The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (34 page)

Rilke later told me how these Elegies arose. He had felt no premonition of what was being prepared deep inside him; though there may be a hint of it in a letter he wrote: “The nightingale is approaching—” Had he perhaps felt what was to come? But once again it fell silent. A great sadness came over him; he began to think that this winter too would be without result.

Then, one morning, he received a troublesome business letter. He wanted to take care of it quickly, and had to deal with numbers and other such tedious matters. Outside, a violent north wind was blowing, but the sun shone and the water gleamed as if covered with silver. Rilke climbed down to the bastions which, jutting out to the east and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by a narrow path along the cliffs, which abruptly drop off, for about two hundred feet, into the sea. Rilke walked back and forth, completely absorbed in the problem of how to answer the letter. Then, all at once, in the midst of his thoughts, he stopped; it seemed that from the raging storm a voice had called to him: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?”

He stood still, listening. “What is that?” he whispered. “What is coming?”

Taking out the notebook that he always carried with him, he wrote down these words, together with a few lines that formed by themselves without his intervention. He knew that the god had spoken.

Very calmly he climbed back up to his room, set his notebook aside, and answered the difficult letter.

By the evening the whole First Elegy had been written.

(Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe,
Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria Rilke
, pp. 40 f.)

My dear friend,

late, and though I can barely manage to hold the pen, after several days of huge obedience in the spirit—, you must be told, today, right now, before I try to sleep:

I have climbed the mountain!

At last! The Elegies are here, they exist.…

So.

Dear friend, now I can breathe again and, calmly, go on to something manageable. For this was larger than life—during these days and nights I have howled as I did that time in Duino—but, even after that struggle there, I didn’t know that
such
a storm out of mind and heart could come over a person! That one has endured it! that one has endured.

      Enough. They are here.

      I went out into the cold moonlight and stroked the little tower of Muzot as if it were a large animal—the ancient walls that granted this to me.

(To Anton Kippenberg, February 9, 1922)

Affirmation of
life-AND-death
turns out to be one in the Elegies.… We of the here-and-now are not for a moment satisfied in the world of time, nor are we bound in it; we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. In that vast “open” world, all beings
are
—one cannot say “contemporaneous,” for the very fact that time has ceased determines that they all
are.
Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being.… It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. The Elegies show us at this work, the work of the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible world into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our own nature … Elegies and Sonnets support each other constantly—, and I consider it an infinite grace that, with the same breath, I was permitted to fill both these sails: the little rust-colored sail of the Sonnets and the Elegies’ gigantic white canvas.

(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

The angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, already appears in its completion …; that being who guarantees the recognition of a higher level of reality in the invisible.—Therefore “terrifying” for us, because we, its lovers and transformers, still cling to the visible.

(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

“There is really
everything
in the ancient churches, no shrinking from anything, as there is in the newer ones, where only the ‘good’ examples appear. Here you see also what is bad and evil and horrible; what is deformed and suffering, what is ugly, what is unjust—and you could say that all this is somehow loved for God’s sake. Here is the angel, who doesn’t exist, and the devil, who doesn’t exist; and the human being, who does exist, stands between them, and (I can’t help saying it) their unreality makes him more real to me.”

(“The Young Workman’s Letter,” February 12–15, 1922, SW 6, 1120 f.)

More and more in my life and in my work I am guided by the effort to correct our old repressions, which have removed and gradually estranged from us the mysteries out of whose abundance our lives might become truly infinite. It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear
this
mask, the mask of the dreadful? Life—and we know nothing else—, isn’t life itself dreadful? But as soon as we acknowledge its dreadfulness (not as opponents: what kind of match could we be for it?), but somehow with a confidence that this very dreadfulness may be something completely
ours
, though something that is just now too great, too vast, too incomprehensible for our learning hearts—: as soon as we accept life’s most terrifying dreadfulness, at the risk of perishing from it (i.e., from our own Too-much!)—: then an intuition of blessedness will open up for us and, at this cost, will be ours. Whoever does not, sometime or other, give his full consent, his full and
joyous
consent, to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the
identity
of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine head, indeed this one
single
face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it—: this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.

(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, April 12, 1923)

               
Wir
machen mit Worten und Fingerzeigen

               uns allmählich die Welt zu eigen,

               vielleicht ihren schwächsten, gefährlichsten Tell.

Certainly I have no window on human beings. They yield themselves to me only insofar as they take on words within me, and during these last few years they have been communicating with me almost entirely through two forms, upon which I base my inferences about human beings in general. What speaks to me of humanity—immensely, with a calm authority that fills my hearing with space—is the phenomenon of those who have died young and, even more absolutely, purely, inexhaustibly:
the woman in love.
In these two figures humanity gets mixed into my heart whether I want it to or not. They step forward on my stage with the clarity of the marionette (which is an exterior entrusted with conviction) and, at the same time, as completed types, which nothing can go beyond, so that the definitive natural-history of their souls could now be written.

As for the woman in love (I am not thinking of Saint Theresa or such magnificence of that sort): she yields herself to my observation much more distinctly, purely, i.e., undilutedly and (so to speak) unappliedly in the situation of Gaspara Stampa, Louize Labé, certain Venetian courtesans, and, above all, Marianna Alcoforado, that incomparable creature, in whose eight heavy letters woman’s love is for the first time charted from point to point, without display, without exaggeration or mitigation, drawn as if by the hand of a sibyl. And there—my God—there it becomes evident that, as a result of the irresistible logic of woman’s heart, this line was finished, perfected, not to be continued any further in the earthly realm, and could be prolonged only toward the divine, into infinity.

(To Annette Kolb, January 23, 1912)

In Padua, where one sees the tombstones of many young men who died there (while they were students at the famous university), in Bologna, in Venice, in
Rome, everywhere, I stood as a pupil of death: stood before death’s boundless knowledge and let myself be educated. You must also remember how they lie resting in the churches of Genoa and Verona, those youthful forms, not envious of our coming and going, fulfilled within themselves, as if in their death-spasms they had for the first time bitten into the fruit of life, and were now, forever, savoring its unfathomable sweetness.

(To Magda von Hattingberg, February 16, 1914)

Death is the
side of life
that is turned away from us and not illuminated. We must try to achieve the greatest possible consciousness of our existence, which is at home in
both these unlimited realms
, and
inexhaustibly nourished by both.
The true form of life extends through
both
regions, the blood of the mightiest circulation pulses through
both:
there
is neither a this-world nor an other-world, but only the great unity
, in which the “angels,” those beings who surpass us, are at home.

(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

Girls and young men, with carefree hearts and innocent laughter, were carrying the honey-sweet grapes, piled up in wicker baskets; in their midst, a boy performed the ancient music of yearning, plucking his clear-toned lyre and singing the lament for Linus with his lovely voice, while the others moved to the powerful rhythm, their feet pounding in the dance, leaping and shouting for joy.

(
Iliad
18, 567 ff.)

What is shown so beautifully in the world of plants—how they make no secret of their secret, as if they knew that it would always be safe—is exactly what I experienced in front of the sculptures in Egypt and what I have always experienced, ever since, in front of Egyptian Things: this exposure of a secret that is so thoroughly secret, through and through, in every place, that there is no need to hide it. And perhaps everything phallic (as I
fore
-thought in the temple of Karnak, for I couldn’t yet think it) is just a setting-forth of the human hidden secret in the sense of the open secret of Nature. I can’t remember the smile of the Egyptian gods without thinking of the word “pollen.”

(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 20, 1914)

The case of the Portuguese nun is so wonderfully pure because she doesn’t fling the streams of her emotion on into the imaginary, but rather, with infinite strength, conducts this magnificent feeling back into herself: enduring
it
, and nothing else. She grows old in the convent, very old; she doesn’t become a saint, or even a good nun. It is repugnant to her exquisite tact to apply to God what, from the very beginning, had never been intended for him, and what the Comte de Chamilly could disdain. And yet it was almost impossible to stop the heroic onrush of this love before its final leap: almost impossible, with such a powerful emotion pulsing in her innermost being, not to become a saint. If she—that measurelessly glorious creature—had yielded for even a moment, she would have plunged into God like a stone into the sea. And if it had pleased God to attempt with her what he continually does with the angels, casting all their radiance back into them—: I am certain that, immediately, just as she was, in that sad convent, she would have become an angel, in her deepest self.

(To Annette Kolb, January 23, 1912)

This is meant quite literally: that the place where the lover puts his hand is thereby withheld from passing away, from aging, from all the near-disintegration that is always occurring in our integral nature—that simply beneath his hand, this place
lasts, is.
It must be possible, just as literally, to make this clear in Italian; in any paraphrase it is simply lost. Don’t you agree? And I think of these lines with a special joy in having been able to write them.

(To Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, December 16, 1913)

Once, in Naples I think, in front of some ancient gravestone, it flashed through me that I should never touch people with stronger gestures than the ones depicted there. And I really think that sometimes I get so far as to express the whole impulse of my heart, without loss or destiny, by gently placing my hand on someone’s shoulder. Wouldn’t that, Lou, wouldn’t that be the only progress conceivable within the “restraint” that you ask me to remember?

(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, January 10, 1912)

One of his most definite emotions was to marvel at Greek gravestones of the earliest period: how, upon them, the mutual touching, the resting of hand in hand, the coming of hand to shoulder, was so completely unpossessive. Indeed, it seemed as if in these lingering gestures (which no longer operated in the realm of fate) there was no trace of sadness about a future parting, since the hands were not troubled by any fear of ending or any presentiment of change, since nothing approached them but the long, pure solitude in which they were conscious of themselves as the images of two distant Things that gently come together in the unprovable inner depths of a mirror.

(Notebook entry, early November 1910; quoted in F.W. Wodtke,
Rilke und Klopstock
, Kiel diss., 1948, p. 28)