Rainer Maria Rilke

Woman in Love

Woman in Love - meaning Summary

Awakened to Vast Longing

The speaker awakens at a window in a liminal, half-dream state and questions where her self ends and the night begins. She feels vast enough to hold stars yet lets a loved one go, recognizing a new, strange fate. The voice mixes yearning and fragility—stretched toward the infinite, fragrant and calling, but afraid of being heard—and anticipates dissolving into another life. The poem explores longing, self-transcendence, and vulnerability.

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That is my window. Just now I have so softly wakened. I thought that I would float. How far does my life reach, and where does the night begin I could think that everything was still me all around; transparent like a crystal's depths, darkened, mute. I could keep even the stars within me; so immense my heart seems to me; so willingly it let him go again. whom I began perhaps to love, perhaps to hold. Like something strange, undreamt-of, my fate now gazes at me. For what, then, am I stretched out beneath this endlessness, exuding fragrance like a meadow, swayed this way and that, calling out and frightened that someone will hear the call, and destined to disappear inside some other life.

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