This is Episode 41 of Poems to Live Well By.

Today’s poem is "Go to the Limits of Your Longing", by Rainer Maria Rilke.

You can read the poem here.

Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet who came from the old Austro-Hungarian empire which existed until the end of World War I. He was a near contemporary of Friedrich Nietzsche, both men wrote in German, and it’s said that they even, 15 or 20 years apart, fell in love with the same woman (the psychoanalyst Lou Salomé). 

Whereas the philosophy of Nietzsche can be dense and difficult to read, and is sometimes seen as depressing or nihilistic, and the poetry of Rilke is easy to read and often hopeful or spiritually uplifting, there are many parallels in their work too. For one thing, both reject easy summaries of the way life was or could be. Both, in their own way, questioned what life was for.

Rilke’s poems can often be adopted as affirmations or prayers, and often include short lines that seem to go straight to the heart of things. That can be said about today’s poem, “Go to the Limits of Your Longing”, a prayer given to us directly by God to encourage us to go out and live, fully, deeply, embracing the full complexity of our being.

Music Credit:

Once Upon a Time by Alex-Productions | https://onsound.eu/  | Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com