Ahead of All Parting

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  Love Song (Capri, mid-March 1907)

  The Panther (Paris, 1903, or possibly late in 1902)

  In addition to the panther in the Jardin des Plantes, Rilke was probably remembering a small Greek statue of a panther (or tiger).

  In his studio in the rue de l’Université, Rodin has a tiny plaster cast of a tiger (antique) which he values very highly: C’est beau, c’est tout [It’s beautiful, it’s everything], he says of it. And from this little plaster copy I have seen what he means, what antiquity is and what links him to it. There is in this animal the same kind of aliveness in the modeling; on this little Thing (it is no higher than my hand is wide, and no longer than my hand is) there are a hundred thousand places, as if it were something really huge—a hundred thousand places that are all alive, active, and different. All this just in plaster! And the representation of the prowling stride is intensified to the highest degree, the powerful downward tread of the broad paws, and simultaneously that caution in which all strength is wrapped, that noiselessness.

  (To Clara Rilke, September 27, 1902)

  In Rodin’s studio there is a cast of a panther, of Greek workmanship, hardly as big as a hand (the original is in the medallion collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris). If you look from the front under its body into the space formed by the four powerful soft paws, you seem to be looking into the depths of an Indian stone temple; so huge and all-inclusive does this work become.

  (Auguste Rodin, 1902, SW 5, 173)

  The Gazelle (Paris, July 17, 1907)

  Yesterday I spent the whole morning in the Jardin des Plantes, looking at the gazelles. Gazella Dorcas, Linnaeus. There are a pair of them and also a single female. They were lying a few feet apart, chewing their cuds, resting, gazing. As women gaze out of pictures, they were gazing out of something, with a soundless, final turn of the head. And when a horse whinnied, the single one listened, and I saw the radiance from ears and horns around her slender head.… I saw the single one stand up, for a moment; she lay right down again; but while she was stretching and testing herself, I could see the magnificent workmanship of those legs (they are like rifles from which leaps are fired). I just couldn’t tear myself away, they were so beautiful.

  (To Clara Rilke, June 13, 1907)

  l. 6, songs of love: Possibly a reference to the Song of Songs, which, in the translation that Rilke used, frequently compares the beloved to a gazelle.

  The Swan (Meudon, winter 1905/1906)

  The Grown-up (Paris, July 19, 1907)

  There is an insightful study of this poem in Geoffrey H. Hartman’s The Unmediated Vision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954).

  l. 4, the Ark of God: The ark of the tabernacle, Exodus 25.

  Going Blind (Paris, late June 1906)

  Before Summer Rain (Paris, early July 1906)

  Written after a visit to the Château de Chantilly.

  l. 6, Saint Jerome (ca. 347-ca. 420): One of the four great Doctors of the Western Church, noted for his asceticism and pugnacity. Rilke may have been thinking of the Dürer engraving, dated 1514.

  The Last Evening (Paris, June 1906)

  Dedication, Frau Nonna: Rilke’s friend Julie Freifrau von Nordeck zur Rabenau, whose first husband was killed in the battle of Königgrätz, July 3, 1866, at the age of thirty-one.

  l. 14, shako: “A military cap in the shape of a truncated cone, with a peak and either a plume or a ball or ‘pompom.’ ” (OED)

  Portrait of My Father as a Young Man (Paris, June 27, 1906)

  This poem, written three months after Josef Rilke’s death, describes

  the fine colored daguerreotype of my father that was taken when he was seventeen, just before his departure on the [Austrian army’s] Italian campaign. Those first, naive photographs could be so movingly real—this one gives you the impression that you are looking at him through his mother’s eyes, seeing the beautiful young face in its solemn, barely smiling presentiment of bravery and danger. In my childhood I must have seen it once among my father’s papers; later it seemed as though it was missing for years—useless to ask where it had gone. Then, after he died, I found it among the possessions he had left behind, framed like a miniature in antique red velvet, intact—and I realized how unutterably it had taken form in my heart.

  (To Magda von Hattingberg, February 11, 1914)

  Self-Portrait, 1906 (Probably Paris, spring 1906)

  Spanish Dancer (Paris, June 1906)

  Tombs of the Hetaerae (Rome, early in 1904)

  Hetaerae: Courtesans.

  Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes (Rome, early in 1904)

  According to Ovid: After Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife, died of a snakebite, the poet descended to the land of shadows to retrieve her, and held the whole underworld spellbound by the beauty of his song.

  Neither the dark queen

  nor the lord who rules the underworld could deny

  what he in his song had asked for, and they called

  Eurydice. She was there among the shades

  just recently arrived, and now walked toward them,

  slowly, the wound still fresh upon her ankle.

  Orpheus took her, with the one condition:

  if he should turn to look at her before

  they had passed the dismal valleys of Avernus,

  the gift would be revoked.

  They climbed the path

  through the deep silence, wrapped in total darkness.

  They had almost reached the rim of the upper world

  when he, afraid that she might slip, impatient

  to see her bright, beloved face, looked back:

  and in an instant, she began to fade,

  reaching out, struggling desperately to hold on

  to him, or to be held; but her hands could grasp

  nothing but thin air. She didn’t blame

  her appalled husband for this second death

  (how could she blame such love?) and, calling out

  a last Farewell!, which he could barely hear,

  she vanished.

  (Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 46 ff.)

  Hermes: The messenger of the gods and the guide (psychopompos) who took the souls of the dead to the underworld.

  l. 15, in the blue cloak: In Homer, dark blue is the color of mourning.

  Alcestis (Capri, between February 7 and 10, 1907)

  Several years after King Admetus’ marriage, Death arrived to announce that Admetus had been condemned to die immediately, and could be saved only if someone else was willing to be taken in his stead. Only Alcestis, his wife, volunteered. Later, Hercules was so moved by Admetus’ mourning that he pursued Death, snatched Alcestis away from him, and brought her back to Admetus. (This myth is the theme of the tragicomic Alcestis by Euripides.)

  l. 1, the messenger: Hermes (the poem was originally entitled “Admetus. Alcestis. Hermes”).

  l. 72, she: The goddess Artemis, who was offended because Admetus had forgotten the customary prenuptial sacrifice to her.

  Archaic Torso of Apollo (Paris, early summer 1908)

  The inspiration for this sonnet, which is the first poem in New Poems, Second Part, was the early-fifth-century B.C. Torso of a Youth from Miletus in the Salle Archaïque of the Louvre.

  The incomparable value of these rediscovered Things lies in the fact that you can look at them as if they were completely unknown. No one knows what their intention is and (at least for the unscientific) no subject matter is attached to them, no irrelevant voice interrupts the silence of their concentrated reality, and their duration is without retrospect or fear. The masters from whom they originate are nothing; no misunderstood fame colors their pure forms; no history casts a shadow over their naked clarity—: they are. That is all. This is how I see ancient art. The little tiger at Rodin’s is like that, and the many fragments and broken pieces in the museums (which you pass by many times without paying attention, until one day one of them reveals itself to you, and shines like a first star …)

  (To Lou Andreas-
Salomé, August 15, 1903)

  The companion piece, “Early Apollo,” is the first poem in New Poems (Part One):

  … so ist in seinem Haupte

  nichts was verhindern könnte, daß der Glanz

  aller Gedichte uns fast tödlich träfe;

  denn noch kein Schatten ist in seinem Schaun,

  zu kühl für Lorbeer sind noch seine Schläfe

  und später erst wird aus den Augenbraun …

  … so, in his head,

  nothing can stop the radiance of all

  poems from nearly burning us to death;

  for there is still no shadow in his gaze,

  his forehead is too cool for a laurel-wreath,

  and not for another century will his eyebrows

  blossom …

  Washing the Corpse (Paris, summer 1908)

  Black Cat (Paris, summer 1908)

  The Flamingos (Paris, autumn 1907, or Capri, spring 1908)

  l. 1, Fragonard: Jean-Honoré Fragonard (pronounced Fragonár), 1732–1806, French painter.

  l. 8, Phryne (fourth century B.C.E.): Greek courtesan, famous for her beauty.

  Buddha in Glory (Paris, summer 1908)

  This is the final poem in New Poems, Second Part.

  Soon after supper I retire, and am in my little house by 8:30 at the latest. Then I have in front of me the vast blossoming starry night, and below, in front of the window, the gravel walk goes up a little hill on which, in fanatic taciturnity, a statue of the Buddha rests, distributing, with silent discretion, the unutterable self-containedness of his gesture beneath all the skies of the day and night. C’est le centre du monde [He is the center of the world], I said to Rodin.

  (To Clara Rilke, September 20, 1905)

  Cf. the two earlier poems called “Buddha” in the first part of New Poems (“As though he were listening. Silence: something far” and “From far away the awe-struck pilgrim feels”).

  FROM REQUIEM (1909)

  Requiem for a Friend (Paris, October 31–November 2, 1908)

  Written in memory of the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907).

  The fate that I tried to tell of and to lament in the Requiem is perhaps the essential conflict of the artist: the opposition and contradiction between objective and personal enjoyment of the world. It is no less conclusively demonstrated in a man who is an artist by necessity; but in a woman who has committed herself to the infinite transpositions of the artist’s existence the pain and danger of this choice become inconceivably visible. Since she is physical far into her soul and is designed for bearing children of flesh and blood, something like a complete transformation of all her organs must take place if she is to attain a true fruitfulness of soul.

  The birth processes which, in a purely spiritual way, the male artist enjoys, suffers, and survives, may, in a woman who is capable of giving birth to a work of art, broaden and be exalted into something that is of the utmost spirituality. But these processes undergo just a gradual intensification, and still remain, in unlimited ramifications, within the realm of the physical. (So that, exaggerating, one could say that even what is most spiritual in woman is still body: body become sublime.) Therefore, for her, any relapse into a more primitive and narrow kind of suffering, enjoying, and bringing forth is an overfilling of her organs with the blood that has been augmented for another, greater circulation.

  Long ago I had a presentiment of this fate; but I experienced it in all its intensity when it actually brushed against me: when it stood in front of me, so huge and close that I could not shut my eyes.

  (To Hugo Heller, June 12, 1909; in Berliner

  Tageblatt, November 29, 1929)

  l. 5, return:

  … his body became indescribably touching to him and of no further use than to be purely and cautiously present in, just as a ghost [Revenant], already dwelling elsewhere, sadly enters the realm that was tenderly laid aside, in order to belong once again, even if inattentively, to this once so indispensable world.

  (“An Experience,” this page f.)

  l. 15, transformation:

  Und sind nicht alle so, nur sich enthaltend,

  wenn Sich-enthalten heißt: die Welt da draußen

  und Wind und Regen und Geduld des Frühlings

  und Schuld und Unruh und vermummtes Schicksal

  und Dunkelheit der abendlichen Erde

  bis auf der Wolken Wandel, Flucht und Anflug,

  bis auf den vagen Einfluß ferner Sterne

  in eine Hand voll Innres zu verwandeln.

  And aren’t all of them that way: self-containing?

  If self-containing means to take the outside

  world, and wind and rain and springtime’s patience

  and guilt and restlessness and muffled fate

  and darkness of the evening earth and sky,

  out to the clouds’ approach and change and flight,

  out to the vaguest influence of the stars—

  to take these outward qualities and transform them

  into a handful of perfect innerness.

  (“The Bowl of Roses,” New Poems)

  The poet’s task is

  hart sich in die Worte zu verwandeln,

  wie sich der Steinmetz einer Kathedrale

  verbissen umsetzt in des Steines Gleichmut.

  to transform himself austerely into words,

  just as the mason of a great cathedral

  persists in changing his whole life and passion

  into the equanimity of stones.

  (“Requiem for Count Wolf von Kalckreuth,” Requiem)

  ll. 49 f., a country / you never saw: Rilke was probably thinking of Egypt here. Both he and Paula Becker were deeply impressed by the Egyptian sculptures in the Louvre. (H. W. Petzet, Das Bildnis des Dichters: Paula Modersohn-Becker und Rainer Maria Rilke, Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1976, p. 49 f.)

  l. 80, your naked body: This probably refers to the wonderful Self-Portrait on her Fifth Anniversary (1906), where Paula Becker is wearing her amber necklace and is naked to the hips. There are two other self-portraits from 1906, half-length, in which she appears naked, wearing the amber necklace, and with pink flowers in her hands and hair. (Those interested should consult Gillian Perry, Paula Modersohn-Becker, New York: Harper & Row, 1979, which contains twenty-five color plates and ninety-three duotone illustrations.)

  l. 83, and didn’t say: I am that; no: this is: In one of his great letters on Cézanne, Rilke wrote:

  You notice better each time you look at these paintings how necessary it was to go beyond even love. It is of course natural to love each one of these Things if you have made them. But if you show that, you make them less well; you judge them instead of saying them. You cease to be impartial; and what is best of all, the love, remains outside the work, does not enter it, is left untransformed beside it. That is how mood-painting arose (which is in no way better than realism). They painted: I love this; instead of painting: here it is. In the latter, everyone must then look carefully to see whether I have loved it. That is not shown at all, and many people would even say that there is no love in it. So utterly has it been consumed in the act of making. This consuming of love in anonymous work, out of which such pure Things arise—perhaps no one has so completely succeeded in doing that as this old man.

  (To Clara Rilke, October 13, 1907)

  ll. 85 f., of such true / poverty:

  Any kind of work delighted him: he worked even during meals, he read, he drew. He drew as he walked along the street, and quite early in the morning he drew the sleepy animals in the Jardin des Plantes. And when pleasure did not tempt him to work, poverty drove him to it. Poverty, without which his life would be unthinkable. He never forgets that it included him with the animals and flowers, without possessions among all those who are without possessions, and who have only God to depend on.

  (Auguste Rodin, 1907, SW 5, 228)

  l. 117, someone: Otto Modersohn.

  ll. 129 ff., the objective world expanded …; Paula’s pr
egnancy.

  l. 223, Nikē:

  I have seen such beautiful things in the Louvre.… The Nikē of Samothrace, the goddess of victory on the ship’s hull, with the wonderful movement and the vast sea-wind in her clothes, is a miracle and seems like a whole world.

  (To Clara Rilke, September 26, 1902)

  l. 232, the freedom of a love:

  For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.… Love does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person … Rather, it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for another’s sake.… We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes brought about by time there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.

  The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex.… This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be surprised and struck by it. Someday … there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.