The Evening
The Evening - context Summary
From the Book of Hours
This short poem, from Rilke’s The Book of Hours, watches twilight as a boundary between earth and heaven. The lowering sky and the retreating landscapes leave the speaker stranded between two realms. In that in-between state the speaker’s life is both constrained and vast, shifting between heaviness and luminous possibility. The evening becomes a moment that reveals the coexistence of fear and transcendence.
Read Complete AnalysesThe sky puts on the darkening blue coat held for it by a row of ancient trees; you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight, one journeying to heaven, one that falls; and leave you, not at home in either one, not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses, not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes a star each night, and rises; and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel) your life, with its immensity and fear, so that, now bounded, now immeasurable, it is alternately stone in you and star.
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