…[Orpheus] had to tell himself: They follow still.
He spoke the words aloud and heard them fade.
How soundlessly they moved! The silence gnawed
At him. Although he knew one backward glance
Must utterly destroy the whole design
So nearly now achieved, he ached, he longed
At last to halt, to turn and look behind
And in the distance see those other two
Who followed but who stayed so strangely mute:
The God of distant journeys, God of Messages,
Whose eyes were bright beneath the dusty hood,
His slender baton held in front of him
And at his feet the ever-beating wings;
Beside him, held at his left hand, walked she.
This was the woman for the love of whom
More lamentation burst out from the lyre
Than from the throats of all lamenting women
Since the world began. Whose mourning
Made a world-brought all things back again,
The forests, valleys, roads, and villages;
Their cattle, fields and streams; a world like ours
Circled by sun and spanned by stars like ours-
But set quite differently within
Those other-heavens. So beloved was she.
She kept the God’s left hand. Her gentle limbs
Were still constrained by tatters of her shroud.
She followed patiently, uncertainly.
Like one whose time is near, all inwardness,
She did not see the figure far ahead
Nor see the path which led them upward
Towards the living world. All inwardness,
And full-clothed in her own death, her treasure,
She had become like a sweet fruit of darkness:
She was all crammed with death
Too huge and recent for her understanding.
She had acquired a new, inviolable
Virginity: her sex had closed
As flowers close at evening;
Her hands by now were so accustomed
To their widowhood that even the God’s
Ghostly and infinitely careful touch
Gave her offence, as if too intimate.
No more was she the poet’s golden Muse
Whose note and essence sounded in his songs.
She was no longer his. She had been myrrh
And spices, his island in the marriage bed;
She had become as fluent, sinuous, as hair;
She was as prodigal as fallen rain,
Distributed like corn in a famine.
She had become all root.
So that, when suddenly the God stopped short,
Took both her hands in his and said
With pity in his voice: He has looked back!
She did not understand him, murmured: Who?
There in the distance, dark against
The sunlit world outside, a figure stood,
Unrecognizable and indistinct.
And had to watch the Messenger,
The sorrowing God, turn back again
To follow her along that strip of pathway
Over meadows, for already she
Had started to walk back along that road,
Her limbs constrained by tatters of her shroud,
Her footsteps patient in uncertainty.
-From Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes By Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated from German by Stephen Cohn, 1997
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