There is a God-shaped hush in Rainer Maria Rilke’s later poetry. Not an absence, but a retreat from the direct naming of the divine, a movement from invocation to intimation. This shift, subtle yet unmistakable, has long fascinated me. For decades now, I have returned to Rilke’s work as one might revisit a sacred grove: with awe and expectation for quiet revelation.

In his early work, particularly The Book of Hours, Rilke writes of God with a startling immediacy. These poems take the form of devotion, with psalm-like, fervent pleading:

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, that primordial tower.
I have been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

This is a young man’s cry to the heavens, unguarded and almost tenderly insistent. Rilke’s God in The Book of Hours is not distant or doctrinal – it is a you, a thou, with whom he seeks a dialogue, no matter how asymmetrical the relationship. This God is strange, shapeshifting, sometimes hidden behind veils, but still present in the vocabulary of yearning.

But then something begins to change.

By the time of his magisterial Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke has stopped using the word “God.” Instead, he speaks of angels, silence, breath, music, the invisible. He orbits the same ineffable presence, but no longer dares to name it outright. This is not a retreat from the spiritual. If anything, his spiritual vision becomes more expansive, more radical.

What are we to make of this linguistic shedding? This retreat from the G-word? It’s as though, in growing quiet around the divine name, Rilke joins a far older tradition, one that knows the sacred is not less present for being unnamed. In Judaism, that name is too holy to utter or even to write fully: G*d. Likewise, in Islam, whatever image we conjure of God is already an idol: laysa kamithlihi shay’ – there is nothing like him. Perhaps Rilke, in his later work, comes to understand what mystics have always known: to speak of God freely is to risk speaking wrongly. Better to leave that holy space intact, uncluttered, a silence God might choose to fill.

I suspect this reticence has something to do with reverence. Perhaps Rilke also recognizes that language sometimes closes what it seeks to open, and that naming, while necessary, can also confine. As he matures, Rilke becomes more attuned to the delicate ways in which the sacred reveals itself in suffering, in death, in art, in the unsayable spaces between things. Here he is in Duino Elegies:

Listen, heart, as before now only
the saints have listened: thus the immense summons
lifted them from the ground; but continuing
to kneel, these more than human beings never noticed.

Rilke continues to honor the Unknowable One by praising creation itself. In the Ninth Elegy, for example, he writes:

And are we here,
perhaps, merely to say: house, bridge, fountain,
gate, jar, fruit tree, window –at most,
pillar, tower? But to say them, you understand –
to say them in such a way that even the things
themselves never hoped to exist so intensely.

There is also the matter of pain. Rilke does not shy from it. He regards suffering as an essential part of the soul’s deepening, the entry point to mystery. “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,” he famously observes in his First Elegy. It is in this terrifying beauty that the sacred now dwells – not in the comfort of liturgy but in the raw, trembling pulse of existence. He no longer seeks to speak to God. Instead, he becomes a listening post for the unseen, for what vibrates just beyond the grasp of language.

Such a shift is not a diminishment but an evolution. The soul matures, and with maturity often comes a more spacious kind of silence. There is something commendable in Rilke’s reticence, in the way he steps back from naming the divine and instead opens his poetry to it, letting it move through his metaphors, cadences, and oblique affirmations.

Rilke, in his later work, does not ask us to believe; he asks us to experience, to remain open to the numinous. If The Book of Hours is a love letter to God, the Duino Elegies are what remain when the words have fallen away and only awe persists.

This Rilke, it would seem, is more likely to connect with spiritual seekers and even to those who would never claim that title. I think of British philosopher Bertrand Russell, a self-avowed atheist, who once confessed in a private letter to Lady Constance Malleson: “The center of me is always and eternally a terrible pain – a curious wild pain – a searching for something beyond what the world contains, something transfigured and infinite – the beatific vision – God – I do not find it, I do not think it is to be found – but the love of it is my life – it’s like passionate love for a ghost.”

In an essay titled “How to Grow Old,” Russell writes that ideally a human life gradually expands “until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river, small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

This, too, is surrender. Even if Russell did not believe in God, might not that longing, that ache for the infinite, be its own form of prayer? Poetry, philosophy, silence – these are all ways to kneel.

In a letter written late in life, Rilke gives voice to what feels like a mystic-artistic manifesto, distilling both his worldview and his idea of the sacred labor of the artist:

Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being. It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves, so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, invisible, inside of us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

In an age when many seem allergic to mystery, Rilke’s spiritual restraint feels radical. He teaches that faith is neither loud nor showy, that silence might better invite a visitation of the invisible. For those who continue to circle the holy in their own work and life, his example is a kind of permission: to approach faith with modest reverence, surrender certainty, and let silent longing sing itself.