The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (6 page)

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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: