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The Last Evening

And night and distant rumbling; now the army's
carrier-train was moving out, to war.
He looked up from the harpsichord, and as
he went on playing, he looked across at her

almost as one might gaze into a mirror:
so deeply was her every feature filled
with his young features, which bore his pain and were
more beautiful and seductive with each sound.

Then, suddenly, the image broke apart.
She stood, as though distracted, near the window
and felt the violent drum-beats of her heart.

His playing stopped. From outside, a fresh wind blew.
And strangely alien on the mirror-table
stood the black shako with its ivory skull.

Rilke was born in Prague, but he is considered an Austrian poet because he writes mainly in German within the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. He grew up in the family of a clerk from the railway administration with a failed military career. At the request of her ambitious mother, Rilke has been educated for many years as a girl, wearing feminine clothes and hairstyles. After the separation of his parents, at the insistence of his father as a counterpart, he spends five years at a military school where he feels physically and mentally crushed. Rilke attends the Trade Academy in Linz and then records philosophy, law and art history at the universities of Prague, Munich and Berlin. The rest of his life goes on a continuous journey through Italy, Spain, France, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland. Among them, it is particularly important that he travel to Moscow, where he often meets Lev Tolstoy. His last years Rilke lives in Switzerland, where friends provide him with a tower in the so-called "Castle Muzeu". There the poet, inspired by the lyrics of his relatives, Paul Valeri and Andre Gide, wrote poems mostly in French, some poems after his death. He died of leukemia and was buried in the courtyard of the old church in Raron in the Bernese Alps.