Night (O You Whose Countenance)
Night (O You Whose Countenance) - meaning Summary
Vastness Meets Human Daring
Rilke addresses Night as a living, weighty presence that both overwhelms and sustains the speaker. The poem contrasts cosmic immensity—stars, interstellar motion, endurance beyond earth—with the speaker’s felt minuteness. Yet rather than retreat, the speaker claims a rooted unity with the darkening earth and finds courage to exist within Night’s embrace. It is a modest, existential affirmation amid awe at the universe’s vastness.
Read Complete AnalysesNight. O you whose countenance, dissolved in deepness, hovers above my face. You who are the heaviest counterweight to my astounding contemplation. Night, that trembles as reflected in my eyes, but in itself strong; inexhaustible creation, dominant, enduring beyond the earth's endurance; Night, full of newly created stars that leave trails of fire streaming from their seams as they soar in inaudible adventure through interstellar space: how, overshadowed by your all-embracing vastness, I appear minute!--- Yet, being one with the ever more darkening earth, I dare to be in you.
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