The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (7 page)
Read The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Online
Authors: Rainer Maria Rilke
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 your
self
, 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
FROM
THE BOOK OF HOURS
(1905)
[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
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.
THE BOOK OF PICTURES
(1902; 1906)
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 …
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.
The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;
and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;
and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.
I am blind, you outsiders. It is a curse,
a contradiction, a tiresome farce,
and every day I despair.
I put my hand on the arm of my wife
(colorless hand on colorless sleeve)
and she walks me through empty air.
You push and shove and think that you’ve been
sounding different from stone against stone,
but you are mistaken: I alone
live and suffer and howl.
In me there is an endless outcry
and I can’t tell what’s crying, whether it’s my
broken heart or my bowels.
Are the tunes familiar? You don’t sing them like this:
how could you understand?
Each morning the sunlight comes into your house,
and you welcome it as a friend.
And you know what it’s like to see face-to-face;
and that tempts you to be kind.