I am, O Anxious One
by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Stephen Mitchell
I am, O Anxious One. Don't you hear my voice
surging forth with all my earthly feelings?
They yearn so high, that they have sprouted wings
and whitely fly in circles round your face.
My soul, dressed in silence, rises up
and stands alone before you: can't you see?
don't you know that my prayer is growing ripe
upon your vision as upon a tree?
If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.
But when you want to wake, I am your wish,
and I grow strong with all magnificence
and turn myself into a star's vast silence
above the strange and distant city, Time.
Book of Hours (1905), translated by Stephen Mitchell
Who is the translator? An important inclusion.
Rilke’s poem feels like someone quietly admitting how much another person matters, without any armour on.
There’s a trembling sincerity in the way the speaker lets their feelings rise, almost against their will.
Those “wings” make me think of emotions that refuse to stay contained, no matter how hard we try.
I love how the soul appears “dressed in silence,” as if silence itself were a kind of fragile honesty.
The poem gently dissolves the border between two people until dreamer and dream overlap.
There’s something deeply tender in becoming whatever the other needs—prayer, vision, wish.
It doesn’t feel like self‑erasure, but a kind of luminous devotion.
And then that final shift into “a star’s vast silence” opens everything outward.
As if love could stretch beyond the moment and settle somewhere timeless.
It’s a soft, aching reminder of how profoundly we can inhabit someone else’s inner life.