Ahead of All Parting (48 page)

Ultimately there is only
one
poet, that infinite one who makes himself felt, here and there through the ages, in a mind that can surrender to him.

(To Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, July 29, 1920)

True art can issue only from a purely anonymous center.

(To R. S., November 22, 1920)

Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living

they are moving among, or the dead. The eternal torrent

whirls all ages along in it, through both realms

forever, and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

(The First Elegy, ll. 92 ff.)

But when the North Wind has breathed you across the River of Ocean,

you will come to a wooded coast and the Grove of Persephone,

dense with shadowy poplars and willows that shed their seeds.

Beach your boat on that shore as the ocean-tide foams behind you;

then walk ahead by yourself, into the Land of Decay.

(Odyssey X, 508 ff.)

But slowly growing beside it is patience, that delicate “earthsmoke.”

(To Gudi Nölke, October 5, 1919)

The comprehensible slips away, is transformed; instead of possession one learns connection.

(To Ilse Jahr, February 22, 1923)

It is true, the gods have neglected no opportunity of exposing us: they let us uncover the great kings of Egypt in their tombs, and we were able to see them in their natural decay, how they were spared no indignity.

(“On the Young Poet,”
this page
f.)

Da wurde von den alten Aquädukten

ewiges Wasser in sie eingelenkt …

Then, eternal water from the ancient

aqueducts was channeled into them …

(“Roman Sarcophagi,”
New Poems
)

(what is being referred to, after the Roman ones, are those other, uncovered sarcophagi in the famous cemetery of Aliscamps, out of which flowers bloom)

—Rilke’s note

Oh how she [Vera] loved, how she reached out with the antennas of her heart beyond everything that is comprehensible and embraceable here— …

(To Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, January 1922)

Comme le fruit se fond en jouissance,

Gomme en délice il change son absence

Dans une bouche où sa forme se meurt,…

(Valéry, “Le Cimetière Marin”)

So wie die Frucht sich auflöst im Genusse
,

Abwesenheit Entzücken wird zum Schlusse

in einem Mund, drin ihre Form verschwand
,…

  (Rilke’s translation, March 14 and 16, 1921)

At various times I have had the experience of feeling apples, more than anything else—barely consumed, and often while I was still eating them—being transposed into spirit. Thus perhaps the Fall. (If there
was
one.)

(To Princess Marie von Thurn und
Taxis-Hohenlohe, January 16, 1912)

One has to know—or guess—that Sonnet XVI is addressed to a dog; I didn’t want to add a note to this effect, precisely because I wanted to take him completely into the whole. Any hint would just have isolated him again, singled him out. (This way he takes part down below, belonging and warned, like the dog and the child in Rembrandt’s Night Watch.)

(To Clara Rilke, April 23, 1923)

Now it is my turn to thank you, not for Pierrot, for God’s sake
no:
it would be his ruin, Pierrot’s ruin, the saddest story in the world. How could you even think I might adopt him, what kind of match could I be for his boundless homesickness? Furthermore, apart from the torment of helplessly looking on, I would have the additional torment of sacrificing myself for his sake, which I find especially painful where dogs are involved: they touch me so deeply, these beings who are entirely dependent on us, whom we have helped up to a soul for which there is no heaven. Even though I need all of my heart, it is probable that this would end, end tragically, by my breaking off little pieces from the edge of it at first, then bigger and bigger pieces toward the middle (like dog biscuits) for this Pierrot as he cried for you and no longer understood life; I would, after hesitating for a little while, give up my writing and live entirely for his consolation.

(To N. N., February 8, 1912)

“And I was about to (I feel quite cold, Malte, when I think of it), but, God help me, I was just about to say, ‘Where is …’—when Cavalier shot out from under the table, as he always did, and ran to meet her. I saw it, Malte; I saw it. He ran toward her, although she wasn’t coming; for him she
was
coming.”

(
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
, p. 89)

“In the end a responsibility would arise, which I can’t accept. You wouldn’t notice how completely you had come to trust me; you would overvalue me and expect from me what I can’t perform. You would watch me and approve of everything, even of what is unworthy. If I want to give you a joy: will I find one? And if one day you are sad and complain to me—will I be able to help you? —And you shouldn’t think that
I
am the one who lets you die. Go away, I beg of you: go away.”

(“A Meeting,”
this page
)

In the poem
to the dog
, by “my master’s hand” the hand of the god is meant; here, of “Orpheus.” The poet wants to guide this hand so that it too may, for the sake of his [the dog’s] infinite sympathy and devotion, bless the dog, who, almost like Esau, has put on his pelt only so that he could share, in his heart, an inheritance that would never come to him: could participate, with sorrow and joy, in all of human existence.

(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, June 1, 1923)

And imagine, one thing
more
, in another connection (in the “Sonnets to Orpheus,” twenty-five sonnets, written, suddenly, in the prestorm, as a monument for Vera Knoop), I wrote,
made
, the
horse
, you know, the free happy white horse with the hobble on his foot, who once, as evening fell, on a Volga meadow, came bounding toward us at a gallop—:

how

I made him, as an “ex-voto” for Orpheus!—What is time?—
When
is
Now? Across so many years he bounded, with his absolute happiness, into my wide-open feeling.

(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 11, 1922)

There is also an account of the incident in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s travel diary:

As we were standing by the Volga, a neigh resounded through the silent evening, and a frisky little horse, having finished its day of work, came quickly trotting toward the herd, which was spending the night somewhere, far away, in the meadow-steppes. In the distance one could now and then see the shepherds’ fire blazing in the clear night. After a while a second little horse, from somewhere else, followed, more laboriously: they had tied a wooden hobble to one of his legs, in order to stop him from wildly leaping into the wheatfield.

(
Briefwechsel
, p. 611)

It is done,
done!
/ The blood- and myth-cycle of ten (ten!) strange years has been completed.—It was (now for the first time I feel it entirely) like a mutilation of my heart, that this did not exist. And now it is here.

(To Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, February 10, 1922)

The little spring-song seems to me, as it were, an “interpretation” of a remarkable, dancing music that I once heard sung by the convent children at a morning Mass in the little church at Ronda (in southern Spain). The children, who kept leaping to a dance rhythm, sang a text I didn’t know, to the accompaniment of triangle and tambourine.

—Rilke’s note
^*

If the Sonnets to Orpheus were allowed to reach publication, probably two or three of them, which, I now see, just served as conduits for the stream (e.g., the XXIst) and after its passage-through remained empty, would have to be replaced by others.

(To Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, February 7, 1922)

It makes me uncomfortable to think of that XXIst poem, the “empty” one in which the “transmissions” appear (“The New, my friends, is not a matter of”)…, please paste it over, right now, with this child’s-spring-song, written today, which, I think, enriches the sound of the whole cycle and stands fairly well, as a pendant, opposite the white horse.

This little song, which had risen into my consciousness when I woke up this morning, fully formed up to the eighth line, and the rest of it immediately afterward, appears to me like an interpretation of a “Mass”—a real
Mass
, gaily accompanied as if with hanging garlands of sound: the convent children sang it to I don’t know what text, but in this dance-step, in the little nuns’-church at Ronda (in southern Spain—); sang it, one can hear, to tambourine and triangle!—It fits, doesn’t it, into these interrelationships of the Sonnets to Orpheus: as the brightest spring-tone in them? (I think it does.)

(Does the paper more-or-less match? I hope it is the same.)

Only this—and only because that XXIst is like a blot on my conscience.

(To Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, February 9, 1922)

This Sonnet I have—at least temporarily—inserted as the XXIII, so that what has become the
first
part of the Sonnets now contains twenty-six poems.

(To Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, March 18, 1922)

(to Vera)

—Rilke’s note

Three years went by, but Orpheus still refused

to love another woman: so intense

his grief was, for his lost Eurydice;

or else because he had vowed to stay alone.

But many women desired him, and raged

at his abrupt rejection.

(Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 78 ff.)

From a nearby hill the frenzied women, bristling

in skins of savage beasts, at last caught sight

of Orpheus, as he sat absorbed in music,

accompanied by the sweet lyre. One of them,

her long hair streaming in the wind, cried out:

“Look! there he is, that man who shows us such

contempt.” And, with a yell, she hurled her spear

straight at the singing mouth …

(Ibid. XI, 3 ff.)

His limbs lay scattered; but the river Hebrus

took the head and lyre, and as they floated

down its stream, the lyre began to play

a mournful tune, and the lifeless tongue sang out

mournfully, and both the river-banks

answered, with their own, faint, mournful echo.

(Ibid. XI, 50 ff.)

Another threw a stone; but in mid-flight,

overwhelmed by the beauty of the song,

it fell at his feet, as though to beg forgiveness

for its violent intention.

(Ibid. XI, 10 ff.)

Such music would have moved to softness all

these stones and spears; except that the wild shrieking,

shrill flutes, the blare of trumpets, drumbeats, howls

of the enraged bacchantes had completely

drowned out the lyre’s voice. Until at last

the unhearing stones reddened with poet’s blood.

(Ibid. XI, 15 ff.)