth, my love, I want it."

— Rainer Maria Rilke, The 9th Elegy.

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Envelope from Rainer Maria Rilke to the writer and editor Leopold von Schlözer, at Schloss Winkel, Meran (Tyrol, Austria), written in black ink and postmarked Paris, March 26, 1913. Rilke and Schlözer met for the first time in Capri in 1907.

[madkrok]

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Duino Castle, view on the roofs and the Adriatic Sea.

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Rainer Maria Rilke (1925)

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"It would be good to give much thought, before you try to find words for something so lost, for those long childhood afternoons you knew that vanished so completely —and why?"

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Buch der Bilder, 1902. Tr. by Edward Snow.

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BETZ (Maurice). Rilke à Paris. Paris Émile-Paul Frères, 1941.