My father's advice I have never heeded.

Since I was a little boy my father has subtly, and not so subtly, given me a solitary piece of advice: "Where there are many words transgression is unavoidable". This poem by Rilke is my father's advice that I never have heeded. 

“A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.

Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright
unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests;
and it was not from any dullness, not
from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves,

but from just listening. Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
at most a makeshift hut to receive the music,

a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind --
you built a temple deep inside their hearing.”

            -Rilke, Part I, The Sonnets of Orpheus