The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Read online

  And that is how I have cherished you—deep inside

  the mirror, where you put yourself, far away

  from all the world. Why have you come like this

  and so denied yourself?

  The stubbornness of Rilke’s conviction—and the wholeness of his imagination—only dawns on us when we see, later in the poem, how he takes up the idea of Paula’s pregnancy. Flawed, somehow, by her own desire or by her husband’s possessiveness, she has, he imagines, broken the perfect circuit of mirroring energy in her painting:

  Let us lament together that someone pulled you

  out of your mirror’s depths. Can you still cry?

  No: I see you can’t. You turned your tears’

  strength and pressure into your ripe gaze,

  and were transforming every fluid inside you

  into a strong reality, which would rise

  and circulate, in equilibrium, blindly.

  Then, for the last time, chance came in and tore you

  back, from the last step forward on your path,

  into a world where bodies have their will.

  This distrust of birth seems so strange in the twentieth century, so literal, that it is as if it were drawn from an ancient text, the Tibetan or Egyptian Book of the Dead; as if Paula were Pandora opening the box, initiating, through desire, the whole endless natural cycle of birth and death:

  Ah let us lament. Do you know how hesitantly,

  how reluctantly your blood, when you called it back,

  returned from its incomparable circuit?

  How confused it was to take up once again

  the body’s narrow circulation; how,

  full of mistrust and astonishment, it came

  flowing into the placenta …

  There is a personal subtext here, of course: Rilke’s jealousy of Otto Modersohn. (How could you have married that man?) And a deeper and more troubling one than that. He has tried to imagine himself inside a woman’s body because of his own identification with what is female.

  This needs looking at. It is a famous fact of Rilke’s childhood in that apartment in Prague that his mother, having lost a baby girl in the year before his birth, raised her baby son as a girl. She gave him a first name, René, which was sexually ambiguous (he changed it to Rainer after meeting Lou Andreas-Salomé), dressed him in beautifully feminine clothes, and called him, in coy games they played, “Miss.” These practices ended when he went to school—the latter part of his schooling occurred at a particularly brutal military academy of his father’s choosing. Far back in Rilke’s childhood—and farther back than that, in his mother’s unconscious wishes—there is a perfect little girl, brought into this world to replace a dead one.

  This fact requires a second detour. The occasion of The Sonnets to Orpheus was the death of a young girl, Vera Knoop. She was the daughter of an acquaintance of Rilke’s. A gifted dancer as a young child, she developed a glandular disease, which caused her to grow fat. She abandoned dance and turned to the piano, which she also played beautifully, while becoming more and more deformed, until her death at the age of nineteen. Orpheus, as we have seen, is the figure in the First Sonnet. Vera is the figure in the Second:

  And it was almost a girl who, stepping from

  this single harmony of song and lyre,

  appeared to me through her diaphanous form

  and made herself a bed inside my ear.

  And slept in me. Her sleep was everything:

  the awesome trees, the distances I had felt

  so deeply that I could touch them, meadows in spring:

  all wonders that had ever seized my heart.

  She slept the world. Singing god, how was that first

  sleep so perfect that she had no desire

  ever to wake? See: she arose and slept.

  Where is her death now? Ah, will you discover

  this theme before your song consumes itself?—

  Where is she vanishing? … A girl, almost.…

  The connection of this poem to “Requiem” seems clear enough. Rilke was moved by the idea of young women artists because they represented his own deepest psychic sources. And, as girls practicing an art, they are emblems of eros in a kind of undifferentiated contact with being, before it has become sexuality and located itself in the world. Paula, unlike Vera Knoop, lived to be a woman. Almost all of Rilke’s close friends were women. He was deeply sympathetic to the conflict which the claims of art and family caused in a woman’s life. When those social claims seemed to kill Paula Becker, it confirmed his belief that life was the enemy of art, that sexuality and the world were the enemies of eros and eternity. It is for this reason that, in one of the strongest passages in the poem, he lashes out against her marriage:

  For this is wrong, if anything is wrong:

  not to enlarge the freedom of a love

  with all the inner freedom one can summon.

  We need, in love, to practice only this:

  letting each other go. For holding on

  comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

  This is very striking; and I don’t think we deny its power by noticing that, as is so often the case in Rilke, he is teaching his readers something they probably need to know more than he does. All the evidence of his own life is that he fled relationships, that he was always attracted by the first flaring of eros and terrified of its taking root. What was hard for him, as Louise Glück has observed, was holding on; and she believes that there is a certain amount of bad faith in his pretending otherwise. It is certainly the case that he was not possessive, or tempted to be. He chose solitude, and took the grief of his own loneliness as his teacher.

  This solitude sends him back, in the first Orpheus poem and in the dialectic of the New Poems, always to the ragged hut of his own inner emptiness. He did not trust relationships, but the truth was that he did not have much capacity for them either. Psychoanalysis is not to the point here; we all know enough about choosing solitude and then suffering loneliness not to imagine that because the details of Rilke’s life are different from ours, his situation is aberrant and local. He has seen to it in his art that he can’t be regarded as a case history. What one of his lovers said about him is what any reader of his poems would have guessed:

  His outcries of astonishment and admiration interrupted his partner’s words. At the same time, I could not fend off the impression that basically they resolved themselves into monologues, or dialogues with an absent one—was it perhaps the angel? … In truth, he fulfilled himself with his own. Did he ever take pains, even in love, to see the partner as she was? Did he not usurp both roles?

  It would be wrong to conclude from this, as some readers have, that Rilke was simply narcissistic, if we mean by that a person who looks lovingly into the shallow pool of himself. He was, if anything, androgynous. The term has come to stand for our earliest bi- or pan-sexuality, and this is not quite what I mean. Androgyny is the pull inward, the erotic pull of the other we sense buried in the self. Psychoanalysis speaks of the primary narcissism of infants, but in the sense in which we usually use that term, only an adult can be narcissistic. Rilke —partly because of that girl his mother had located at the center of his psychic life—was always drawn, first of all and finally, to the mysterious fact of his own existence. His own being was otherness to him. It compelled him in the way that sexual otherness compels lovers.

  I think this is why, in “Requiem” and in the Elegies, he has a (for me tiresome) reverence for unrequited love and writes about sexual love as if those given over to it were saints of a mistaken religion:

  Lovers, gratified in each other, I am asking you

  about us. You hold each other. Where is your proof?

  When the Elegies were nearly complete in 1922, when the whole labor of bringing them into being was finally over, he added a passage at the end of the Fifth. It reads like a final, petulant, and funny exclamation point:

  Angel!: If there were a place that we didn’t kno
w of, and there,

  on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed

  what they never could bring to mastery here—the bold

  exploits of their high-flying hearts,

  their towers of pleasure, their ladders

  that have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaning

  just on each other, trembling,—and could master all this,

  before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead:

  Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up,

  forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid

  coins of happiness before the at last

  genuinely smiling pair on the gratified

  carpet?

  I love the energy, the comic desperation of the writing. No one has ever composed a more eloquent indictment of fucking: if it is so great, why hasn’t it catapulted all the dead directly into heaven, why is the world still haunted by the ghosts of so much unsatisfied desire? But I would guess that most people have known what it meant to be one of that “genuinely smiling pair.” They have felt the dead go pouring into heaven. “Copulation,” Baudelaire said, accurately but with a great deal of disdain, “is the lyric of the mob.” Walt Whitman would have cheerfully agreed, would have added that it was, therefore, what made the lyric—and politics—possible. Mostly, people experience the possibility of union with the other in their bodies, with other people. But it would seem that for Rilke this was not so. He defined love once as two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other. And though it is a moving statement, it leaves out the fury of that greeting. It makes people sound as if they were soap bubbles bouncing off one another, whereas each of those two solitudes is a charged field of its own energy, and when they meet, they give off brilliant sparks.

  In any case, this is the answer to the question of Rilke’s attitude toward human relationships. It is not that he was not involved, intensely and intimately, with other people. He was, all his life. But he always drew back from those relationships because, for him, the final confrontation was always with himself, and it is partly because he was such a peculiarly solitary being that his poems have so much to teach us. There are pleasures, forms of nourishment perhaps, that most people know and that he did not. What he knew about was the place that the need for that nourishment came from. And he knew how immensely difficult it is for us to inhabit that place, to be anything other than strangers to our own existence. To learn not to be a stranger is the burden of the Duino Elegies. It is what causes him, at the end of “Requiem,” to take Paula’s death inside in the way that she took the world and a child inside herself. It is an incredibly strange and moving moment, because he is asking her, almost, to impregnate him with her absence. Here is the prayer with which that poem ends:

  Do not return. If you can bear to, stay

  dead with the dead. The dead have their own tasks.

  But help me, if you can without distraction,

  as what is farthest sometimes helps: in me.

  All of this wandering through Rilke’s life should help a reader to hear clearly the many resonances of the cry that opens the Duino Elegies:

  Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’

  hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me

  suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed

  in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing

  but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,

  and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

  to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

  And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note

  of my dark sobbing.…

  Even when it has become familiar to us, this intensity of grief registers its shock. Not the world, the young man in Prague had vowed sixteen years before, an iris in his fist, but the infinite. Now he calls that vow back. In a stroke, he has leapt to the center of his imagination and cut out from under himself the ground of his own art. It is hard to know what is most breathtaking about the moment, the shock of self-understanding or the stifled cry.

  The angels embody the sense of absence which had been at the center of Rilke’s willed and difficult life. They are absolute fulfillment. Or rather, absolute fulfillment if it existed, without any diminishment of intensity, completely outside us. You feel a sunset open up an emptiness inside you which keeps growing and growing and you want to hold on to that feeling forever; only, you want it to be a feeling of power, of completeness and repose: that is longing for the angel. You feel a passion for someone so intense that the memory of their smell makes you dizzy and you would gladly throw yourself down the well of that other person, if the long hurtle in the darkness would then be perfect inside you: that is the same longing. The angel is desire, if it were not desire, if it were pure being. Lived close to long enough, it turns every experience into desolation, because beauty is not what we want at those moments, death is what we want, an end to limit, an end to time. And—it is hard to think of Rilke as ironic, as anything but passionately earnest, but the Elegies glint with dark, comic irony—death doesn’t even want us; it doesn’t want us or not want us. All of this has come clear suddenly in Rilke’s immensely supple syntax. He has defined and relinquished the source of a longing and regret so pure, it has sickened the roots of his life. It seems to me an act of great courage. And it enacts a spiritual loneliness so deep, so lacking in consolation, that there is nothing in modern writing that can touch it. The company it belongs to is the third act of King Lear and certain passages in Dostoevsky’s novels.

  Only the first two poems came to him at Duino in the winter of 1912. But the conception of them—that there would be ten, that they would arrive somewhere—came in a flash with these first few lines. He wrote down the beginning of the last Elegy, “Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight, / let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels,” and made a start on several others, then the impulse died away. It is not surprising that it did. He had committed himself to taking all of his yearning inside himself, its beauty and destructive contradictions, everything he had seen—thrust of tower and cathedral, the watercolor sadness of the city embankments of European rivers, night, spring, dogs, plaintiveness of violins, as if he were swallowing Malte—and to integrate it somehow so that he could emerge praising. The project needed to gestate and he needed to live with his desolation. The record of the last years before the war is restless traveling, inability to write, make-work, a little real work, discontent. Even his letters echo the decision of the First Elegy:

  I am sick to death of Paris, it is a city of the damned. I always knew that; but in the old days an angel interpreted their torments to me. Now I have to explain them to myself and I can find no decent elucidation.

  It was going to cost him a great deal, but the gains were already great. The main one is the incredible fluidity of the early Elegies. It is as if, not having a place to stand, the author of these poems is everywhere. Really, they are the nearest thing in the writing of the twentieth century to the flight of birds. They dive, soar, swoop, belly up, loop over. Look again at a passage that I quoted earlier:

  But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we

  breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment

  our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume. Though someone may tell us:

  “Yes, you’ve entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime

  is filled with you …”—what does it matter? he can’t contain us,

  we vanish inside and around him. And those who are beautiful,

  oh who can retain them? Appearance ceaselessly rises

  in their face, and is gone. Like dew from the morning grass,

  what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish

  of hot food. O smile, where are you going? O upturned glance:

  new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart …

  alas, bu
t that is what we are. Does the infinite space

  we dissolve into, taste of us then? …

  The subject is the volatility of emotion; what is extraordinary is the volatility of the writing itself. Beginning with a communal we, it becomes a young woman addressing her lover, the lover she addresses, a man gazing at beautiful women, and then, moving from the expression of faces to dew on the grass to steam coming off food to waves receding from shore, leaps to a metaphor of space. This energy and freedom of movement become, in the long run, not just how the poem is written but what it is about. But it was ten years before that recognition was accomplished.

  The narrative here becomes complicated. The facts are that Rilke moved from place to place before the war broke out. He was in Germany at the time and so was detained there, for the most part bored, passive, and unhappy. Then he wandered for three more years, from 1919 to 1922, before he settled in Switzerland. The Third Elegy—the Freud Elegy, if you will, or the one in which he uses what he had seen of psychoanalysis to construct an argument against sexuality as a home for desire—had been finished in Paris in 1913. Most of the Sixth, which he called the Hero Elegy, was written in the same year in Spain. It is an attempt to pursue the questions that end the Third, I think, and sits rather uneasily in its position in the final text. The Fourth was written in Germany during the war. It came in a burst of creative energy which ended very quickly because Rilke was drafted, a grim enough event for a man whose only permanent hatred was for the military academy of his adolescence. The poem seems almost to anticipate the event. It is one of his darkest, full of the atmosphere of the war years, though it is about other things—the father he could not please, the women he could not live with, the self he had chosen to inhabit which seemed to have no meaning but its own death. It is full of disgust with the obsessive scenery and the repetitive melodrama of his own heart, but it is also stubborn:

  am I not right

  to feel as if I must stay seated, must