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RAINER MARIA RILKE

editors reject your efforts. Now (as you have permitted me to
advise you) I beg you to give all that up. You are looking out-
wards, and of all things that is what you must now not do.
Nobody can advise and help you, nobody. There is only one
single means. Go inside yourself. Discover the motive that bids
you write; examine whether it sends its roots down to the
deepest places of your heart, confess to yourself whether you
would have to die if writing were denied you. This before all :
ask yourself in the quietest hour of your night: must I write :
Dig down into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should
be in the affirmative, if you may meet this solemn question with
a strong and simple “I must”’, then build your life according to
this necessity ; your life must, right to its most unimportant and
insignificant hour, become a token and a witness of this impulse.
Then draw near to Nature. Then try, as if you were one of the
first men, to say what you see and experience and love and lose.
Do not write love poems; avoid at first those forms which are
too familiar and usual : they are the most difficult, for great and
fully matured strength is needed to make an individual con-
tribution where good and in part brilliant traditions exist in
plenty. Turn therefore from the common themes to those which
your own everyday life affords; depict your sorrows and
desires, your passing thoughts and belief in some kind of beauty

~—depict all that with heartfelt, quiet, humble sincerity and use

to express yourself the things that surround you, the images of

. your dreams and the objects of your memory. If your everyday

life seems poor to you, do not accuse it; accuse yourself, tell
yourself you are not poet enough to summon up its riches;
since for the creator there is no poverty and no poor or unim-
portant place. And even if you were in a prison whose walls
allowed none of the sounds of the world to reach your senses—
would you not still have always your childhood,? that precious,
royal richness, that treasure house of memories: Turn your
attention there. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that
distant past ; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude

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