The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (37 page)
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Authors: Rainer Maria Rilke
TO
DUINO ELEGIES
[Fragment of an Elegy]
(Duino, late January 1912)
Written between the First and Second Elegies.
[Original Version of the Tenth Elegy]
(Lines 1–15: Duino, January / February 1912; continued in Paris, late in 1913)
Antistrophes
(Lines 1–4: Venice, summer 1912; the rest: Muzot, February 9, 1922)
See
note
to
the Fifth Elegy
.
Antistrophe:
“The returning movement, from left to right, in Greek choruses and dances, answering to the previous movement of the strophe from right to left; hence, the lines of choral song recited during this movement.” (OED)
THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
(1923)
These strange Sonnets were no intended or expected work; they appeared, often
many
in one day (the first part of the book was written in about three days), completely unexpectedly, in February of last year, when I was, moreover, about to gather myself for the continuation of those other poems—the great Duino Elegies. I could do nothing but submit, purely and obediently, to the dictation of this inner impulse; and I understood only little by little the relation of these
verses to the figure of Vera Knoop, who died at the age of eighteen or nineteen, whom I hardly knew and saw only a few times in her life, when she was still a child, though with extraordinary attention and emotion. Without my arranging it this way (except for a few poems at the beginning of the second part, all the sonnets kept the chronological order of their appearance), it happened that only the next-to-last poems of both parts explicitly refer to Vera, address her, or evoke her figure.
This beautiful child, who had just begun to dance and attracted the attention of everyone who saw her, by the art of movement and transformation which was innate in her body and spirit,—unexpectedly declared to her mother that she no longer could or would dance (this happened just at the end of childhood). Her body changed, grew strangely heavy and massive, without losing its beautiful Slavic features; this was already the beginning of the mysterious glandular disease that later was to bring death so quickly. During the time that remained to her, Vera devoted herself to music; finally she only drew—as if the denied dance came forth from her ever more quietly, ever more discreetly.
(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, April 12, 1923)
Even to me, in the way they arose and imposed themselves on me, the Sonnets to Orpheus are perhaps the most mysterious, most enigmatic dictation I have ever endured and achieved; the whole first part was written down in a single breathless obedience, between the 2nd and 5th of February 1922, without one word being in doubt or having to be changed. And that at a time when I had braced myself for another great work and was already occupied with it. How can one help growing in reverence and endless gratitude, through such experiences in one’s own existence.
(To Xaver von Moos, April 20, 1923)
I, 1
(Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
l. 2,
Orpheus:
According to Greek mythology, the song of Orpheus was so enchantingly beautiful that the animals in the forest and even the rocks and trees gathered to listen.
During a visit to Sion (a town not far from Muzot), Rilke’s friend Baladine Klossowska had discovered a postcard reproduction of Cima da Conegliano’s pen-and-ink drawing (ca. 1500) of this scene: Orpheus sitting under a tree, playing a kind of viol, with a bird, a pair of deer, and a pair of rabbits intently listening. Madame Klossowska tacked the card to the wall opposite Rilke’s desk and left it there on her departure from Muzot in November 1921.
I, 2
(Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
l. 1,
almost a girl:
Cf. the end of “Turning-point”:
Look, inner man, at your inner girl.
The deepest experience of the creative artist is feminine, for it is an experience of conceiving and giving birth. The poet Obstfelder once wrote, speaking of the face of a stranger: “When he began to speak, it was as though a
woman
had taken a seat within him.” It seems to me that every poet has had that experience in beginning to speak.
(To a young woman, November 20, 1904)
I, 3
(Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
ll. 3 f.,
crossing / of heart-roads:
“The sanctuaries that stood at crossroads in classical antiquity were dedicated to sinister deities like Hecate, not to Apollo, the bright god of song.” (Hermann Mörchen,
Rilkes Sonette an Orpheus
, Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1958, p. 66)
l. 13,
True singing:
It is not only the
hearable
in music that is important (something can be pleasant to hear without being
true
). What is decisive for me, in all the arts, is not their outward appearance, not what is called the “beautiful”; but rather their deepest, most inner origin, the buried reality that calls forth this appearance.
(To Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, November 17, 1912)
l. 14,
A gust inside the god. A wind:
All in a few days, it was a nameless storm, a hurricane in the spirit (like that time at Duino), everything that was fiber and fabric in me cracked.
(Ibid., February 11, 1922, just after the completion of the Elegies)
I, 5
(Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
ll. 5 f.,
When there is poetry, / it is Orpheus singing:
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)
I, 7
(Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
I, 8
(Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
I, 25
(Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
Rilke’s note: “To Vera.” (In a copy of the Sonnets sent to Herr and Frau Leopold von Schlözer on May 30, 1923)
Vera Ouckama Knoop (1900–1919) was the young dancer to whom the whole cycle is dedicated. Her mother had recently sent Rilke a detailed, moving account of her illness and death.
II, 4
(Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
Any “allusion,” I am convinced, would contradict the indescribable
presence
of the poem. So in the unicorn no parallel with Christ is meant; rather, all love of the non-proven, the non-graspable, all belief in the value and reality of whatever our heart has through the centuries created and lifted up out of itself: that is what is praised in this creature.… The unicorn has ancient associations with virginity, which were continually honored during the Middle Ages. Therefore this sonnet states that, though it is nonexistent for the profane, it comes into being as soon as it appears in the “mirror” which the virgin holds up in front of it (see the tapestries of the 15th century) and “in her,” as in a second mirror that is just as pure, just as mysterious.
(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, June 1, 1923)
II, 8
(Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
l. 4,
the lamb with the talking scroll:
Rilke’s note: “the lamb (in medieval paintings) which speaks only by means of a scroll with an inscription on it.”
Dedication,
Egon von Rilke
(1873–1880): Youngest child of Rilke’s father’s brother.
I think of him often and keep returning to his image, which has remained indescribably moving to me. So much “childhood”—the sad and helpless side of childhood—is embodied for me in his form, in the ruff he wore, his little neck, his chin, his beautiful disfigured eyes. So I evoked him once more in connection with that eighth sonnet, which expresses transience, after he had already served, in the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, as the model for little Erik Brahe, who died in childhood.
(To Phia Rilke, January 24, 1924, in Carl Sieber,
René Rilke: Die Jugend Rainer Maria Rilkes
, Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1932)
II, 13
(Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
In a letter telling Vera’s mother about the unexpected appearance of the second part of the Sonnets, Rilke wrote:
Today I am sending you only
one
of these sonnets, because, of the entire cycle, it is the one that is closest to me and ultimately the one that is the most valid.
(To Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, March 18, 1922)
The thirteenth sonnet of the second part is for me the most valid of all. It includes all the others, and it expresses
that
which, though it still far exceeds me, my purest, most final achievement would someday, in the midst of life, have to be.
(To Katharina Kippenberg, April 2, 1922)
l. 14,
cancel the count:
Renunciation of love or fulfillment in love:
both
are wonderful and beyond compare only where the entire love-experience, with
all
its barely differentiable ecstasies, is allowed to occupy a central position: there (in the rapture of a few lovers or saints of
all
times and
all
religions) renunciation and completion are identical. Where the infinite
wholly
enters (whether as minus or plus), the ah so human number drops away, as the road that has now been completely traveled, —and what remains is the having arrived,
the being!
(To Rudolf Bodländer, March 23, 1922)
II, 14
(Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
II, 23
(Muzot, February 17/23, 1922)
Rilke’s note: “To the reader.”
l. 3,
a dog’s imploring glance:
Alas, I have not completely gotten over expecting the “nouvelle opération” to come from some human intervention; and yet, what’s the use, since it is my lot to pass the human by, as it were, and arrive at the extreme limit, the edge of the earth, as recently in Cordova, when an ugly little bitch, in the last stage of pregnancy, came up to me. She was not a remarkable animal, was full of accidental puppies over whom no great fuss would be made; but since we were all alone, she came over to me, hard as it was for her, and raised her eyes enlarged by trouble and inwardness and sought my glance—and in her own there was truly everything that goes beyond the individual, to I don’t know where, into the future or into the incomprehensible. The situation ended in her getting a lump of sugar from my coffee, but incidentally, oh so incidentally, we read Mass together, so to speak; in itself, the action was nothing but giving and receiving, yet the sense and the seriousness and our whole silent understanding was beyond all bounds.
(To Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, December 17, 1912)
II, 24
(Muzot, February 19/23, 1922)
l. 5,
Gods:
Does it confuse you that I say God and gods and, for the sake of completeness, haunt you with these dogmatic words (as with a ghost), thinking that they will have some kind of meaning for you also? But grant, for a moment, that there is a realm beyond the senses. Let us agree that from his earliest beginnings man has created gods in whom just the deadly and menacing and destructive and terrifying elements in life were contained—its violence, its fury, its impersonal bewilderment—all tied together into one thick knot of malevolence: something alien to us, if you wish, but something which let us admit that we were aware of it, endured it, even acknowledged it for the sake of a sure, mysterious relationship and inclusion in it. For
we were this too;
only we didn’t know what to do with this side of our experience; it was too large, too dangerous, too many-sided, it grew above and beyond us, into an excess of meaning; we found it impossible (what with the many demands of a life adapted to habit and achievement) to deal with these unwieldy and ungraspable forces; and so we agreed to place them outside us.—But since they were an overflow of our own being, its most powerful element, indeed were
too
powerful, were huge, violent, incomprehensible, often monstrous—: how could they not, concentrated in one place, exert an influence and ascendancy over us? And, remember, from the outside now. Couldn’t the history of God be treated as an almost never-explored area of the human soul, one that has always been postponed, saved, and finally neglected … ?
And then, you see, the same thing happened with death. Experienced, yet not to be fully experienced by us in its reality, continually overshadowing us yet never truly acknowledged, forever violating and surpassing the meaning of life—it too was banished and expelled, so that it might not constantly interrupt us in the search for this meaning. Death, which is probably so close to us that the distance between it and the life-center inside us cannot be measured, now became something external, held farther away from us every day, a presence that lurked somewhere in the void, ready to pounce upon this person or that in its evil choice. More and more, the suspicion grew up against death that it was the contradiction, the adversary, the invisible opposite in the air, the force that makes all our joys wither, the perilous glass of our happiness, out of which we may be spilled at any moment.…
All this might still have made a kind of sense if we had been able to keep God and death at a distance, as mere ideas in the realm of the mind—: but Nature knew nothing of this banishment that we had somehow accomplished—when a tree blossoms, death as well as life blossoms in it, and the field is full of death, which from its reclining face sends forth a rich expression of life, and the animals move patiently from one to the other—and everywhere around us, death is at home, and it watches us out of the cracks in Things, and a rusty nail that sticks out of a plank somewhere, does nothing day and night except rejoice over death.
(To Lotte Hepner, November 8, 1915)
II, 28
(Muzot, February 19/23, 1922)
