Page:Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (1918).djvu/37

 ardent visionary force. The motif of The Monk's Life is expressed in the poem beginning with the lines:

I live my life in circles that grow wide

And endlessly unroll."

Through the grey cell of the young Monk there flash in luminous magnificence the colours of the great renaissance masters, for he feels in Titian, in Michelangelo, in Raphael the same fervour that animates him; they, too, are worshippers of the same God.

There are poems in The Book of Pilgrimage of the stillness of a whispered prayer in a great Cathedral and there are others that carry in their exultation the music of mighty hymns. The visions in this second book are no less ecstatic though less glowingly colourful; they have withdrawn inward and have brought a great peace and a great faith as in the poem of God, whose very manifestation is the quietude and hush of a silent world:

By day Thou art the Legend and the Dream

That like a whisper floats about all men,

The deep and brooding stillnesses which seem,

After the hour has struck, to close again.

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