The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Read online

  where the milliner Madame Lamort

  twists and winds the restless paths of the earth,

  those endless ribbons, and, from them, designs

  new bows, frills, flowers, ruffles, artificial fruits—, all

  falsely colored, —for the cheap

  winter bonnets of Fate.

  The Duino Elegies are an argument against our lived, ordinary lives. And it is not surprising that they are. Rilke’s special gift as a poet is that he does not seem to speak from the middle of life, that he is always calling us away from it. His poems have the feeling of being written from a great depth in himself. What makes them so seductive is that they also speak to the reader so intimately. They seem whispered or crooned into our inmost ear, insinuating us toward the same depth in ourselves. The effect can be hypnotic. When Rilke was dying in 1926—of a rare and particularly agonizing blood disease—he received a letter from the young Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva. “You are not the poet I love most,” she wrote to him. “ ‘Most’ already implies comparison. You are poetry itself.” And one knows that this is not hyperbole. That voice of Rilke’s poems, calling us out of ourselves, or calling us into the deepest places in ourselves, is very near to what people mean by poetry. It is also what makes him difficult to read thoughtfully. He induces a kind of trance, as soon as the whispering begins:

  Yes—the springtimes needed you. Often a star

  was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you

  out of the distant past, or as you walked

  under an open window, a violin

  yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.

  But could you accomplish it? Weren’t you always

  distracted by expectation, as if every event

  announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place

  to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you

  going and coming and often staying all night.)

  Look at how he bores into us. That caressing voice seems to be speaking to the solitary walker in each of us who is moved by springtimes, stars, oceans, the sound of music. And then he reminds us that those things touch off in us a deeper longing. First, there is the surprising statement that the world is a mission, and the more surprising question about our fitness for it. Then, with another question, he brings us to his intimacy with our deeper hunger. And then he goes below that, to the still more solitary self with its huge strange thoughts. It is as if he were peeling off layers of the apparent richness of the self, arguing us back to the poverty of a great, raw, objectless longing.

  This is why the argument of the Elegies is against ordinary life. Nor does it admit, as comfort, any easy idea of transcendence. “Who, if I cried out,” the poems begin, “would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” And the implicit answer is “No one.” The great, stormy movements of those poems that seem to open out and open out really aim to close in, to narrow, to limit: to bring us up against the huge nakedness and poverty of human longing. He himself did not necessarily see this project of his art clearly. The Elegies were begun in 1912 and he did not complete them until 1922. The last of them, the Fifth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth and Tenth, were not composed until after he was visited, suddenly, by the early Sonnets to Orpheus. In the first of them, he speaks of the mythic project of Orpheus:

  And where there had been

  just 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.

  It is that hut I want to call attention to. It is how Rilke saw our unformed inner lives—what he is always telling us about ourselves. He was not, in the end, interested in Paris. There is very little evidence that he was interested in breakfasts (except for one occasion when he first discovered in 1901 a California health food—Quaker Oats—and enthusiastically sent a packet to his future wife, with the recipe—Boil water, add oats.) He is always arguing against the world of days and habits, our blurred and blurring desires, “a makeshift hut to receive the music, / a shelter nailed up out of our darkest longing, / with an entryway that shuddered in the wind.” This hut is the place one means when one says that Rilke wrote from a great depth in himself, and it is, I believe, what Marina Tsvetayeva meant when she said that Rilke was poetry. His work begins and ends with this conviction of an inner emptiness. It is what he says at the very beginning of the Elegies:

  Don’t you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms

  into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds

  will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

  It even provides a clue to the odd fact that Rilke started writing in French just before his death. The only explanation for it he ever offered was to say that he found the language useful, since there was “in German no exact equivalent for the French word absence, in the great positive sense with which Paul Valéry used it.” For what Orpheus has done is to turn the hut of our emptiness into something positive, into a temple, and that is also apparently what Rilke felt Valéry had done. The project of his poetry, then, was to find, in art, a way to transform the emptiness, the radical deficiency, of human longing into something else.

  This project was, to some extent, an inheritance—it recapitulates many currents in European poetry in the nineteenth century. The romantic poets at the beginning of it opened up the territory. Hölderlin spoke of a new poetry, almost overwhelmed by the discovery of an infinite human inwardness. And Wordsworth had said that poets had to give that inwardness a local habitation and a name. It is important to remember that when he said this he was still a political radical, sympathetic to the French revolution, who believed that the social and artistic projects were parallel, because after the failed European revolutions of 1848, those two projects were divorced. For Baudelaire, nature had become a temple where one only read symbolic meanings, and the poet, like an albatross, was understood to be hopelessly ungainly on the ground of social life and graceful only in the air. Poets trafficked with the infinite. In the work of Mallarmé, this led to a changed notion of poetry itself. As the poet pulled away from the social world the words in a poem pulled away from referential meaning. Poetry was an art near to music. It did not reach down to the mere world of objects. It made a music which lifted the traces of objects where they half survived in the referential meaning of words—street, apple, tree—toward a place where they lived a little in the eternal stillness of the poem. Something like this idea—it went by the name of symbolism—was inherited by the last, decadent or Parnassian, generation of nineteenth-century poets. The poem was to have as little commerce as possible with the middle-class world, and the poet, in his isolation, served only his art, which was itself in the service of beauty.

  If there is any doubt that this ambience was felt by the young Rilke, it is dispelled by a description of him in provincial Prague at the age of twenty-one. “He went about,” one of his contemporaries wrote, “wearing an old-world frock coat, black cravat, and broad-brimmed black hat, clasping a long-stemmed iris and smiling, oblivious of the passersby, a forlorn smile into ineffable horizons.” His attachment to the role of decadent and aesthete was qualified, however, by his interest in Nietzsche, particularly Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who had given a name to the yearning place that the young poet had already hollowed out in himself: the death of God. And it was Nietzsche who had defined the task of art: God-making. This interest of Rilke’s was intensified by one of the important events in his life; he met a remarkable older writer, Lou Andreas-Salomé. She was thirty-four at the time. When she was eighteen, Nietzsche had fallen in love with her and proposed marriage. It was already part of her legend that her refusal of him was responsible for the philosopher’s derangement. Later, she would become an associate of Sigmund Freud’s. In 1913 she brought Rilke, who was terrified by the idea of mental health, to a Psycho-analytic Congress and introduced him to Freud, a
n experience which issued in Rilke’s own descent into what he called “the mother experience” in the Third Duino Elegy. But in 1899, she took the young poet for a lover and, in that year and the next, accompanied him on a pair of trips to Russia.

  His first readable work, the prose Tales of God and The Book of Hours, comes out of his experience of Russia and Nietzsche and Lou. The poems are written, appropriately enough, in the persona of a young Russian monk. A young monk because that could stand for Rilke’s sense of his own apprenticeship and for the God who he felt was only just coming into being. Russian because it was on this trip, in the immense open spaces of the Russian countryside and in the bell-ringing churches of old Moscow, that Rilke first discovered a landscape which he felt corresponded to the size and terror and hushed stillnesses of his own inner life. The poems themselves are a beginning—they already have the qualities of Rilke’s mind and imagination, but formally they belong to the dreamy, musical mold of the symbolist lyric. This is a reason why, I think, they sometimes seem more interesting in English translation than they really are. Here is an example. To understand the point I’m trying to make, the reader without German has to attend to it anyway and try reading the poem out loud, noticing the tinkling regularity of the meter and the neat finality of the rhymes, Abendbrot and tot, geht and steht.

  Manchmal steht einer auf beim Abendbrot

  und geht hinaus und geht und geht und geht,—

  weil eine Kirche wo im Osten steht.

  Und seine Kinder segnen ihn wie tot.

  Und einer, welcher stirbt in seinem Haus,

  bleibt drinnen wohnen, bleibt in Tisch und Glas,

  so dass die Kinder in die Welt hinaus

  zu jener Kirche ziehn, die er vergass.

  Here is the poem in the vigorous, unrhymed, unmetered translation of Robert Bly:

  Sometimes a man stands up during supper

  and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,

  because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.

  And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

  And another man, who remains inside his own house,

  stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,

  so that his children have to go far out into the world

  toward that same church, which he forgot.

  Rilke’s theme is already present, the abandonment of ordinary life for the sake of a spiritual quest. And so is his intensity. Robert Bly has muted it, by having the father stay rather than die in the house, but in either case the poem insists that the spirit will have no rest until the quest is undertaken, which is probably Rilke’s understanding of his relationship to his own father. But the poem has a feeling of being too neat, too pat, which disappears, I think, in the English translation. A way to hear this might be to look at an English poem on a similar theme. Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a little more luxuriant, but it has the same end-of-the-century music and the same desire to escape:

  I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

  And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

  Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,

  And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

  Imagine if you can a translation of this stanza into twentieth-century free verse:

  I’m going to get up now, and go west to Innisfree,

  and I’ll build a small cabin there out of reeds and clay.

  I’ll make nine rows of beans and a hive for honeybees

  and I’ll live by myself in that bee-loud valley.

  What goes are the wistfulness and the music. They are replaced by a sense of active will and specificity, which aren’t really in the original poem.

  There is something else to notice in this comparison. In both Yeats and Rilke, the spiritual search or the aim of art does not occur inside life, but somewhere eise. For Yeats and his readers, Innisfree could stand for the wild naturalness of the west of Ireland and for Irish nationalism and for the elsewhere of symbolist art. In Rilke’s poem, a comfortably symbolic “church in the East” does similar work. It is easy to see, biographically, how potent a symbol it was for him. It combined the experience of Russia, his Nietzschean spiritual strivings, his artistic vocation, and his first serious love affair. Heady stuff. But a church in the East is a long way from that tattered hut in the first Sonnet to Orpheus. In order to get there, Rilke had to descend into the terrible and painful sense of his own emptiness, which lay behind the hunger for the ideal. That, finally, is why The Book of Hours seems like apprentice work and why it seems so limited by the dexterity and gracefulness of its writing.

  Rilke needed to think less about art as visionary recital and more about it as a practice. The next phase of his development gave him a chance to do that. It took him, almost directly upon his return from Russia, to Worpswede, an artists’ colony in the fen country near Bremen. The atmosphere combined fresh air, the sensibility of the English arts-and-crafts movement, and landscape painting—it was here that Rilke developed his enthusiasm for Quaker Oats. The place brought him into contact with the plastic arts and with two women who played a large part in his life, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, whom he married, and the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. The prose that grew out of these associations—“On Landscape,” Worpswede, Auguste Rodin—deal with the visual arts and lent him both the title and the spirit of his next volume of poems, The Book of Pictures. It contains the poems through which many readers of Rilke first discover him. The religious tonality of The Book of Hours is gone, replaced by solitude and majestic sadness. These are the poems of invitation, of seductive intimacy, calling us away from ordinary life. Wer du auch seist, whoever you are, one of them begins, am Abend tritt hinaus, in the evening go outside, aus deiner Stube, out of your room, drin du alles weisst, where you know everything. The language is clear, calm, only slightly poetic. (The room, for example, is Stube, whereas Gregor Samsa suffers his domestic embarrassment in a more modern and neutral Zimmer.) Many of them are gorgeous, especially “Autumn Day,” with the sad, rich cadence of its final lines:

  Whoever has no house now, will never have one.

  Whoever is alone will stay alone,

  will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,

  and wander on the boulevards, up and down,

  restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.

  But it is possible to make an argument against these poems, to say that they are the first pleasant face of everything that is terrible and painful about human loneliness. Later, in the First Elegy, Rilke will say it: “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror …” Here, though, the poems—just slightly—tend to congratulate the poet and his reader for having feelings and experiencing beauty. Partly this was a matter of Rilke’s temperament, but it is also partly a matter of symbolist aesthetics.

  Let us locate the moment. Rilke arrived in Paris in 1902. His wife had been a student of Rodin’s and through her he came to know the sculptor, then at the height of his fame, and eventually became his secretary. During this time, from 1902 to 1906, he worked on The Book of Pictures, but as early as 1903, another projeet, inspired by Rodin, was forming in his mind. What impressed him about Rodin was how hard he worked. Rilke’s ideas of art had been based on the symbolist myth of solitary inspiration, in which the artist was a passive receptor of intimations of large spiritual realities. But Rodin made things, working hard for long hours with a great concentration of energy. And Rilke, following his example, began to think about a different kind of poem. He wanted to write poems, he said, “not about feelings, but about things he had felt.” Ding-Gedichte, thing-poems, he called them, poems about looking at animals, people, sculptures, paintings, in which the focus was thrown off the lyrical speaker of the poem and onto the thing seen. From this experiment came New Poems, work done between 1903 and 1908.

  And it is poetry of a different order. Phenomenal changes were in the air in the decade before the First World War. Apollinaire
was also in Paris, writing the poems of Alcools. “Zone,” in fact, with its twentieth-century freshness, seemed to be inventing the new age:

  After all you are weary of this ancient world.

  Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower your flock of bridges is bleating this morning.

  You have had enough of living in a Greek and Roman antiquity.

  In London, Ezra Pound was on the verge of writing the first imagist poem, a vision of the Paris Métro. Osip Mandelstam was also in Paris in 1906, an awkward high school boy with funny ears. He would return to Russia and write a manifesto in 1910, “The Morning of Acmeism,” which declared that symbolism with its theurgy and its Gothic yearning had come to an end. Pablo Picasso had startled the world, though the world didn’t know it yet, with his Demoiselles d’Avignon. New Poems marks Rilke’s participation in this great shift in sensibility. But, in fact, he never made himself over into a modernist poet. His work came to have, through Rodin, a feeling of being actively made, but it does not have that modernist sense of the active and refreshing presence of the world. He was not deeply touched by the explosion of German expressionism in 1911. His Picasso is the painter of the pink and blue periods, as the Fifth of the Elegies shows, the painter of melancholy and isolated saltimbanques. It is possible to see him, for all these reasons, as the last symbolist. He takes a great deal from the eyes and the working methods of Rodin, but he takes it on his own terms. For all their objectivity, Neue Gedichte are profoundly inward poems.

  Inward and almost savage. When Rilke began to look at things, the first thing he looked at was a caged animal. “The Panther” is a much celebrated poem. It is also a terrifying one. In it Rilke says something to himself that he hasn’t quite said before; he discovers, looking at the big cat pacing behind the bars in the Paris zoo, that the world is not for him a series of symbols of the infinite but a cage. The shock of that discovery initiates the poem, which is half a self-portrait, half the recognition of some profound otherness, difference, emptiness, power in the animal he might have liked, ideally and comfortably, to become: