The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (5 page)

The fascination of these opening lines is the depth of Rilke’s identification of art with death. I should confess that it is what put me off reading the poem for many years. It seemed like the poet at his most morbid and talky. It was not until this brilliant translation by Stephen Mitchell taught me to hear the nakedness of the voice in which the poem is spoken that I could even get through it. And when I did, it stunned me. Still, it is very peculiar: this is an Orpheus talking Eurydice
back down
into the underworld, telling her how wonderful it is to be dead:

The key to this is the idea of mirroring. He imagines the artist as a polished surface, disinterested (and, in that, unlike the face of a parent or a lover), which mirrors the world back to itself and, by wanting nothing of it, makes it real. This is how he sees Paula Becker’s calm self-portraits:

I don’t think Rilke ever made a plainer statement of what he wanted art to be: cessation of desire; a place where our inner emptiness stops generating that need for things which mutilates the world and turns it into badly handled objects, where it becomes instead a pure, active, becalmed absence:

The stubbornness of Rilke’s conviction—and the wholeness of his imagination—only dawns on us when we see, later in the poem, how he takes up the idea of Paula’s pregnancy. Flawed, somehow, by her own desire or by her husband’s possessiveness, she has, he imagines, broken the perfect circuit of mirroring energy in her painting:

This distrust of birth seems so strange in the twentieth century, so literal, that it is as if it were drawn from an ancient text, the Tibetan or Egyptian Book of the Dead; as if Paula were Pandora opening the box, initiating, through desire, the whole endless natural cycle of birth and death:

There is a personal subtext here, of course: Rilke’s jealousy of Otto Modersohn. (How could you have married that man?) And a deeper and more troubling one than that. He has tried to imagine himself inside a woman’s body because of his own identification with what is female.

This needs looking at. It is a famous fact of Rilke’s childhood in that apartment in Prague that his mother, having lost a baby girl in the year before his birth, raised her baby son as a girl. She gave him a first name, René, which was sexually ambiguous (he changed it to Rainer after meeting Lou Andreas-Salomé), dressed him in beautifully feminine clothes, and called him, in coy games they played, “Miss.” These practices ended when he went to school—the latter part of his schooling occurred at a particularly brutal military academy of his father’s choosing. Far back in Rilke’s childhood—and farther back than that, in his mother’s unconscious wishes—there is a perfect little girl, brought into this world to replace a dead one.

This fact requires a second detour. The occasion of
The Sonnets to Orpheus
was the death of a young girl, Vera Knoop. She was the daughter of an
acquaintance of Rilke’s. A gifted dancer as a young child, she developed a glandular disease, which caused her to grow fat. She abandoned dance and turned to the piano, which she also played beautifully, while becoming more and more deformed, until her death at the age of nineteen. Orpheus, as we have seen, is the figure in the First Sonnet. Vera is the figure in the Second:

The connection of this poem to “Requiem” seems clear enough. Rilke was moved by the idea of young women artists because they represented his own deepest psychic sources. And, as girls practicing an art, they are emblems of eros in a kind of undifferentiated contact with being, before it has become sexuality and located itself in the world. Paula, unlike Vera Knoop, lived to be a woman. Almost all of Rilke’s close friends were women. He was deeply sympathetic to the conflict which the claims of art and family caused in a woman’s life. When those social claims seemed to kill Paula Becker, it confirmed his belief that life was the enemy of art, that sexuality and the world were the enemies of eros and eternity. It is for this reason that, in one of the strongest passages in the poem, he lashes out against her marriage:

This is very striking; and I don’t think we deny its power by noticing that, as is so often the case in Rilke, he is teaching his readers something they probably need to know more than he does. All the evidence of his own life is that he fled relationships, that he was always attracted by the first flaring of eros and terrified of its taking root. What was hard for
him
, as Louise Glück has observed, was holding on; and she believes that there is a certain amount of bad faith in his pretending otherwise. It is certainly the case that he was not possessive, or tempted to be. He chose solitude, and took the grief of his own loneliness as his teacher.

This solitude sends him back, in the first Orpheus poem and in the dialectic of the
New Poems
, always to the ragged hut of his own inner emptiness. He did not trust relationships, but the truth was that he did not have much capacity for them either. Psychoanalysis is not to the point here; we all know enough about choosing solitude and then suffering loneliness not to imagine that because the details of Rilke’s life are different from ours, his situation is aberrant and local. He has seen to it in his art that he can’t be regarded as a case history. What one of his lovers said about him is what any reader of his poems would have guessed:

It would be wrong to conclude from this, as some readers have, that Rilke was simply narcissistic, if we mean by that a person who looks lovingly into the shallow pool of himself. He was, if anything, androgynous. The term has come to stand for our earliest bi- or pan-sexuality, and this is not quite what I mean. Androgyny is the pull inward, the erotic pull of the other we sense buried in the self. Psychoanalysis speaks of the primary narcissism of infants, but in the sense in which we usually use that term, only an adult can be narcissistic. Rilke
—partly because of that girl his mother had located at the center of his psychic life—was always drawn, first of all and finally, to the mysterious fact of his own existence. His own being was otherness to him. It compelled him in the way that sexual otherness compels lovers.

I think this is why, in “Requiem” and in the Elegies, he has a (for me tiresome) reverence for unrequited love and writes about sexual love as if those given over to it were saints of a mistaken religion:

When the Elegies were nearly complete in 1922, when the whole labor of bringing them into being was finally over, he added a passage at the end of the Fifth. It reads like a final, petulant, and funny exclamation point:

I love the energy, the comic desperation of the writing. No one has ever composed a more eloquent indictment of fucking: if it is so great, why hasn’t it catapulted all the dead directly into heaven, why is the world still haunted by the ghosts of so much unsatisfied desire? But I would guess that most people have known what it meant to be one of that “genuinely smiling pair.” They have felt the dead go pouring into heaven. “Copulation,” Baudelaire said, accurately but with a great deal of disdain, “is the lyric of the mob.” Walt Whitman would have cheerfully agreed, would have added that it was, therefore, what made the lyric—and politics—possible. Mostly, people experience
the possibility of union with the other in their bodies, with other people. But it would seem that for Rilke this was not so. He defined love once as two solitudes that protect and border and greet each other. And though it is a moving statement, it leaves out the fury of that greeting. It makes people sound as if they were soap bubbles bouncing off one another, whereas each of those two solitudes is a charged field of its own energy, and when they meet, they give off brilliant sparks.

In any case, this is the answer to the question of Rilke’s attitude toward human relationships. It is not that he was not involved, intensely and intimately, with other people. He was, all his life. But he always drew back from those relationships because, for him, the final confrontation was always with himself, and it is partly because he was such a peculiarly solitary being that his poems have so much to teach us. There are pleasures, forms of nourishment perhaps, that most people know and that he did not. What he knew about was the place that the need for that nourishment came from. And he knew how immensely difficult it is for us to inhabit that place, to be anything other than strangers to our own existence. To learn not to be a stranger is the burden of the
Duino Elegies.
It is what causes him, at the end of “Requiem,” to take Paula’s death inside in the way that she took the world and a child inside herself. It is an incredibly strange and moving moment, because he is asking her, almost, to impregnate him with her absence. Here is the prayer with which that poem ends: