From 'Letters to a Young Poet' - Rilke

I read this passage today and it hit home with some force. Consequently it seems worth sharing, particularly if your artistic endeavours, like mine, have been bogged down in considerations of what others (editors, critics, peers, family)  will think of your work.  Here goes:

"...Read as few works of aesthetic criticism as possible - there are in them either partisan opinions which have become petrified and meaningless in their lifeless obduracy, or else a clever play of words, with which today one finds favour and tomorrow the opposite. 

Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and nothing can reach them so little as criticism. Only love and grasp them and keep hold of them and be just to them. Always trust yourself and your own feelings as opposed to any such analysis, review or introduction; if you should be wrong, then the natural growth of your inner life will lead you slowly and in time to new realisations.

Allow your judgments their own quiet, undisturbed development, which like all progress must come from deep within you and cannot be forced or hastened by anything. The whole thing is to carry the full time and then give birth; to let every impression and every germ of a feeling consummate itself entirely within itself, in that which is dark, inexpressible, unconscious and unattainable by your own intelligence, and to await the hour of delivery of a new clearness of vision. That alone is to live an artistic life, in understanding, as in creating."

Onto a Vast Plain, by Rainer Maria Rilke

Onto a Vast Plain

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit:
now it becomes a riddle again
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you know
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.

Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

From A Book of Hours.

This was on the back of the funeral service sheet of my cousin who died about 18 months ago. I would like it read at my funeral too.