The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (36 page)

The bird is a creature that has a very special feeling of trust in the external world, as if she knew that she is one with its deepest mystery. That is why she sings in it as if she were singing within her own depths; that is why we so easily receive a birdcall into our own depths; we seem to be translating it without residue into our emotion; indeed, it can for a moment turn the whole world into inner space, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between her heart and the world’s.

(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 20, 1914)

               Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,

               the one attained from a thousand

               natures …

(“Turning-point”)

What we call fate does not come to us from outside: it goes forth from within us.

(To Franz Xaver Kappus, August 12, 1904)

Woman has something of her very own, something suffered, accomplished, perfected. Man, who always had the excuse of being busy with more important matters, and who (let us say it frankly) was not at all adequately prepared for love, has not since antiquity (except for the saints) truly entered into love. The Troubadours
knew very well how little they could risk, and Dante, in whom the need became great, only skirted around love with the huge arc of his gigantically evasive poem. Everything else is, in this sense, derivative and second-rate.… You see, after this very salutary interval I am expecting man, the man of the “new heartbeat,” who for the time being is getting nowhere, to take upon himself, for the next few thousand years, his own development into the lover—a long, difficult, and, for him, completely new development. As for the woman—withdrawn into the beautiful contour she has made for herself, she will probably find the composure to wait for this slow lover of hers, without getting bored and without too much irony, and, when he arrives, to welcome him.

(To Annette Kolb, January 23, 1912)

For the angel of the Elegies, all the towers and palaces of the past are existent
because
they have long been invisible, and the still-standing towers and bridges of our reality are
already
invisible, although still (for us) physically lasting.… All the worlds in the universe are plunging into the invisible as into their next-deeper reality;
a few stars intensify immediately and pass away in the infinite consciousness of the angels—, others are entrusted to beings who slowly and laboriously transform them, in whose terrors and delights they attain their next invisible realization. We
, let it be emphasized once more,
we, in the sense of the Elegies, are these transformers of the earth; our entire existence, the flights and plunges of our love, everything, qualifies us for this task
(beside which there is, essentially, no other).

(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

 … a calyx column stands there, alone, a survivor, and you can’t encompass it, so far out beyond your life does it reach; only together with the night can you somehow take it in, perceiving it with the stars, as a whole, and then for a second it becomes human—a human experience.

(To Clara Rilke, January 18, 1911)

I sometimes wonder whether longing can’t radiate out from someone so powerfully, like a storm, that nothing can come to him from the opposite direction. Perhaps William Blake has somewhere drawn that—?

(To Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, May 14, 1912)

You must understand the concept of the “Open,” which I have tried to propose in this Elegy, as follows: The animal’s degree of consciousness is such that it comes into the world without at every moment setting the world over against itself (as we do). The animal is
in
the world; we stand
in front of
the world because of the peculiar turn and heightening which our consciousness has taken. So by the “Open” it is not sky or air or space that is meant; they, too, for the human being who observes and judges, are “objects” and thus “opaque” and closed. The animal or the flower presumably
is
all that, without accounting for itself, and therefore has before itself and above itself that indescribably open freedom which has its (extremely fleeting) equivalents for us perhaps only in the first moments of love, when we see our own vastness in the person we love, and in the ecstatic surrender to God.

(To Lev P. Struve, February 25, 1926, in Maurice Betz,
Rilke in Frankreich: Erinnerungen—Briefe—Dokumente,
Wien / Leipzig / Zürich: Herbert Reichner Verlag, 1937)

In general, he was able to notice how all objects yielded themselves to him more distantly and, at the same time, somehow more truly; this might have been due to his own vision, which was no longer directed forward and diluted in empty space; he was looking, as if over his shoulder,
backward
at Things, and their now completed existence took on a bold, sweet aftertaste, as though everything had been spiced with a trace of the blossom of parting.

(“An Experience,” 1913, SW 6, 1039)

That a multitude of creatures which come from externally exposed seeds have
that
as their maternal body, that vast sensitive freedom—how much at home they must feel in it all their lives; in fact they do nothing but leap for joy in their mother’s womb, like little John the Baptist; for this same space has both conceived them and brought them forth, and they never leave its security.

Until in the bird everything becomes a little more uneasy and cautious. The nest that Nature has given him is already a small maternal womb, which he only covers instead of wholly containing it. And suddenly, as if it were no longer safe enough outside, the wonderful maturing flees wholly into the darkness of the creature and emerges into the world only at a later turning-point, experiencing it as a second world and never entirely weaned from the conditions of the earlier, more intimate one.

(Rivalry between mother and world—)

(Notebook entry, February 20, 1914; SW 6, 1074 f.)

                                        Und die verwandelte Daphne

will, seit sie lorbeern fühlt, daß du dich wandelst in Wind.

                                        
And the transfigured Daphne,

feeling herself become laurel, wants you to change into wind.

The reality of any joy in the world is indescribable; only in joy does creation take place (happiness, on the contrary, is only a promising, intelligible constellation of things already there); joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness. How superficially must happiness engage us, after all, if it can leave us time to think and worry about how long it will last. Joy is a moment, unobligated, timeless from the beginning, not to be held but also not to be truly lost again, since under its impact our being is changed chemically, so to speak, and does not only, as may be the case with happiness, savor and enjoy itself in a new mixture.

(To Ilse Erdmann, January 31, 1914)

Hardly had she cried her breathless prayer

when a numbness seized her body; her soft breasts

were sealed in bark, her hair turned into leaves,

her arms into branches; her feet, which had been so quick,

plunged into earth and rooted her to the spot.

Only her shining grace was left. Apollo

still loved her; he reached out his hand to touch

the laurel trunk, and under the rough bark

could feel her heart still throbbing …

(Ovid,
Metamorphoses
I, 548 ff.)

Even for our grandparents a “house,” a “well,” a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat, was infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything was a vessel in which they found what is human and added to the supply of what is human.

(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

I often wonder whether things unemphasized in themselves haven’t exerted the most profound influence on my development and my work: the encounter with a dog; the hours I spent in Rome watching a rope-maker, who in his craft repeated one of the oldest gestures in the world—as did the potter in a little village on the Nile; standing beside his wheel was indescribably and in a most mysterious sense fruitful for me.…

(To Alfred Schaer, February 26, 1924)

We should not be afraid that our strength is insufficient to endure any experience of death, even the closest and most terrifying. Death is not
beyond
our strength; it is the measuring-line at the vessel’s brim: we are
full
whenever we reach it—and being full means (for us) being heavy.—I am not saying that we should
love
death; but we should love life so generously, so without calculation and selection, that we involuntarily come to include, and to love, death too (life’s averted half); this is in fact what always happens in the great turmoils of love, which cannot be held back or defined. Only because we exclude death, when it suddenly enters our thoughts, has it become more and more of a stranger to us; and because we have kept it a stranger, it has become our enemy. It is conceivable that it is infinitely closer to us than life itself—. What do we know of it?!

Prejudiced as we are against death, we do not manage to release it from all its distorted images. It is a
friend
, our deepest friend, perhaps the only one who can never be misled by our attitudes and vacillations—and this, you must understand,
not
in the sentimental-romantic sense of life’s opposite, a denial of life: but our friend precisely when we most passionately, most vehemently, assent to being here, to living and working on earth, to Nature, to love. Life simultaneously says Yes and No. Death (I implore you to believe this!) is the true Yes-sayer. It says
only
Yes. In the presence of eternity.

(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923)

I reproach all modern religions for having provided their believers with consolations and glossings-over of death, instead of giving them the means of coming to an understanding with it. With it and with its full, unmasked cruelty: this cruelty is so immense that it is precisely with
it
that the circle closes: it leads back into a mildness which is greater, purer, and more perfectly clear (all consolation is muddy!) than we have ever, even on the sweetest spring day, imagined mildness to be.

(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923)

The Christian experience enters less and less into consideration; the primordial God outweighs it infinitely. The idea that we are sinful and need to be redeemed as a prerequisite for God is more and more repugnant to a heart that has comprehended the earth. Sin is the most wonderfully roundabout path to God—but why should
they
go wandering who have never left him? The strong, inwardly
quivering bridge of the Mediator has meaning only where the abyss between God and us is admitted—; but this very abyss is full of the darkness of God; and where someone experiences it, let him climb down and howl away inside it (that is more necessary than crossing it). Not until we can make even the abyss our dwelling-place will the paradise that we have sent on ahead of us turn around and will everything deeply and fervently of the here-and-now, which the Church embezzled for the Beyond, come back to us; then all the angels will decide, singing praises, in favor of the earth!

(To Ilse Jahr, February 22, 1923)

The land of Lament, through which the elder Lament guides the dead youth, is
not
to be
identified
with Egypt, but is only, as it were, a reflection of the Nile-land in the desert clarity of the consciousness of the dead.

(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

Go look at the Head of Amenophis the Fourth in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin; feel, in this face, what it means to be opposite the infinite world and, within such a limited surface, through the intensified arrangement of a few features, to form a weight that can balance the whole universe. Couldn’t one turn away from a starry night to find the same law blossoming in this face, the same grandeur, depth, inconceivableness? By looking at such Things I learned to see; and when, later, in Egypt, many of them stood before me, in their extreme individuality, insight into them poured over me in such waves that I lay for almost a whole night beneath the great Sphinx, as though I had been vomited out in front of it by my whole life.

You must realize that it is difficult to be alone there; it has become a public square; the most irrelevant foreigners are dragged in
en masse.
But I had skipped dinner; even the Arabs were sitting at a distance, around their fire; one of them noticed me, but I got away by buying two oranges from him; and then the darkness hid me. I had waited for nightfall out in the desert, then I came in slowly, the Sphinx at my back, figuring that the moon must already be rising (for there was a full moon) behind the nearest pyramid, which was glowing intensely in the sunset. And when at last I had come around it, not only was the moon already far up in the sky, but it was pouring out such a stream of brightness over the endless landscape that I had to dim its light with my hand, in order to find my way among the heaps of rubble and the excavations. I found a place to sit down on a slope near the Sphinx, opposite that gigantic form, and I lay there, wrapped in my coat, frightened, unspeakably taking part. I don’t know whether my existence ever emerged so completely into consciousness as during those night hours when it lost
all value: for what was it in comparison with all that? The dimension in which it moved had passed into darkness; everything that is world and existence was happening on a higher plane, where a star and a god lingered in silent confrontation. You too can undoubtedly remember experiencing how the view of a landscape, of the sea, of the great star-flooded night inspires us with the sense of connections and agreements beyond our understanding. It was precisely this that I experienced, to the highest degree; here there arose an image built on the pattern of the heavens; upon which thousands of years had had no effect aside from a little contemptible decay; and most incredible of all was that this Thing had human features (the fervently recognizable features of a human face) and that, in such an exalted position, these features were enough. Ah, my dear— I said to myself, “This, this, which we alternately thrust into fate and hold in our own hands: it must be capable of some great significance if even in such surroundings its form can persist.” This face had taken on the customs of the universe; single parts of its gaze and smile were damaged, but the rising and setting of the heavens had mirrored into it emotions that had endured. From time to time I closed my eyes and, though my heart was pounding, I reproached myself for not experiencing this deeply enough; wasn’t it necessary to reach places in my astonishment where I had never been before? I said to myself, “Imagine, you could have been carried here blind-folded and been set down on a slope in the deep, barely-stirring coolness—you wouldn’t have known where you were and you would have opened your eyes—” And when I really did open them, dear God: it took quite a long time for them to endure it, to take in this immense being, to achieve the mouth, the cheek, the forehead, upon which moonlight and moonshadows passed from expression to expression. How many times already had my eyes attempted this full cheek; it rounded itself out so slowly that there seemed to be room up there for
more
places than in our world. And then, as I gazed at it, I was suddenly, unexpectedly, taken into its confidence, I received a knowledge of that cheek, experienced it in the perfect emotion of its curve. For a few moments I didn’t grasp what had happened. Imagine: this: Behind the great projecting crown on the Sphinx’s head, an owl had flown up and had slowly, indescribably
audibly
in the pure depths of the night, brushed the face with her faint flight: and now, upon my hearing, which had grown very acute in the hours-long nocturnal silence, the outline of that cheek was (as though by a miracle) inscribed.

(To Magda von Hattingberg, February 1, 1914)

What a kind thought it was of yours to introduce me so clearly and thoroughly to the elements of “catkinology” with your book and the explanatory letter; after this there is no need for further or more exact information: I am convinced! So (remarkably enough) there are no “hanging” willow catkins; and even if there
were some rare, tropical exception, I still would not be able to use it. The place in the poem that I wanted to check for factual accuracy stands or falls according to whether the reader can understand, with his
first
intuition, precisely this
falling
of the catkins; otherwise, the image loses all meaning. So the absolutely
typical
appearance of this inflorescence must be evoked—and I immediately realized from the very instructive illustrations in your little book that the shrub which, years ago, supplied me with the impression I have now used in my work must have been a hazelnut tree; whose branches are furnished most densely,
before
the leaves come out, with long, perpendicularly hanging catkins. So I know what I needed to know and have changed the text from “willow” to “hazel.”

(To Elisabeth Aman-Volkart, June 1922)