Rainer Maria Rilke

Lament (Whom Will You Cry to, Heart?)

Lament (Whom Will You Cry to, Heart?) - meaning Summary

Loss Uproots Inner Joy

The speaker addresses their own heart, portraying an increasing loneliness and a faltering path through an indifferent world. Small past pleasures now seem trivial as a deeper, longstanding joy—likened to a tree—is breaking under a storm of loss. The poem contrasts outward futility and movement toward an uncertain future with an inward, invisible landscape where that joy once made the self known to spiritual witnesses.

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Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely, your path struggles on through incomprehensible mankind. All the more futile perhaps for keeping to its direction, keeping on toward the future, toward what has been lost. Once. You lamented? What was it? A fallen berry of jubilation, unripe. But now the whole tree of my jubilation is breaking, in the storm it is breaking, my slow tree of joy. Loveliest in my invisible landscape, you that made me more known to the invisible angels.

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