The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (4 page)

That ego did not, of course, disappear. “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is an agonizingly personal poem. Like “The Panther,” it begins from a sense of shock. In this case, the feeling occurs because, looking at a mutilated piece of old Greek sculpture, he suddenly realizes that it is more real than he is—not more perfect but more real. It is even, as he sees it, sexually more alive than he is:

Stephen Mitchell’s translation, here as elsewhere, renders exactly Rilke’s own sculptural articulation, so that it becomes possible for English readers to sense his inner, stylistic development. Formally, the main difference between
New Poems
and Rilke’s earlier work lies in the way he uses the poetic line. In the earlier poems, the line and the image or idea contained in the sentence tend to coincide, as they do in this English version:

There is a pause at the line-end, and this pause is emphasized by the rhyme. In other words, the ideal paradigm of the poetic form is always emphasized. This
physical fact about a poem can express many different things, but in Rilke it tends to say, beneath whatever is actually being said, Look at how the movement of my thought, this flow of tender and melancholy images, is attuned to an ideal shape. There is a sense that the poet, making the poem, is loyal to the ideal rather than the actual. But in “Archaic Torso,” the thought tends to muscle past the line-end to complete itself in a restless pause at mid-line, and then plunge onward. Sculpture provides an analogy. The sculpture of a human body is made up of certain clearly separate parts—the head, the tapering mass of the torso, etc. The delight of looking at it, the presence in it of the energy of its making, comes from the way the parts are seen to be related to one another, which is the sculptor’s particular energy of seeing and creating. In this poem, the rhymes are still present (
Bug/trug, Drehen/gehen
), but they are de-emphasized by the sinuous movement of the lines. The poem, as a result, seems absolutely given over to the moment of its making. That is why the torso in the poem, luminous, animal, radiantly sexual, feels so present and alive. It is also why, throughout
New Poems
, one feels that Rilke has made himself over into a twentieth-century poet.

And yet this is what would seem to be a classic nineteenth-century poem: a sonnet about the ideal perfection of a statue. The mere description would have induced nausea in Apollinaire, or the impulse to hang a
FOR RENT
sign on the sculpture. What makes it more than its subject is partly the furious concentration with which the poem is made, but also the persistent strangeness of Rilke’s imagination. Characteristically, he begins with what is absent. “We cannot know his legendary head …” Absence, more mysterious and hopeful to Rilke than any presence, introduces immediately the idea of growth. “
Darin die Augenäpfel reiften
”—in which the eye-apples ripened—is the rather startling phrase in German. The ripening that he has imagined passes like light into the body of the Apollo where it becomes both animal and star, animal because it is at home in the world in a way that human beings are not, star because it also belongs to what is distant from us and perfected. In this poem the speaker stands at a midpoint between them, neither one thing nor the other. That is when the eyes come back into the poem. “For here there is no place that does not see you.” It is an odd thing to say. What is seeing him is not there, and yet has passed everywhere into the torso, so that it makes the speaker visible—in the absence of those qualities in himself. That is what, for me, has always made the shock of the poem’s last, imperative sentence almost sickening in its impact. There is a pause in that last line: “
die dich nicht sieht. Du musst
 …” It is as if the brief silence—the heart-pause, Rilke calls it elsewhere—between
sieht
and
Du
were
a well that filled suddenly with a tormented sense of our human incompleteness, from which leaps the demand for transformation: “You must change your life.” The difference between this and other similar poems is that Rilke does not praise the perfection of art, he suffers it.

But there is also a counter-emotion in the poem, just because the poet is being seen. Rilke had already spoken of this in a little essay, “Concerning Landscape,” that he wrote in 1902:

He takes up this theme again, more forcibly and strangely, in a wonderful essay about dolls (
Puppe
, in German—the noun is feminine) written in 1914:

“Archaic Torso” reflects the attitude of the essay on landscape, whereas the fury and dark comedy of “Some Reflections on Dolls” is the tone of the early Elegies. Taken together they suggest the underlying rhythm of the thing-poems.

Looking at things, he saw nothing—or, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, “the nothing”—that arose from his hunger for a more vivid and permanent world. He had a wonderful eye for almost anything he really looked at, dogs, children, qualities of light, works of art; but in the end he looked at them in order to take them inside himself and transform them: to soak them in his
homelessness and spiritual hunger so that when he returned them to the world, they were no more at home in it than he was, and gave off unearthly light. In this dialectic, everything out there only drives him deeper inside himself, into the huge raw wound of his longing and the emptiness that fueled it. It is true that the Apollo answers him. Art answers him, but only by intensifying his desire to pass over into the country it represents. This explains to me why I have always thought that Rilke’s attitude toward art seemed slightly mortuary, Poe-esque. There is something vaguely necrophiliac about it. “Archaic Torso” is primarily, stunningly, a poem about the hunger for life, but its last, darkest echoes carry the suspicion that its true provenance is death.

I think I should report that when I first recognized this impulse in these poems, I had a very strong, divided response. It made me feel, on the one hand, that Rilke was a very great poet, that he had gone deeper than almost any poet of his age and stayed there longer, and I felt, on the other hand, a sudden restless revulsion from the whole tradition of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century poetry, or maybe from lyric poetry as such, because it seemed, finally, to have only one subject, the self, and the self—which is not life; we know this because it is what in us humans stands outside natural processes and says, “That’s life over there”—had one subject, the fact that it was not life and must, therefore, be death, or if not death, death’s bride, or if not death’s bride, its lover and secret. It is not only that this portrait of the self’s true dialectic has terrifying implications for our age—implications which the reader can conjure by imagining my friend Fred in his battered journalist’s trenchcoat patiently interviewing the last philosopher in Europe on the prospects for our imminent and total extermination while the young on Boulevard St.-Michel dye their hair turquoise, dress in black, and wear buttons that say, “No Future” (so much for finding the Rilke of 1908)—but that it also has the effect of making my own self seem like a disease to me. This is very much a case of blaming the messenger. Rilke has clearly not abandoned the symbolist quest for the absolute in
New Poems
, he has dragged it, like a sick animal, into the twentieth century and brought it alive before us.

What about human relationships? They are more or less what we mean by life, once nature and art have been disposed of. Rilke had marked views on the subject. The short version is that he thought they were distraction and evasion. The purest creatures of his imagination, the angels of the Elegies, don’t need relationship because they are complete as they are. They are “
mirrors
, which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face / and gather it back, into
themselves, entire.” In a late poem about childhood, he pictures a child at home by himself, beginning to feel his strange solitariness in the world. Then his parents come home and ruin everything. And in his version of the story of the prodigal son, the young man leaves home because he couldn’t stand the fact that people loved him there, because what that really meant was that they wanted him to be their mirrors. “In their eyes he could see observation and sympathy, expectation, concern; in their presence he couldn’t do anything without giving pleasure or pain. But what he wanted in those days was that profound indifference of heart which sometimes, early in the morning, in the fields, seized him with such purity …” And there is his version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. As he tells it, Eurydice is lucky to be in the underworld, where she is finally complete. She is not full of that hungry emptiness that made her open to love. “Her sex had closed / like a young flower at nightfall.” And, in Rilke’s version, Orpheus wants to ruin that, out of his need for her, and bring her back into the transitory world. But she is “no longer that man’s property,” and when Orpheus turns around to look at her, she is saved. The poem is stranger and more beautiful than this summary conveys, and the translation is one of Stephen Mitchell’s triumphs.

The most extraordinary poem Rilke ever wrote on this theme is the “Requiem” of 1908. Its occasion was the death of his friend, one of the great German painters of the early part of the century, Paula Modersohn-Becker. Rilke met her, as we have seen, with Clara Westhoff at Worpswede, and he seems to have fallen in love with them both. Shortly after Paula became engaged to the painter Otto Modersohn, Rilke proposed marriage to Clara. They lived together only for a year or so, long enough to have a child and for Rilke to discover his unsuitability for domestic life. After that, they decided to give themselves the freedom they felt they needed as artists. Paula’s life with Otto Modersohn had a different outcome. He was the director of Worpswede, a much more famous painter than she, and her life in his shadow became filled with domestic tasks. Eventually, she took a year off and went to Paris to be by herself and paint. During that year she was importuned with letters from her husband and her parents, urging her to return to Germany and take up the duties of a wife. Almost as soon as she did so, she became pregnant, and in the winter of 1907 she gave birth to a child and died shortly afterward. She is a very moving and original painter. Rilke, though he loved her company in the year at Worpswede and talked to her long hours about the idea of art (he wrote letters to Clara, one biographer observed, and poems to Paula), seems not to have understood her work while she was alive. It was apparently in the summer after her death, when he attended the Cézanne retrospective in Paris, that he realized, looking
at Cézanne’s late work, what a great painter she had been. Her death was a profound shock to him. “It stood in front of me,” he wrote to a friend, “so huge and close that I could not shut my eyes.” “Requiem” was written in the fall of that year. It was begun, appropriately enough, on the eve of All Hallows.

Part of its appeal is that it is so raw and personal a poem. It is not Rilke onstage, not the great necromancer of the Elegies with the seductive voice and the breathtaking shifts of argument which leap from image to surprising image. This poem, written in blank-verse paragraphs, proceeds in bursts: it has the awkwardness of grief, which seems to exhaust itself and then breaks out again. It is also full of awkward ideas, contrary emotions. For all these reasons, it is a poem that is probably more revealing and less self-preoccupied than anything else Rilke ever wrote. The opening lines address Paula’s ghost. The anxiety that they express is not feigned.