Rachel A. Lott

A Translation from the German of "The Knight" by Rainer Maria Rilke 

The knight rides out in blackened mail:

out to the galloping world.

And all is out yonder: the day and the dale,

the friend and the foe and the hall of ale,

and May and the maid and the wood and the Grail,

and God Himself with a hundredfold Hail

is waiting on every road.

But deep in the knight’s iron sinews,

down past the darkest ring,

stoops Death, and must ceaselessly muse:

when will the keen blade spring?—

the swift and sudden edge

that will fetch through the hindmost seam

and free me from this niche

where I so many a day

have huddled pondering,—

that I at last may stretch

and play

and sing.

Rachel A. Lott holds a PhD in medieval philosophy from the University of Toronto. In her free time she writes and translates poetry. Her current passion project is a translation of 17th-century mystical poems, the first 100 of which have appeared in The Philosophers' Stone: Alchemical Poems by Angelus Silesius.