Rainer Maria Rilke

At the Brink of Night

At the Brink of Night - meaning Summary

Evening as Resonant Bridge

The speaker conceives evening as a unifying, musical space: their room and the distant dark become one while they imagine themselves as a taut string. By sounding silver vibrations, they hope to animate sleeping, troubled things—dreams, generational rancor, and deep abysses—drawing stray elements toward a sustaining light. The poem frames art or voice as a bridge that revitalizes and softens the night’s darkness.

Read Complete Analyses

My room and this distance, awake upon the darkening land, are one. I am a string stretched across deep surging resonance. Things are violin bodies full of murmuring darkness, where women's weeping dreams, where the rancor of whole generations stirs in its sleep . . . I should release my silver vibrations: then everything below me will live, and whatever strays into things will seek the light that falls without end from my dancing tone into the old abysses around which heaven swells through narrow imploring rifts.

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