Prayers of a Young Poet

Rilke wrote these poems in 1899 after returning to Germany from his first trip to Russia, calling them simply "the prayers."  They reflect the intensity of his experience of the East, voicing his fascination with Orthodox churches and monasteries.  The icons, so different than the religious art he encountered on an earlier trip to Italy, seemed to him like flames glowing in dark spaces.  These luminous prayers gesture as verbal icons, their images illumining a way in the darkness