rainer maria rilke loves freddie's dolphins

Dolphins

Those real ones, who gave their equal
the power to grow and to take hold
everywhere, felt through kindred signs
equivalences in the fluid realm
which the god, with drenching Tritons,
inundated sometimes surmounts;
for there the animal had shown itself:
different form the mute, phlegmatic
stock of fishes, alive with their blood
and drawn to the human from afar.

A band of them came up, somersaulting,
gay, as though they felt the waters sparkling:
warm, deep-feeling beings, whose convoy,
wreathing the voyage as if with confidence,
lightly joined around the curving bow
as if circling a vase's midriff,
blissful, carefree, secure from being wounded,
catapulted up, swept away, surging
and in dives exchanging with the waves,
bore the trireme brightly after it.

And the sailor took this newly given friend
into his lonely peril and gratefully
devised for it, for the companion there,
a world, and knew beyond all doubt
that it too loved music, gods, gardens,
and the deep, silent stellar year.