The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Read online

  His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

  has grown so weary that it cannot hold

  anything else. It seems to him there are

  a thousand bars; and behind the bars, no world.

  As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

  the movement of his powerful soft strides

  is like a ritual dance around a center

  in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

  Only at times, the curtain of the pupils

  lifts, quietly—. An image enters in,

  rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles,

  plunges into the heart and is gone.

  There is a second shock for me in those last lines—after all the concentration and furious accuracy in the articulation of the poem: nothing. The question is, Where does that image go? Or, to put it another way, What is in that animal’s heart? The answer seems to be “Nowhere, nothing.” Is that good or bad? Does the image disappear because the animal is so magnificently self-contained that he doesn’t need it? Or does it die because he is encaged and can’t use it? The answer seems to be “Both and neither.” The poem doesn’t answer a philosophical question, it presents or enacts a moment at which a will pacing around a center sees at the center nothing, and renders in that recognition a sudden, not at all pleasant, sense of liberation. Analogous poems may be helpful. The ones that occur to me are Buddhist. Basho, walking in the mountains in a storm, wrote: “Hailstones / on the rocks / at Stony Pass.” Hard things striking hard things in a hard place: it is a poem about nothingness. Again, famously, he wrote the poem that invented haiku: “An old pond; / frog jumps in, / plop.” Where did the frog go? Where the image taken in by the panther went. Rilke, deciding to write poems about really seeing, wrote immediately a poem about the exhaustion of seeing. It took him to a much deeper place, and stripped away entirely the lyrical ego of his early poems.

  That ego did not, of course, disappear. “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is an agonizingly personal poem. Like “The Panther,” it begins from a sense of shock. In this case, the feeling occurs because, looking at a mutilated piece of old Greek sculpture, he suddenly realizes that it is more real than he is—not more perfect but more real. It is even, as he sees it, sexually more alive than he is:

  We cannot know his legendary head

  with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

  is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

  like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

  gleams in all its power. Otherwise

  the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could

  a smile run through the placid hips and thighs

  to that dark center where procreation flared.

  Otherwise this stone would seem defaced

  beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

  and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur:

  would not, from all the borders of itself,

  burst like a star: for here there is no place

  that does not see you. You must change your life.

  Stephen Mitchell’s translation, here as elsewhere, renders exactly Rilke’s own sculptural articulation, so that it becomes possible for English readers to sense his inner, stylistic development. Formally, the main difference between New Poems and Rilke’s earlier work lies in the way he uses the poetic line. In the earlier poems, the line and the image or idea contained in the sentence tend to coincide, as they do in this English version:

  Whoever has no house now, will never have one.

  Whoever is alone will stay alone.

  There is a pause at the line-end, and this pause is emphasized by the rhyme. In other words, the ideal paradigm of the poetic form is always emphasized. This physical fact about a poem can express many different things, but in Rilke it tends to say, beneath whatever is actually being said, Look at how the movement of my thought, this flow of tender and melancholy images, is attuned to an ideal shape. There is a sense that the poet, making the poem, is loyal to the ideal rather than the actual. But in “Archaic Torso,” the thought tends to muscle past the line-end to complete itself in a restless pause at mid-line, and then plunge onward. Sculpture provides an analogy. The sculpture of a human body is made up of certain clearly separate parts—the head, the tapering mass of the torso, etc. The delight of looking at it, the presence in it of the energy of its making, comes from the way the parts are seen to be related to one another, which is the sculptor’s particular energy of seeing and creating. In this poem, the rhymes are still present (Bug/trug, Drehen/gehen), but they are de-emphasized by the sinuous movement of the lines. The poem, as a result, seems absolutely given over to the moment of its making. That is why the torso in the poem, luminous, animal, radiantly sexual, feels so present and alive. It is also why, throughout New Poems, one feels that Rilke has made himself over into a twentieth-century poet.

  And yet this is what would seem to be a classic nineteenth-century poem: a sonnet about the ideal perfection of a statue. The mere description would have induced nausea in Apollinaire, or the impulse to hang a FOR RENT sign on the sculpture. What makes it more than its subject is partly the furious concentration with which the poem is made, but also the persistent strangeness of Rilke’s imagination. Characteristically, he begins with what is absent. “We cannot know his legendary head …” Absence, more mysterious and hopeful to Rilke than any presence, introduces immediately the idea of growth. “Darin die Augenäpfel reiften”—in which the eye-apples ripened—is the rather startling phrase in German. The ripening that he has imagined passes like light into the body of the Apollo where it becomes both animal and star, animal because it is at home in the world in a way that human beings are not, star because it also belongs to what is distant from us and perfected. In this poem the speaker stands at a midpoint between them, neither one thing nor the other. That is when the eyes come back into the poem. “For here there is no place that does not see you.” It is an odd thing to say. What is seeing him is not there, and yet has passed everywhere into the torso, so that it makes the speaker visible—in the absence of those qualities in himself. That is what, for me, has always made the shock of the poem’s last, imperative sentence almost sickening in its impact. There is a pause in that last line: “die dich nicht sieht. Du musst …” It is as if the brief silence—the heart-pause, Rilke calls it elsewhere—between sieht and Du were a well that filled suddenly with a tormented sense of our human incompleteness, from which leaps the demand for transformation: “You must change your life.” The difference between this and other similar poems is that Rilke does not praise the perfection of art, he suffers it.

  But there is also a counter-emotion in the poem, just because the poet is being seen. Rilke had already spoken of this in a little essay, “Concerning Landscape,” that he wrote in 1902:

  To see landscape thus, as something distant and foreign, something remote and unloving, something entirely self-contained, was necessary, if it was ever to be a medium and an occasion for an autonomous art; for it had to be distant and very different from us, if it was to be capable of becoming a redemptive symbol for our fate. It had to be almost hostile in its sublime indifference, if it was to give a new meaning to our existence … For we began to understand Nature only when we no longer understood it; when we felt that it was the Other, indifferent toward men, which has no wish to let us enter, then for the first time we stepped outside of Nature, alone, out of the lonely world.

  He takes up this theme again, more forcibly and strangely, in a wonderful essay about dolls (Puppe, in German—the noun is feminine) written in 1914:

  … in a world in which fate and even God himself have become famous above all because they answer us with silence … the doll was the first to inflict on us that tremendous silence (larger than life) which later kept breathing on us out of space, whenever we came to the limits of our existence. It was facing the doll, as it stared at us, that we experienced for the first time (or am I mi
staken?) that emptiness of feeling, that heart-pause, in which we could have vanished …

  “Archaic Torso” reflects the attitude of the essay on landscape, whereas the fury and dark comedy of “Some Reflections on Dolls” is the tone of the early Elegies. Taken together they suggest the underlying rhythm of the thing-poems.

  Looking at things, he saw nothing—or, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, “the nothing”—that arose from his hunger for a more vivid and permanent world. He had a wonderful eye for almost anything he really looked at, dogs, children, qualities of light, works of art; but in the end he looked at them in order to take them inside himself and transform them: to soak them in his homelessness and spiritual hunger so that when he returned them to the world, they were no more at home in it than he was, and gave off unearthly light. In this dialectic, everything out there only drives him deeper inside himself, into the huge raw wound of his longing and the emptiness that fueled it. It is true that the Apollo answers him. Art answers him, but only by intensifying his desire to pass over into the country it represents. This explains to me why I have always thought that Rilke’s attitude toward art seemed slightly mortuary, Poe-esque. There is something vaguely necrophiliac about it. “Archaic Torso” is primarily, stunningly, a poem about the hunger for life, but its last, darkest echoes carry the suspicion that its true provenance is death.

  I think I should report that when I first recognized this impulse in these poems, I had a very strong, divided response. It made me feel, on the one hand, that Rilke was a very great poet, that he had gone deeper than almost any poet of his age and stayed there longer, and I felt, on the other hand, a sudden restless revulsion from the whole tradition of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century poetry, or maybe from lyric poetry as such, because it seemed, finally, to have only one subject, the self, and the self—which is not life; we know this because it is what in us humans stands outside natural processes and says, “That’s life over there”—had one subject, the fact that it was not life and must, therefore, be death, or if not death, death’s bride, or if not death’s bride, its lover and secret. It is not only that this portrait of the self’s true dialectic has terrifying implications for our age—implications which the reader can conjure by imagining my friend Fred in his battered journalist’s trenchcoat patiently interviewing the last philosopher in Europe on the prospects for our imminent and total extermination while the young on Boulevard St.-Michel dye their hair turquoise, dress in black, and wear buttons that say, “No Future” (so much for finding the Rilke of 1908)—but that it also has the effect of making my own self seem like a disease to me. This is very much a case of blaming the messenger. Rilke has clearly not abandoned the symbolist quest for the absolute in New Poems, he has dragged it, like a sick animal, into the twentieth century and brought it alive before us.

  What about human relationships? They are more or less what we mean by life, once nature and art have been disposed of. Rilke had marked views on the subject. The short version is that he thought they were distraction and evasion. The purest creatures of his imagination, the angels of the Elegies, don’t need relationship because they are complete as they are. They are “mirrors, which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face / and gather it back, into themselves, entire.” In a late poem about childhood, he pictures a child at home by himself, beginning to feel his strange solitariness in the world. Then his parents come home and ruin everything. And in his version of the story of the prodigal son, the young man leaves home because he couldn’t stand the fact that people loved him there, because what that really meant was that they wanted him to be their mirrors. “In their eyes he could see observation and sympathy, expectation, concern; in their presence he couldn’t do anything without giving pleasure or pain. But what he wanted in those days was that profound indifference of heart which sometimes, early in the morning, in the fields, seized him with such purity …” And there is his version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. As he tells it, Eurydice is lucky to be in the underworld, where she is finally complete. She is not full of that hungry emptiness that made her open to love. “Her sex had closed / like a young flower at nightfall.” And, in Rilke’s version, Orpheus wants to ruin that, out of his need for her, and bring her back into the transitory world. But she is “no longer that man’s property,” and when Orpheus turns around to look at her, she is saved. The poem is stranger and more beautiful than this summary conveys, and the translation is one of Stephen Mitchell’s triumphs.

  The most extraordinary poem Rilke ever wrote on this theme is the “Requiem” of 1908. Its occasion was the death of his friend, one of the great German painters of the early part of the century, Paula Modersohn-Becker. Rilke met her, as we have seen, with Clara Westhoff at Worpswede, and he seems to have fallen in love with them both. Shortly after Paula became engaged to the painter Otto Modersohn, Rilke proposed marriage to Clara. They lived together only for a year or so, long enough to have a child and for Rilke to discover his unsuitability for domestic life. After that, they decided to give themselves the freedom they felt they needed as artists. Paula’s life with Otto Modersohn had a different outcome. He was the director of Worpswede, a much more famous painter than she, and her life in his shadow became filled with domestic tasks. Eventually, she took a year off and went to Paris to be by herself and paint. During that year she was importuned with letters from her husband and her parents, urging her to return to Germany and take up the duties of a wife. Almost as soon as she did so, she became pregnant, and in the winter of 1907 she gave birth to a child and died shortly afterward. She is a very moving and original painter. Rilke, though he loved her company in the year at Worpswede and talked to her long hours about the idea of art (he wrote letters to Clara, one biographer observed, and poems to Paula), seems not to have understood her work while she was alive. It was apparently in the summer after her death, when he attended the Cézanne retrospective in Paris, that he realized, looking at Cézanne’s late work, what a great painter she had been. Her death was a profound shock to him. “It stood in front of me,” he wrote to a friend, “so huge and close that I could not shut my eyes.” “Requiem” was written in the fall of that year. It was begun, appropriately enough, on the eve of All Hallows.

  Part of its appeal is that it is so raw and personal a poem. It is not Rilke onstage, not the great necromancer of the Elegies with the seductive voice and the breathtaking shifts of argument which leap from image to surprising image. This poem, written in blank-verse paragraphs, proceeds in bursts: it has the awkwardness of grief, which seems to exhaust itself and then breaks out again. It is also full of awkward ideas, contrary emotions. For all these reasons, it is a poem that is probably more revealing and less self-preoccupied than anything else Rilke ever wrote. The opening lines address Paula’s ghost. The anxiety that they express is not feigned.

  I have my dead, and I have let them go,

  and was amazed to see them so contented,

  so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,

  so unlike their reputation. Only you

  return; brush past me, loiter, try to knock

  against something, so that the sound reveals

  your presence. Oh don’t take from me what I

  am slowly learning. I’m sure you have gone astray

  if you are moved to homesickness for anything

  in this dimension. We transform these Things;

  they aren’t real, they are only the reflections

  upon the polished surface of our being.

  The fascination of these opening lines is the depth of Rilke’s identification of art with death. I should confess that it is what put me off reading the poem for many years. It seemed like the poet at his most morbid and talky. It was not until this brilliant translation by Stephen Mitchell taught me to hear the nakedness of the voice in which the poem is spoken that I could even get through it. And when I did, it stunned me. Still, it is very peculiar: this is an Orpheus talking Eurydice back down into the
underworld, telling her how wonderful it is to be dead:

  … that you too were frightened, and even now

  pulse with your fear, where fear can have no meaning;

  that you have lost even the smallest fragment

  of your eternity, Paula, and have entered

  here, where nothing yet exists; that out there,

  bewildered for the first time, inattentive,

  you didn’t grasp the splendor of the infinite

  forces, as on earth you grasped each Thing …

  The key to this is the idea of mirroring. He imagines the artist as a polished surface, disinterested (and, in that, unlike the face of a parent or a lover), which mirrors the world back to itself and, by wanting nothing of it, makes it real. This is how he sees Paula Becker’s calm self-portraits:

  And at last, you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped

  out of your clothes and brought your naked body

  before the mirror, you let yourself inside

  down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense,

  and didn’t say: I am that; no: this is.

  So free of curiosity your gaze

  had become, so unpossessive, of such true

  poverty, it had no desire even

  for you yourself; it wanted nothing: holy.

  I don’t think Rilke ever made a plainer statement of what he wanted art to be: cessation of desire; a place where our inner emptiness stops generating that need for things which mutilates the world and turns it into badly handled objects, where it becomes instead a pure, active, becalmed absence: