Page:Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (1918).djvu/35

 Colonna, The Czars, Charles XII Riding Through the Ukraine are portrayed each with his individual historical gesture, with a luminosity as strong as the colour and movement which they gave to their time. In the mythical poem, Kings in Legends, this concrete element in the art of Rilke has found perhaps its supreme expression:

There are in The Book of Pictures poems in which this will to concentrate a mood into its essence and finality is applied to purely lyrical poems as in Initiation, that stands out in this volume like "the great dark tree" itself so immeasurable isin [sic] the straight line of its aspiration reaching into the far distant silence of the night; or as in the poem entitled Autumn, with its melancholy mood of gentle descent in all nature. xxvii