The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (3 page)

If there is any doubt that this ambience was felt by the young Rilke, it is dispelled by a description of him in provincial Prague at the age of twenty-one. “He went about,” one of his contemporaries wrote, “wearing an old-world frock coat, black cravat, and broad-brimmed black hat, clasping a long-stemmed iris and smiling, oblivious of the passersby, a forlorn smile into ineffable horizons.” His attachment to the role of decadent and aesthete was qualified, however, by his interest in Nietzsche, particularly Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who had given a name to the yearning place that the young poet had already hollowed out in himself: the death of God. And it was Nietzsche who had defined the task of art: God-making. This interest of Rilke’s was intensified by one of the important events in his life; he met a remarkable older writer, Lou Andreas-Salomé. She was thirty-four at the time. When she was eighteen, Nietzsche had fallen in love with her and proposed marriage. It was already part of her legend that her refusal of him was responsible for the philosopher’s derangement. Later, she would become an associate of Sigmund Freud’s. In 1913 she brought Rilke, who was terrified by the idea of mental health, to a Psycho-analytic Congress and introduced him to Freud, an experience which issued in Rilke’s own descent into what he called “the mother experience” in the Third Duino Elegy. But in 1899, she took the young poet for a lover and, in that year and the next, accompanied him on a pair of trips to Russia.

His first readable work, the prose
Tales of God
and
The Book of Hours
, comes out of his experience of Russia and Nietzsche and Lou. The poems are written, appropriately enough, in the persona of a young Russian monk. A young monk because that could stand for Rilke’s sense of his own apprenticeship and for the God who he felt was only just coming into being. Russian because it was on this trip, in the immense open spaces of the Russian countryside and
in the bell-ringing churches of old Moscow, that Rilke first discovered a landscape which he felt corresponded to the size and terror and hushed stillnesses of his own inner life. The poems themselves are a beginning—they already have the qualities of Rilke’s mind and imagination, but formally they belong to the dreamy, musical mold of the symbolist lyric. This is a reason why, I think, they sometimes seem more interesting in English translation than they really are. Here is an example. To understand the point I’m trying to make, the reader without German has to attend to it anyway and try reading the poem out loud, noticing the tinkling regularity of the meter and the neat finality of the rhymes,
Abendbrot
and
tot, geht
and
steht.

Here is the poem in the vigorous, unrhymed, unmetered translation of Robert Bly:

Rilke’s theme is already present, the abandonment of ordinary life for the sake of a spiritual quest. And so is his intensity. Robert Bly has muted it, by
having the father
stay
rather than
die
in the house, but in either case the poem insists that the spirit will have no rest until the quest is undertaken, which is probably Rilke’s understanding of his relationship to his own father. But the poem has a feeling of being too neat, too pat, which disappears, I think, in the English translation. A way to hear this might be to look at an English poem on a similar theme. Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a little more luxuriant, but it has the same end-of-the-century music and the same desire to escape:

Imagine if you can a translation of this stanza into twentieth-century free verse:

What goes are the wistfulness and the music. They are replaced by a sense of active will and specificity, which aren’t really in the original poem.

There is something else to notice in this comparison. In both Yeats and Rilke, the spiritual search or the aim of art does not occur inside life, but somewhere eise. For Yeats and his readers, Innisfree could stand for the wild naturalness of the west of Ireland and for Irish nationalism and for the elsewhere of symbolist art. In Rilke’s poem, a comfortably symbolic “church in the East” does similar work. It is easy to see, biographically, how potent a symbol it was for him. It combined the experience of Russia, his Nietzschean spiritual strivings, his artistic vocation, and his first serious love affair. Heady stuff. But a church in the East is a long way from that tattered hut in the first Sonnet to Orpheus. In order to get there, Rilke had to descend into the terrible and painful sense of his own emptiness, which lay behind the hunger for the ideal. That, finally, is why
The Book of Hours
seems like apprentice work and why it seems so limited by the dexterity and gracefulness of its writing.

Rilke needed to think less about art as visionary recital and more about it as a practice. The next phase of his development gave him a chance to do that. It took him, almost directly upon his return from Russia, to Worpswede,
an artists’ colony in the fen country near Bremen. The atmosphere combined fresh air, the sensibility of the English arts-and-crafts movement, and landscape painting—it was here that Rilke developed his enthusiasm for Quaker Oats. The place brought him into contact with the plastic arts and with two women who played a large part in his life, the sculptor Clara Westhoff, whom he married, and the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker. The prose that grew out of these associations—“On Landscape,”
Worpswede, Auguste Rodin
—deal with the visual arts and lent him both the title and the spirit of his next volume of poems,
The Book of Pictures.
It contains the poems through which many readers of Rilke first discover him. The religious tonality of
The Book of Hours
is gone, replaced by solitude and majestic sadness. These are the poems of invitation, of seductive intimacy, calling us away from ordinary life.
Wer du auch seist
, whoever you are, one of them begins,
am Abend tritt hinaus
, in the evening go outside,
aus deiner Stube
, out of your room,
drin du alles weisst
, where you know everything. The language is clear, calm, only slightly poetic. (The room, for example, is
Stube
, whereas Gregor Samsa suffers his domestic embarrassment in a more modern and neutral
Zimmer.
) Many of them are gorgeous, especially “Autumn Day,” with the sad, rich cadence of its final lines:

But it is possible to make an argument against these poems, to say that they are the first pleasant face of everything that is terrible and painful about human loneliness. Later, in the First Elegy, Rilke will say it: “Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror …” Here, though, the poems—just slightly—tend to congratulate the poet and his reader for having feelings and experiencing beauty. Partly this was a matter of Rilke’s temperament, but it is also partly a matter of symbolist aesthetics.

Let us locate the moment. Rilke arrived in Paris in 1902. His wife had been a student of Rodin’s and through her he came to know the sculptor, then at the height of his fame, and eventually became his secretary. During this time, from 1902 to 1906, he worked on
The Book of Pictures
, but as early as 1903, another projeet, inspired by Rodin, was forming in his mind. What impressed him about Rodin was how hard he worked. Rilke’s ideas of art had been based
on the symbolist myth of solitary inspiration, in which the artist was a passive receptor of intimations of large spiritual realities. But Rodin
made things
, working hard for long hours with a great concentration of energy. And Rilke, following his example, began to think about a different kind of poem. He wanted to write poems, he said, “not about feelings, but about things he had felt.”
Ding-Gedichte
, thing-poems, he called them, poems about looking at animals, people, sculptures, paintings, in which the focus was thrown off the lyrical speaker of the poem and onto the thing seen. From this experiment came
New Poems
, work done between 1903 and 1908.

And it is poetry of a different order. Phenomenal changes were in the air in the decade before the First World War. Apollinaire was also in Paris, writing the poems of
Alcools.
“Zone,” in fact, with its twentieth-century freshness, seemed to be inventing the new age:

In London, Ezra Pound was on the verge of writing the first imagist poem, a vision of the Paris Métro. Osip Mandelstam was also in Paris in 1906, an awkward high school boy with funny ears. He would return to Russia and write a manifesto in 1910, “The Morning of Acmeism,” which declared that symbolism with its theurgy and its Gothic yearning had come to an end. Pablo Picasso had startled the world, though the world didn’t know it yet, with his
Demoiselles d’Avignon. New Poems
marks Rilke’s participation in this great shift in sensibility. But, in fact, he never made himself over into a modernist poet. His work came to have, through Rodin, a feeling of being actively made, but it does not have that modernist sense of the active and refreshing presence of the world. He was not deeply touched by the explosion of German expressionism in 1911. His Picasso is the painter of the pink and blue periods, as the Fifth of the Elegies shows, the painter of melancholy and isolated saltimbanques. It is possible to see him, for all these reasons, as the last symbolist. He takes a great deal from the eyes and the working methods of Rodin, but he takes it on his own terms. For all their objectivity,
Neue Gedichte
are profoundly inward poems.

Inward and almost savage. When Rilke began to look at things, the first thing he looked at was a caged animal. “The Panther” is a much celebrated
poem. It is also a terrifying one. In it Rilke says something to himself that he hasn’t quite said before; he discovers, looking at the big cat pacing behind the bars in the Paris zoo, that the world is not for him a series of symbols of the infinite but a cage. The shock of that discovery initiates the poem, which is half a self-portrait, half the recognition of some profound otherness, difference, emptiness, power in the animal he might have liked, ideally and comfortably, to become:

There is a second shock for me in those last lines—after all the concentration and furious accuracy in the articulation of the poem: nothing. The question is, Where does that image go? Or, to put it another way, What is in that animal’s heart? The answer seems to be “Nowhere, nothing.” Is that good or bad? Does the image disappear because the animal is so magnificently self-contained that he doesn’t need it? Or does it die because he is encaged and can’t use it? The answer seems to be “Both and neither.” The poem doesn’t answer a philosophical question, it presents or enacts a moment at which a will pacing around a center sees at the center nothing, and renders in that recognition a sudden, not at all pleasant, sense of liberation. Analogous poems may be helpful. The ones that occur to me are Buddhist. Basho, walking in the mountains in a storm, wrote: “Hailstones / on the rocks / at Stony Pass.” Hard things striking hard things in a hard place: it is a poem about nothingness. Again, famously, he wrote the poem that invented haiku: “An old pond; / frog jumps in, / plop.” Where did the frog go? Where the image taken in by the panther went. Rilke, deciding to
write poems about really seeing, wrote immediately a poem about the exhaustion of seeing. It took him to a much deeper place, and stripped away entirely the lyrical ego of his early poems.