....in all things and in all

I find you, Lord, in all things and in all

I find you, Lord, in all things and in all
my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life,
as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small
and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.

The wondrous game that power plays with Things
is to move in such submission through the world:
groping in roots and growing thick in trunks
and in treetops like a rising from the dead.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
Born in Prague, Austria

This poem is from The Book of Hours 1905. Rilke is said to have written these poems and a book of thirteen connected short stories called, Tales of God “out of his experience of Russia and Nietzsche and Lou.” Rilke was greatly influenced by “Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who had given a name to the yearning place that the young poet had already hollowed out in himself: the death of God. And Nietzsche had defined the task of art: God-making.” Lou Andreas-Salome was the woman who Nietzsche had fallen in love with and had proposed to at age eighteen. The story has it that her refusal led to Nietzsche’s derangement. At age thirty-four she took Rilke for a lover and had accompanied him to Russia on two trips. She later became an associate of Sigmund Freud. The poems are written through the persona of a Russian monk. Rilke later worked as a secretary in Paris for the sculptor Rodin.