Rainer Maria Rilke writes a manuscript with a dip pen beside a window, with smoky quartz on the sill.

Where does the night begin? Rilke’s crystal

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was an Austrian poet born in Prague. In his poem Die Liebende, a woman wakes at a window. She recognises the window at once as her own. For a moment it is much harder to say where her life ends and the night begins.[1]

A window with an uncertain boundary

As she woke, the speaker thought she might float. The second stanza sustains that first impression. Its tentative opening leaves her free to wonder whether the world around her has changed or whether she has yet to recover a sense of her own limits.[1]

I could imagine everything
around me was still me;
transparent as a crystal’s
depth, darkened, mute.[1]

Looking into the crystal

The crystal gives her uncertainty a visible form. The eye can travel beneath its surface, then lose its bearings in the dark depth. A few lines later her heart seems large enough to hold the stars. Yet the person she may have begun to love is someone she would gladly let go again. Between holding and letting go, an optical impression takes on the shape of a human attachment.[1]