Reading Rilke (26 page)

These disciplined figures understood: “We can go no nearer,

this is
our
limit, this tentative touching; the gods can

press confidently down on us, but that is the gods’ affair.”

If only we could reach something human that’s as

pure, modest and secure—a strip of fruitful land

between rock and river. For our heart still

overreaches, as hubris did those others.

And we can no longer follow it into chastening carvings,

or into godlike bodies where its very enhancement

is granted a greater calm.
²

THE THIRD ELEGY

It is one thing to sing the beloved; another, alas,

to hymn that river god shamefully hid in the blood.

A maiden knows her love like the sky the distant grass.

What does he know of the lord of his lust,

who frequently from loneliness alone raised up

its beaded god-head (even before she’s eased him,

and often as though she didn’t exist)

to rouse the night into infinite uproar?

O the Neptune aswim in our blood! O his terrible trident!

The dark wind from his chest through the curving conch!

Hear how the night grows hollow as a cave. And you, stars,

is it not from you that the lover’s longing for that beloved face

falls? Does not his innermost vision

of her pure features shine to him from your purer fires?

No, neither you, alas! nor his mother

ever bent his brows in such an eager arch;

nor to meet the maiden who enfolds him in her feeling

has his mouth begun to ripen like a fall fruit.

Do you really imagine your light step

so shook him, when your walk is like a waver in the morning wind?

Surely you startled his heart; but more primal terrors

overtook him at the shock of your blameless touch.

Call him … you can never call him completely from that converse

with the dark. Really, he
wants
to, he does escape; relieved,

he starts to feel at home in your heart, accepts and begins to be himself.

But could he ever begin himself?

Mother,
you
made him small, it was you who began him,

he was new with you, you arched the friendly world

over those new eyes, and shut the strange outside.

Oh, where are the years, now, when your slender form

stood between him and the drifting chaos of his childhood?

You hid so much from him then; made harmless

the night-frightening room, and sent, from the haven of your heart,

a human space like breath into the substance of his dark.

Not in that night, no, but within your nearby Being

you placed a light that shone, as if in friendship, even through solid things.

Nowhere the rustle of a stair your smile could not explain,

as though you had long known
when
the floor would choose to speak …

And he listened and was soothed. So much did your tender rising

accomplish; his tall caped fate stepped

behind the wardrobe, and his alarming future,

slightly postponing itself, fit into the folds of the drape.

And he himself—as he lay assuaged, your

delicate image beneath his drowsy lids

dissolving like a sweet in the taste of forthcoming sleep—

seemed
safe. But
within
who could divert

or dam the seed-flow of instinct inside him?

Ah, there
was
no caution in that sleeping child; sleeping

but dreaming, but fevered: what he let himself in for!

He, so shy, so untarnished: how interior life entangled

him in its hungry tendrils, its twisted and savage designs,

its constricting embrace, the menacing shapes of its preying forms.

How he handed himself over to it —. Loved.

Loved his inner world, the wilderness inside himself,

that primeval forest from among whose toppled trunks,

accumulated leaves, and silent ruin

rose his pale green heart like a sapling. Loved. Yet left.

Went beyond the place his final roots were rooted to that overwhelming origin

where his own little birth was already outlived. Loving,

he descended into his ancestral blood, the ravines

where Gorgons lay gorged like snakes with his fathers.

And every Terror was his pal and winked with complicity.

Yes, Ghastlies smiled at him … Seldom

did you, mother, smile so winsomely.
How
could

he not love what smiled such smiles at him? Long before

your love he loved it, for even as you, also swollen, bore him,

it was
there
—dissolved in the fluid that floats the seed.

Look, we don’t love like flowers, with only one

springtime behind us; a sap older than memory

mounts in our arms when we love. O my girl,

this: that we’ve loved, in ourselves, not the one still to come,

but a foaming multitude; not one child alone,

but fathers fallen inside us like the ruins of mountains;

then the dry riverbeds mothers have become;

and the whole of that silent landscape under its clear

or cloudy destiny:
this
, girl, got here ahead of you.

And you yourself, how could you know—that you’ve

set prehistoric time to ticking in your lover. —What emotions

were exhaled by extinct things. —What women,

through him, hated you. —What sinister men you

vivified in his youthful veins. Dead children

reached out to you … Oh, gently, gently,

give him a day’s work done with confidence and love. Lead him

nearby a gracious garden; give him restorative nights …

                                                                        Hold him in …
³

THE FOURTH ELEGY

O trees of life, when will your winter come?

We’re not in tune. Not like migratory birds.

Outmoded, late, in haste, we force ourselves on winds

which let us down upon indifferent ponds.

Though we’ve had to learn how flowering is fading,

somewhere lions still roam,

unaware, in their majesty, of any weakness.

Bent upon one thing, we begin

to feel its burden and the beckon of another.

Hostility’s our neighborhood. Aren’t lovers

always arriving at the borders of each other,

although both promised breathing space, unimpeded hunting, home?

Sometimes a backdrop will be carefully prepared

so that a figure in the foreground

will seem frank and open to us;

but the contours of our feelings stay unknown

when public pressure shapes the face we show.

Who has not sat nervously before his own heart’s curtain?

Up it goes: the scene is set for saying farewell.

Easy to understand. The familiar garden

swaying a little before the dancer comes in.

Not him. Enough. However elegantly he pretends to move,

he’s just a bourgeois in a costume,

and enters his house by the kitchen door.

I will not accept these half-filled masks:

better, a puppet. It’s whole. I can endure

the husk it has for body, its wires, its painted face.

Hey! I’m waiting. Even if the lights go out;

even if I’m told, “That’s all”; even if absence

drifts toward me like a gray draft from the stage;

even if none of my ancestors will sit silently by me anymore,

nor a woman, nor the boy with the squinting brown eyes:

I’ll stay in my seat. One can always watch.

Am I not right? You, father, who found life bitter

after you tasted mine, the first infusion of my infant self,

who kept on tasting as my brewing grew,

till, troubled by the aftertaste of such a foreign future,

gazed into my cloudy eyes—you, who, so often

since you died, have lodged your fears about me

deep in my own hopes, giving up that calm

the dead deserve, surrendering a peaceable kingdom

for forebodings about my fate. Am I not right?

and you others, too—am I not right?—who must have loved me

for that first show of love for you I always mislaid

when the look which formed your face,

even as I loved it, became remote as a place in the expanse of the world

where you no longer were … when I’m inclined

to wait before the puppet stage … no,

to stare so intensely as to provoke an Angel to appear,

a player to startle the stuffed skins into life.

Angel and puppet: a real play at last.

Then there comes together like clapping hands

what our being here has pulled apart.

Then the circuit of all cosmic movement can be seen

to arise from the cycle of our seasons.

Then over everything plays the Angel puppeteer.

Surely the dying must sense what a sham it all is,

that nothing is really itself. O hours of childhood,

when behind each shape stood more than the past,

and what lay before us was less than the future.

We grew, and sometimes we wanted to hurry our growing,

partly eager to equal the grown-up

who had for his prize only that.

Yet, when alone, we contented ourselves with what could not be clocked.

We stood there in the pause between world and plaything,

in that place which, from the first, had been set aside for a pure event.

Who’ll show a child his proper place? set him among his stars,

and put the measure of earth’s distance in his hands?

Who makes the death of a child out of gray bread,

or leaves it there to harden in the round mouth

like the ragged core of a sweet apple? Murderers

aren’t hard to understand. But this: to hold death,

the whole of death, even before one’s life’s begun,

to hold it gently, without complaint:

this exceeds description.
⁴

THE FIFTH ELEGY

Dedicated to Frau Hertha Koenig

But tell me, who are they, these troupers,

even more transient than we are—driven since childhood,

and bent (for what? for whom?) by some tireless will?

Because it wrings them, twists them, swings and flings them,

tosses and catches them; and they descend

as if the air were oiled and polished,

to light on a carpet worn threadbare

by their incessant leaping and landing,

a carpet lost in cosmic space.

Stuck there like a bandage, as if the suburban sky

had bruised the earth.

                                                                       And barely there,

upright, displayed there, the great first letter of