The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Read online

  wait before the puppet stage, or, rather,

  gaze at it so intensely that at last,

  to balance my gaze, an angel has to come and

  make the stuffed skins startle into life.

  Angel and puppet: a real play, finally.

  He can’t get rid of the wish for the angel, but the puppet, one remembers from the essay on dolls, is akin to those wooden, wide-eyed creatures that teach us the indifference of the angels by receiving impassively the pure ardor of our childish affections. There is a glimpse of reconciliation here. At the end of the poem, with a glance at the war, he redefines his task:

  Murderers are easy

  to understand. But this: that one can contain

  death, the whole of death, even before

  life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart

  gently, and not refuse to go on living,

  is inexpressible.

  This brings us to Muzot and the winter of 1922. Rilke was forty-seven years old, settled in a small house in the Valais region. Suddenly, in less than a month, he finished the Elegies and wrote the fifty-nine Sonnets to Orpheus. It is fairly astonishing, not just because of the quantity and quality of work produced in so short a time, but because it represents a transformation of the terms of his art. Simply—as simply as he himself announces it in the First Sonnet—Orpheus replaces the angel:

  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.

  This is a shudder of hearing and seeing. It is also almost giddy with pleasure—how that tall tree in the ear has offended literal-minded critics! Rilke had not written a poem that mattered to him in four years, he had written very little for almost twice that long. And now the inner music has begun again. What is happening in this poem is that he recognizes it and greets it.

  It is possible to say something about what this means. If the angel is the personal demon of Rilke’s inner life, it is also a figure for a very old habit of human spirituality, as old, at least, as the Vedic hymns. All dualisms spring from it, and all cult religions of death and resurrection. For Rilke, however, the angels were never hermetic knowledge. They were the ordinary idea, the one that belongs to children at home by themselves looking in the mirror, to lovers bewildered by the intensity of their feelings, to solitaries out walking after dinner: whenever our souls make us strangers to the world. Everyone knows that impulse—and the one that follows from it, the impulse to imagine that we were meant to be the citizens of some other place. It is from this sensation that the angels come into existence, creating in this world their ambience of pure loss. It is the ambience in which Rilke had moved and the one that Orpheus sweeps away.

  He is, of course, a figure for poetry, as an energy that moves inside this world, not outside it. He is that emotion or imagination of estrangement as it returns to the world, moving among things, touching them with the knowledge of death which they acquire when they acquire their names in human language. Through Orpheus, Rilke has suddenly seen a way to hack at the taproot of yearning and projection that produced the angels. It is a phenomenal moment, for announcing, as Nietzsche did, that God is dead is one thing—this was, after all, a relief, no more patriarch, no more ultimate explanation, which never made any sense in the first place, of human suffering—but to take the sense of abandonment which follows from that announcement, and the whole European spiritual tradition on which it was based, inside oneself and transform it there, is another. For once the angel is gone, once it ceases to exist as a primary term of comparison by which all human life is found wanting, then life itself becomes the measure and source of value, and the task of poetry is not god-making, but the creation and affirmation of the world.

  The death of a young girl prompted this discovery, but it was the experience of hearing the music rise in himself to greet Vera Knoop’s death and all of his own unassuageable grief, I think, that finally jarred Rilke loose. He felt the energy of life starting up out of death in this most profound and ordinary way. That is why Orpheus also represents more than poetry. He stands where human beings stand, in the middle of life and death, coming and going. And so Rilke is also able not only to greet his presence, but to accept his absence:

  Erect no gravestone to his memory; just

  let the rose blossom each year for his sake.

  For it is Orpheus. Wherever he has passed

  through this or that. We do not need to look

  for other names. When there is poetry,

  it is Orpheus singing. He lightly comes and goes.

  From here, it is not far to the completed Elegies. The final breakthrough, I think, occurs in the Third Sonnet. Creature of habit, Rilke compares us with Orpheus and is again dismayed:

  A god can do it. But will you tell me how

  a man can penetrate through the lyre’s strings?

  Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing

  of heart-roads, there is no temple for Apollo.

  You can almost hear the music of the beauty of what we are not, cranking up again. But he resists, or leaps across. The last thing he had to give up was this seductive presentation in his poems of beautifully unsatisfied desire. And when that goes, as it does for a moment in the seventh line of this poem, we come to the untranslatable heart of Rilke’s late poetry: Gesang ist Dasein, singing is being, or song is reality, the moment when the pure activity of being consciously alive is sufficient to itself:

  Song, as you have taught it, is not desire,

  not wooing any grace that can be achieved;

  song is reality. Simple, for a god.

  But when can we be real? When does he pour

  the earth, the stars, into us? Young man,

  it is not your loving, even if your mouth

  was forced wide open by your own voice—learn

  to forget that passionate music. It will end.

  True singing is a different breath, about

  nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.

  I love the way this moves. There is that second stutter after the discovery, “But when can we be real?” and then he lectures himself; and then he is simply taken up into the singing, an embrace altogether unlike the annihilating arms of the angel.

  Rilke wrote the twenty-six poems of the first half of the Sonnets in less than four days. Then he turned to the Elegies and the change is immediately apparent. He began with the Seventh:

  Not wooing, no longer shall wooing, voice that has outgrown it,

  be the nature of your cry; but instead, you would cry out as purely as a bird

  when the quickly ascending season lifts him up, nearly forgetting

  that he is a suffering creature and not just a single heart

  being flung into brightness, into the intimate skies.…

  They culminate, for me, in the Ninth which, though it proceeds by self-questioning, is, like the First Sonnet, almost crazy with happiness. Listen:

  … when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into the valley,

  he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but instead

  some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue

  gentian. Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,

  bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window …

  ……………………………

  Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.

  Speak and bear witness.

  ……………

  Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,

  you can’t impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe

  where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice. So show him

  something simple which, formed over generations,

  lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze

  Tell him of Things. He will stand astonished; …
>
  …………………………

  Look, I am living. On what? Neither childhood nor future

  grows any smaller …

  The transformation here is complete. It is wonderful just to be able to watch the world come flooding in on this poet, who had held it off for so long. Human feeling is not so problematical here. It does not just evaporate; it flows through things and constitutes them. And, in the deepest sense, it is not even to the point. Feeling, after all, belongs to the angels. They are the masters of intensity. The point is to show, to praise. Being human, the poem says, being in the world is to be constantly making one’s place in language, in consciousness, in imagination. The work, “steige zurück in den reinen Bezug,” is “to rise again into pure relation.” Singing is being. It creates our presence. This echoes his description of Paula Becker painting, so absorbed that she was able to say This is, and it foreshadows the last of the Sonnets to Orpheus:

  whisper to the silent earth: I’m flowing.

  To the flashing water say: I am.

  The second part of the Sonnets, twenty-nine of them, came on the heels of the Elegies. They are a sort of long suite of gratitude at having finished the larger, darker poem. And though there are a few really terrible poems among them—imprecations against the machine age in Kiplingesque meters—they are, for the most part, very strange and subtle work, full of calm, like light circulating in water. Orpheus has mostly disappeared from them, as the angel disappeared from the Elegies. Vera Knoop is the central figure. She is also Eurydice and, I would guess, that young girl who was Rilke’s dream of his earliest self, pure art, perfect attention, death. The Thirteenth Sonnet is central. He begins it by reminding himself again that the way to be here is to have already let go:

  Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were

  behind you, like the winter that has just gone by.

  For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter

  that only by wintering through it will your heart survive.

  The next line is the remarkable one. It echoes and revises the common Christian prayer for the dead: Wohn im Gott, dwell in God:

  Be forever dead in Eurydice—more gladly arise

  into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.

  Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,

  be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

  I think that readers, to have the full force of this, must also hold in mind the Second Sonnet, where that young girl first appeared, making a bed inside his 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.…

  Earlier, I said that Rilke’s project was the transformation of human longing into something else. Eurydice is that something else. She is Koré, Persephone, the ancient figure from vegetation myth, and she is also a figure for Rilke’s own, peculiar psychology and the unfolding drama of his poems: mirror, dancer, flower, cup. She is the calm at the center of immense contradiction. Most of all, and most surprisingly, she is the Buddha of his “Buddha in Glory,” the sweet kernel of the world, a positive emptiness from which death flows back into life. That is why the end of this poem so much resembles and contrasts with the stony moment at the end of “The Panther.” Through Eurydice, it would seem (in the Thirteenth Sonnet), he is able to experience his own death, to add it to hers, and disappear with perfect equanimity:

  Be—and yet know the great void where all things begin,

  the infinite source of our inmost vibration,

  so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

  To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb

  creatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums,

  joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

  Sei—the German says—und wisse zugleich des Nicht-Seins Bedingung. It is difficult to render those meanings created by adding one noun to another. Be—and know at the same time Non-Being’s condition. Or the Non-Being which is the condition of Being. The nearest translation, perhaps, comes from the Tao Te Ching:

  The ten thousand things are born of being.

  Being is born of non-being.

  Eurydice has become the non-being from which being is born; he has planted her, quietly, at the center of himself. In the peace that follows, and the tenderness, the ending of the poem is almost flippant: cancel the count.

  Rilke lived for another five years past this moment. He wrote many more poems, and the odd contradictions in his character persisted in his habits. He maintained a fairly strict personal privacy and then devoted most of it to voluminous social correspondence. One of the letters that he wrote during that time is addressed to a young man who had asked for advice. “When I think now of myself in my youth,” Rilke writes, “I realize that it was for me absolutely a case of having to go away at the risk of annoying and hurting. I cannot describe to you our Austrian circumstances of that time … What I write as an artist will probably be marked, to the end, by traces of that opposition by means of which I set myself on my own course. And yet if you ask me, I would not want this to be what emanated above all from my works. It is not struggle and revolt, not the deserting of what surrounds and claims us that I would wish young people to deduce from my writings, but rather that they should bear in a new conciliatory spirit what is given, offered …” This is partly, of course, the perpetual advice of middle age, but what a contrast to the sometimes sanctimonious tone of Letters to a Young Poet. About his own work, he is exactly right. It is everywhere marked by furious opposition. And if it is the record of a man who wrestled with an angel, it is also the record of a very rare human victory.

  All that really remained for him to do was to become his Eurydice. He set about the task scrupulously, specifying the churchyard at Raron near Muzot where he was to be buried, and even the gravestone, if it could be found, a very plain one, old and like his father’s. He even wrote the small poem that became his epitaph:

  Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy

  of being No-one’s sleep under so many

  lids.

  Another shiver of pleasure. It is like the moment in “Song of Myself” when Walt Whitman says, “… look for me under your boot-soles.” Rilke died on December 26, 1926, and was buried in the earth he had chosen.

  —Robert Hass

  THE SELECTED POETRY: ENGLISH

  FROM

  THE BOOK OF HOURS

  (1905)

  Notes

  [I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice]

  I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice

  surging forth with all my earthly feelings?

  They yearn so high that they have sprouted wings

  and whitely fly in circles around your face.

  My soul, dressed in silence, rises up

  and stands alone before you: can’t you see?

  Don’t you know that my prayer is growing ripe

  upon your vision, as upon a tree?

  If you are the dreamer, I am what you dream.

  But when you want to wake, I am your wish,

  and I grow strong with all magnificence

  and turn myself into a star’s vast silence

  above the strange and distant city, Time.

  [I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all]

  I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all

  my fellow creatures, pulsing with your life;

  as a tiny seed you sleep in what is small

  and in the vast you vastly yield yourself.

  The wondrous game that power plays with Things

  is to move in such submission through the world:

  groping in roots and growing thick in trunks

  and in treetops like a rising from the dead.

  FROM

  THE B
OOK OF PICTURES

  (1902; 1906)

  Notes

  LAMENT

  Everything is far

  and long gone by.

  I think that the star

  glittering above me

  has been dead for a million years.

  I think there were tears

  in the car I heard pass

  and something terrible was said.

  A clock has stopped striking in the house

  across the road …

  When did it start? …

  I would like to step out of my heart

  and go walking beneath the enormous sky.

  I would like to pray.

  And surely of all the stars that perished

  long ago,

  one still exists.

  I think that I know

  which one it is—

  which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,

  stands like a white city …

  AUTUMN DAY

  Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by.

  Now overlap the sundials with your shadows,

  and on the meadows let the wind go free.

  Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine;

  grant them a few more warm transparent days,

  urge them on to fulfillment then, and press

  the final sweetness into the heavy wine.

  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.

  EVENING

  The sky puts on the darkening blue coat