The park is high. And as out of a house I step out of its glimmering half-light into openness and evening. Into the wind, the same wind that the clouds feel, the bright rivers and the turning mills that stand slowly grinding at the sky's edge. Now I too am a thing held in its hand, the smallest thing under the sky. --Look: Is that one sky?: Blissfully lucid blue, into which ever purer clouds throng, and under it all white in endless changes, and over it that huge, thin-spun gray, pulsing warmly as on red underpaint, and over everything this silent radiance of a setting sun. Miraculous structure, moved within itself and upheld by itself, shaping figures, giant wings, faults and high mountain ridges before the first star and suddenly, there: a gate into such distances as perhaps only birds know...

During the later part of this decade Rilke spent extended periods in Ronda the famous bull-fighting center in southern Spain. During this time Reinhart introduced Rilke to his protégée the Australian violinist Alma Moodie. While doing so he pricked his hand on a thorn.

His writings include one novel several collections of poetry and several volumes of correspondence in which he invokes haunting images that focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief solitude and profound anxiety. These deeply existential themes tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist writers. While born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire Rilke travelled extensively throughout Europe and North Africa including Russia Spain Germany France Italy and in his later years settled in Switzerland—settings that were key to the genesis and inspiration for many of his poems.