Blue Hydrangea - By Rainer Maria Rilke
These leaves are like the last green
in the paint pans, dried-out, dull, and rough,
behind the umbelled blossoms that are a blue
they do not bear, only mirror from far away.
They mirror it tear-stained and inexactly,
as if they wished in turn to lose it;
and as in sheets of old blue letter paper
there's yellow in them, violet and gray;
washed out as with a childhood apron,
the no-longer-worn that nothing more befalls:
how one feels a small life's shortness.
But suddenly the blue seems to revive
in one of the umbels, and you see
a touching blue's delight in greenness.
From New Poems (1907) Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by Edward Snow; North Point Press, Farra, Straus and Giroux, New York 1984.
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