The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (33 page)
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Authors: Rainer Maria Rilke
THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE
(1910; begun in Rome, February 8, 1904; written mostly during 1908/1909; finished in Leipzig, January 27, 1910)
The speaker in these passages is Malte Laurids Brigge, a twenty-eight-year-old Danish writer living in Paris.
ll. 32f.
painted figurehead:
The so-called galleon-figures: carved and painted statues from the bow of a ship. The sailors in Denmark sometimes set up these wooden statues, which have survived from old sailing-ships, in their gardens, where they look quite strange.
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 10, 1925)
l. 34,
and now you were among the alembics:
where the most secret chemistry of life takes place, its transformations and precipitations.
(Ibid.)
l. 40,
You couldn’t wait:
Life,
our
present life, is hardly capable of being presented on stage, since it has wholly withdrawn into the invisible, the inner, communicating itself to us only through “august rumors.” The dramatist, however, couldn’t wait for it to become showable; he had to inflict violence upon it, this not yet producible life; and for that reason too his work, like a wand too strongly bent back, sprang from his hands and was as though it had never been done.
(Ibid.)
l. 67,
go away from the window:
Ibsen spent his last days beside his window, observing with curiosity the people who passed by and in a way confusing these real people with the characters he might have created.
(Ibid.)
l. 1,
those strange pictures:
The reference is to the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder or of Hieronymus Bosch.
Cf. Luke 15:11–32.
l. 23,
Tortuga:
Island off northwest Haiti. In the seventeenth century it was a base for the French and English pirates who ravaged the Caribbean.
l. 23,
Campeche:
Port in southeastern Mexico, frequently raided by pirates during the seventeenth century.
l. 24,
Vera Cruz:
The chief port of entry of Mexico. It was looted by pirates in 1653 and 1712.
l. 26,
Deodatus of Gozon:
A fourteenth-century member of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem (Knights of Malta). Because so many had lost their lives trying to kill the famous dragon of Rhodes, the Grand Master of the Order had forbidden all knights even to approach its cave. Deodatus went ahead and killed the dragon, but because of his disobedience he was stripped of his knighthood. Later he was pardoned, and in 1346 he himself became Grand Master.
l. 103,
Les Baux:
Magnificent landscape in Provence, a land of shepherds, even today still imprinted with the remains of the castles built by the princes of Les Baux, a noble family of prodigious bravery, famous in the 14th and 15th centuries for the splendor and strength of its men and the beauty of its women. As far as the princes of Les Baux are concerned, one might well say that a petrified time outlasts this family. Its existence is, as it were, petrified in the harsh, silver-gray landscape into which the unheard-of castles have crumbled. This landscape, near Arles, is an unforgettable drama of Nature: a hill, ruins, and village, abandoned, entirely turned to rock again with all its houses and fragments of houses. Far around, pasture: hence the shepherd is evoked: here, at the theater of Orange, and on the Acropolis, moving with his herds, mild and timeless, like a cloud, across the still-excited places of a great dilapidation. Like most Provençal families, the princes of Les Baux were superstitious
gentlemen. Their rise had been immense, their good fortune measureless, their wealth beyond compare. The daughters of this family walked about like goddesses and nymphs, the men were turbulent demigods. From their battles they brought back not only treasures and slaves, but the most unbelievable crowns; they called themselves, by the way, “Emperors of Jerusalem.” But in their coat-of-arms sat the worm of contradiction: to those who believe in the power of the number seven, “sixteen” appears the most dangerous counter-number, and the lords of Les Baux bore in their coat-of-arms the 16-rayed star (the star that led the three kings from the East and the shepherds to the manger in Bethlehem: for they believed that the family originated from the holy king Balthazar). The “good fortune” of this family was a struggle of the holy number “7” (they possessed cities, villages, and convents always in sevens) against the “16” rays of their coat-of-arms. And the seven succumbed.
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 10, 1925)
l. 108,
Alyscamps:
The ancient cemetery near Arles, with its uncovered sarcophagi.
ll. 139 f., “
sa patience de supporter une âme”:
“his patience in enduring a soul.”
This comes, I think, from Saint Theresa (of Avila).
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 10, 1925)
The Spanish Trilogy
(Ronda, between January 6 and 14, 1913)
ll. 41 f.,
the distant call of birds / already deep inside him:
Later, he remembered certain moments in which the power of
this
moment was already contained, as in a seed. He thought of the hour in that other southern garden (Capri) when the call of a bird did not, so to speak, break off at the edge of his body, but was simultaneously outside and in his innermost being, uniting both into one uninterrupted space in which, mysteriously protected, only one single place of purest, deepest consciousness remained. On that occasion he had closed his eyes, so that he might not be confused, in so generous an experience, by the outline of his body, and the Infinite passed into him from all sides, so intimately that he believed he could feel the stars which had in the meantime appeared, gently reposing within his breast.
(“An Experience,” 1913, SW 6, 1040)
l. 54,
the daily task of the shepherd:
What I most took part in when I was in Ronda was the life of the shepherds on the great stony hillsides with the picturesque stone-oaks, each of them filling up with darkness the way a cloud’s shadow moves over the fields. The morning departure, when after their night’s rest the shepherds walk out carrying their long staffs on their shoulders; their quiet, lingering, contemplative outdoor presence, through which, in all its breadth, the greatness of the day pours down; and the evenings when they unrecognizably, with the twilight, climb up out of the valley in the air echoing with their flocks, and, above, on the valley’s rim, again darkly gather themselves into the simplest of forms; and that they still use the long slings woven of bast, just like the one which David put his stone into, and with an exactly aimed throw, frighten back a straying animal into the mass of the flock; and that the air knows the color and weave of their thick clothing and treats it as it treats the other tempered presences of Nature; in short, that there are people there who are placed out in the overflowing fullness which we are only sometimes aware of, when we step out of the world of human relationships or when we look up from a book: how such a figure is and endures and, almost godlike, walks on, unhurried, over the hurrying events in which we spend our lives: all this could be counted among the pure experiences which could teach us the days and nights and everything that is most elemental.
(To Katharina Kippenberg, March 27, 1913)
Ariel
(Ronda, early in 1913)
(
after reading Shakespeare’s
Tempest): Rilke had just read the play for the first time.
l. 1,
you had set him free:
Cf.
The Tempest
, I.ii.250 ff.
l. 12,
to give up all your magic:
Cf.
The Tempest
, V.i.50 ff.
I know now that psychoanalysis would make sense for me only if I were really serious about the strange possibility of
no longer writing
, which during the completion of
Malte
I often dangled in front of my nose as a kind of relief. Then one might let one’s devils be exorcised, since in daily life they are truly just disturbing and painful. And if it happened that the angels left too, one would have to understand this as a further simplification and tell oneself that in the new profession (which?), there would certainly be no use for them.
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, January 24, 1912)
[Straining so hard against the strength of night]
(Paris, late February, 1913)
The Vast Night
(Paris, January 1914)
[You who never arrived]
(Paris, winter 1913/1914)
Turning-point
(Paris, June 20, 1914)
Lou, dear, here is a strange poem, written this morning, which I am sending you right away because I involuntarily called it “Turning-point,” because it describes
the
turning-point which no doubt must come if I am to stay alive.
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, June 20, 1914)
Epigraph,
sacrifice:
Rilke had defined sacrifice as “the boundless resolve, no longer limitable in any direction, to achieve one’s purest inner possibility.” (To Magda von Hattingberg, February 17, 1914)
Epigraph,
Kassner:
Rudolf Kassner (1873–1959), Austrian writer. The Eighth Elegy is dedicated to him.
l. 1,
For a long time he attained it in looking:
I love in-seeing. Can you imagine with me how glorious it is to in-see a dog, for example, as you pass it—by
in-see
I don’t mean to look
through
, which is only a kind of human gymnastic that lets you immediately come out again on the other side of the dog, regarding it merely, so to speak, as a window upon the human world lying behind it: not that; what I mean is to let yourself precisely into the dog’s center, the point from which it begins to be a dog, the place in it where God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment when the dog was finished, in order to watch it during its first embarrassments and inspirations and to nod that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it couldn’t have been better made. For a while you can endure being inside the dog; you just have to be alert and jump out in time, before its environment has completely enclosed you, since otherwise you would simply remain the dog in the dog and be lost for everything else. Though you may laugh, dear confidante, if I tell you
where
my very greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was, I must confess to you: it was, again and again, here and there, in such in-seeing—in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this godlike in-seeing.
(To Magda von Hattingberg, February 17, 1914)
Lament
(Paris, early July 1914)
‘We Must Die Because We Have Known Them’
(Paris, July 1914)
Ptah-hotep:
A high official under the pharaoh Asosi, during the Fifth Dynasty (ca. 2600
B.C.
).
To Hölderlin
(Irschenhausen, September 1914)
Hölderlin:
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), one of the greatest German poets.
During the past few months I have been reading your edition of Hölderlin with extraordinary feeling and devotion. His influence upon me is great and generous, as only the influence of the richest and inwardly mightiest can be.… I cannot tell you how deeply these poems are affecting me and with what inexpressible clarity they stand before me.
(To Norbert von Hellingrath, July 24, 29, 1914)
l. 20,
for years that you no longer counted:
Hölderlin went incurably insane in 1806.
[Exposed on the cliffs of the heart]
(Irschenhausen, September 20, 1914)
Death
(Munich, November 9, 1915)
Rilke told me how this poem arose. He was walking, alone as always, in a Munich park. All at once he seemed to see a hand before his eyes; on its level back a cup was standing. He saw this quite distinctly, and the verses describing it formed by themselves. He didn’t quite know what to make of this, and went home still hazy about the meaning of what had been begun. As in a dream he continued the poem to its conclusion—and understood. And suddenly the last three lines were there, in strongest contrast to the preceding ones. As for the shooting star, he had seen it in Toledo. One night he had been walking across the bridge and suddenly a glorious meteor had plunged across the sky, from the zenith down to the dark horizon, and vanished.—That was death, in all its wonder.
(Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe,
Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria Rilke
, München-Berlin-Zürich: R. Oldenbourg, 1932, pp. 80 f.)
l. 1,
There stands death:
Tolstoy’s enormous experience of Nature (I know hardly anyone who had so passionately entered inside Nature) made him astonishingly able to think and write out of a sense of the whole, out of a feeling for life which was permeated by the finest particles of death, a sense that death was contained everywhere in life, like a peculiar spice in life’s powerful flavor. But that was precisely why this man could be so deeply, so frantically terrified when he realized that somewhere there was pure death, the bottle full of death or the hideous cup with the handle broken off and the meaningless inscription “Faith, love, hope,” out of which people were forced to drink a bitterness of undiluted death.
(To Lotte Hepner, November 8, 1915)
l. 17, O
shooting star:
At the end of the poem “Death,” the moment is evoked (I was standing at night on the wonderful bridge of Toledo) when a star, falling through cosmic space in a tensed slow arc, simultaneously (how should I say this?) fell through my inner
space: the body’s dividing outline was no longer there. And whereas this happened then through my eyes, once at an earlier time (in Capri) the same unity had been granted me through my hearing.
(To Adelheid von der Marwitz, January 14, 1919)
