Page:Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke (1918).djvu/77

 THE WOMAN WHO LOVES

Ah yes! I long for you. To you I glide

And lose myself—for to you I belong.

The hope that hitherto I have denied

Imperious comes to me as from your side

Serious, unfaltering and swift and strong.

Those times: the times when I was quite alone

By memories wrapt that whispered to me low,

My silence was the quiet of a stone

Over which rippling murmuring waters flow.

But in these weeks of the awakening Spring

Something within me has been freed—something

That in the past dark years unconscious lay,

Which rises now within me and commands

And gives my poor warm life into your hands

Who know not what I was that Yesterday.

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