Ahead of All Parting

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  (To Annette Kolb, January 23, 1912)

  l. 71, in your endless vision:

  For the angel of the Elegies, all the towers and palaces of the past are existent because they have long been invisible, and the still-standing towers and bridges of our reality are already invisible, although still (for us) physically lasting.… All the worlds in the universe are plunging into the invisible as into their next-deeper reality; a few stars intensify immediately and pass away in the infinite consciousness of the angels—, others are entrusted to beings who slowly and laboriously transform them, in whose terrors and delights they attain their next invisible realization. We, let it be emphasized once more, we, in the sense of the Elegies, are these transformers of the earth; our entire existence, the flights and plunges of our love, everything, qualifies us for this task (beside which there is, essentially, no other).

  (To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

  l. 73, Pillars:

  … a calyx column stands there, alone, a survivor, and you can’t encompass it, so far out beyond your life does it reach; only together with the night can you somehow take it in, perceiving it with the stars, as a whole, and then for a second it becomes human—a human experience.

  (To Clara Rilke, January 18, 1911)

  l. 73, pylons: “The monumental gateway to an Egyptian temple, usually formed by two truncated pyramidal towers connected by a lower architectural member containing the gate.” (OED)

  l. 73, the Sphinx: See note to the Tenth Elegy, ll. 73 ff., this page ff.

  l. 84, a woman in love—, oh alone at night by her window: Cf. “Woman in Love” (New Poems).

  l. 87, filled with departure:

  I sometimes wonder whether longing can’t radiate out from someone so powerfully, like a storm, that nothing can come to him from the opposite direction. Perhaps William Blake has somewhere drawn that—?

  (To Princess Marie von Thurn und

  Taxis-Hohenlohe, May 14, 1912)

  The Eighth Elegy (Muzot, February 7/8, 1922)

  Dedication, Rudolf Kassner: See note to “Turning-point,” this page.

  l. 2, into the Open:

  You must understand the concept of the “Open,” which I have tried to propose in this Elegy, as follows: The animal’s degree of consciousness is such that it comes into the world without at every moment setting the world over against itself (as we do). The animal is in the world; we stand in front of the world because of the peculiar turn and heightening which our consciousness has taken. So by the “Open” it is not sky or air or space that is meant; they, too, for the human being who observes and judges, are “objects” and thus “opaque” and closed. The animal or the flower presumably is all that, without accounting for itself, and therefore has before itself and above itself that indescribably open freedom which has its (extremely fleeting) equivalents for us perhaps only in the first moments of love, when we see our own vastness in the person we love, and in the ecstatic surrender to God.

  (To Lev P. Struve, February 25, 1926, in Maurice Betz,

  Rilke in Frankreich: Erinnerungen—Briefe—Dokumente,

  Wien / Leipzig / Zürich: Herbert Reichner Verlag, 1937)

  ll. 2 f., Only our eyes are turned / backward: In describing his experience of “reaching the other side of Nature,” Rilke uses the mirror image of this metaphor:

  Altogether, he was able to observe how all objects yielded themselves to him more distantly and, at the same time, somehow more truly; this might have been due to his own vision, which was no longer directed forward and diluted in empty space; he was looking, as if over his shoulder, backward at Things, and their now completed existence took on a bold, sweet aftertaste, as though everything had been spiced with a trace of the blossom of parting.

  (“An Experience,” this page)

  l. 9, Free from death:

  Nearby there was one of the darker birdcalls, a more mature one, already sung inwardly, which was to the others as a poem is to a few words—how it shone toward God, already, already, how devout it was, how filled with itself, a song-bud still in the calyx of its sound, but already aware of its own irrepressible fullness, pre-blissful and pre-afraid. Or rather, the fear was entirely there, the indivisible pain common to all creatures, which is as simple as the blissfulness over there, on the other side, where all has been surmounted.

  (To Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, February 24, 1920)

  l. 13, fountain: Here, as well as in the Ninth Elegy, l. 33, and Sonnets to Orpheus VIII, First Part, this is meant in its older sense of “a spring or source of water issuing from the earth and collecting in a basin, natural or artificial; also, the head-spring or source of a stream or river.” (OED)

  l. 53 ff., Oh bliss of the tiny creature …:

  That a multitude of creatures which come from externally exposed seeds have that as their maternal body, that vast sensitive freedom—how much at home they must feel in it all their lives; in fact they do nothing but leap for joy in their mother’s womb, like little John the Baptist; for this same space has both conceived them and brought them forth, and they never leave its security.

  Until in the bird everything becomes a little more uneasy and cautious. The nest that Nature has given him is already a small maternal womb, which he only covers instead of wholly containing it. And suddenly, as if it were no longer safe enough outside, the wonderful maturing flees wholly into the darkness of the creature and emerges into the world only at a later turning-point, experiencing it as a second world and never entirely weaned from the conditions of the earlier, more intimate one.

  (Rivalry between mother and world—)

  (Notebook entry, February 20, 1914; SW 6, 1074 f.)

  The Ninth Elegy (Lines 1–6a and 77–79: Duino, March 1912; the rest: Muzot, February 9, 1922)

  l. 7, happiness:

  The reality of any joy in the world is indescribable; only in joy does creation take place (happiness, on the contrary, is only a promising, intelligible constellation of things already there); joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness. How superficially must happiness engage us, after all, if it can leave us time to think and worry about how long it will last. Joy is a moment, unobligated, timeless from the beginning, not to be held but also not to be truly lost again, since under its impact our being is changed chemically, so to speak, and does not only, as may be the case with happiness, savor and enjoy itself in a new mixture.

  (To Ilse Erdmann, January 31, 1914)

  ll. 9 f., the heart, which / would exist in the laurel too:

  Hardly had she cried her breathless prayer

  when a numbness seized her body; her soft breasts

  were sealed in bark, her hair turned into leaves,

  her arms into branches; her feet, which had been so quick,

  plunged into earth and rooted her to the spot.

  Only her shining grace was left. Apollo

  still loved her; he reached out his hand to touch

  the laurel trunk, and under the rough bark

  could feel her heart still throbbing …

  (Ovid, Metamorphoses I, 548 ff.)

  ll. 32 ff., house, / bridge …:

  Even for our grandparents a “house,” a “well,” a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat, was infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything was a vessel in which they found what is human and added to the supply of what is human.

  (To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

  l. 59, the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile:

  I often wonder whether things unemphasized in themselves haven’t exerted the most profound influence on my development and my work: the encounter with a dog; the hours I spent in Rome watching a rope-maker, who in his craft repeated one of the oldest gestures in the world—as did the potter in a little village on the Nile; standing beside his wheel was indescribably and in a most mysterious sense fruitful for me.…

  (To Alfred Schaer, February 26, 1924)

  ll
. 68 f., to arise within us, / invisible:

  The Spanish landscape (the last one that I experienced absolutely), Toledo, pushed this attitude of mine to its extreme limit: because there the external Thing itself—tower, mountain, bridge—already possessed the extraordinary, unsurpassable intensity of those inner equivalents through which one might have wished to represent it. Everywhere appearance and vision merged, as it were, in the object; in each one of them a whole inner world was revealed, as though an angel who encompassed all space were blind and gazing into himself. This, a world seen no longer from the human point of view, but inside the angel, is perhaps my real task—one, at any rate, in which all my previous attempts would converge.

  (To Ellen Delp, October 27, 1915)

  l. 77, our intimate companion, Death:

  We should not be afraid that our strength is insufficient to endure any experience of death, even the closest and most terrifying. Death is not beyond our strength; it is the measuring-line at the vessel’s brim: we are full whenever we reach it—and being full means (for us) being heavy.—I am not saying that we should love death; but we should love life so generously, so without calculation and selection, that we involuntarily come to include, and to love, death too (life’s averted half); this is in fact what always happens in the great turmoils of love, which cannot be held back or defined. Only because we exclude death, when it suddenly enters our thoughts, has it become more and more of a stranger to us; and because we have kept it a stranger, it has become our enemy. It is conceivable that it is infinitely closer to us than life itself—. What do we know of it?!

  Prejudiced as we are against death, we do not manage to release it from all its distorted images. It is a friend, our deepest friend, perhaps the only one who can never be misled by our attitudes and vacillations—and this, you must understand, not in the sentimental-romantic sense of life’s opposite, a denial of life: but our friend precisely when we most passionately, most vehemently, assent to being here, to living and working on earth, to Nature, to love. Life simultaneously says Yes and No. Death (I implore you to believe this!) is the true Yes-sayer. It says only Yes. In the presence of eternity.

  (To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923)

  The Tenth Elegy (Lines 1–12: Duino, January/February 1912; continued in Paris, late autumn 1913; new conclusion, lines 13–end: Muzot, February 11, 1922)

  Lou, dear Lou, finally:

  At this moment, Saturday, the eleventh of February, at 6 o’clock, I am putting down my pen after completing the last Elegy, the Tenth. The one (even then it was intended as the last one) whose first lines were already written in Duino: “Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight, / let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.…” What there was of it I once read to you; but only the first twelve lines have remained, all the rest is new and: yes, very, very glorious!—Imagine! I have been allowed to survive until this. Through everything. Miracle. Grace.

  (To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 11, 1922)

  l. 20, market of solace:

  Consolation is one of the many diversions we are subject to, a distraction, hence something essentially frivolous and unfruitful.—Even time doesn’t “console,” as people superficially say, at most it arranges, it sets in order—, and only because we later pay so little attention to the order toward which it so quietly collaborates that instead of marveling at what is now established and assuaged, reconciled in the great whole, we think it is some forgetfulness of our own, some weakness of heart, just because it no longer hurts us so much. Ah, how little the heart really forgets it,—and how strong it would be if we didn’t withdraw its tasks from it before they are fully and truly accomplished!—Our instinct shouldn’t be to want to console ourselves for such a loss, rather it should become our deep and painful curiosity to wholly explore it, the particularity, the uniqueness of precisely this loss, to discover its effect within our life, indeed we should summon up the noble avarice of enriching our inner world by precisely it, by its meaning and heaviness … The more deeply such a loss touches us and the more intensely it affects us, the more it becomes a task, of newly, differently, and finally taking into our possession what now, in its being lost, is accented with hopelessness: this then is unending accomplishment which immediately overcomes all negative qualities that cling to pain, all laziness and indulgence that always constitute a part of pain, this is active, inward-working pain, the only kind that makes sense and is worthy of us. I don’t like the Christian ideas of a Beyond, I am getting farther and farther away from them, naturally without any thought of attacking them—; they may have a right to their existence beside so many other hypotheses about the divine periphery,—but for me they contain above all the danger not only of making those who have vanished more indistinct to us and above all more inaccessible—; but also we ourselves, because we allow our longing to pull us away from here, thereby become less definite, less earthly: which nevertheless, for the present, as long as we are here and related to tree, flower, and soil, we in a purest sense have to remain, even still have to become!… I reproach all modern religions for having provided their believers with consolations and glossings-over of death, instead of giving them the means of coming to an understanding with it. With it and with its full, unmasked cruelty: this cruelty is so immense that it is precisely with it that the circle closes: it leads back into a mildness which is greater, purer, and more perfectly clear (all consolation is muddy!) than we have ever, even on the sweetest spring day, imagined mildness to be. But toward the experiencing of this deepest mildness, which, if even a few of us were to feel it with conviction, could perhaps little by little penetrate and make transparent all the relations of life: toward the experiencing of this most rich and complete mildness mankind has never taken even the first steps,—unless in its most ancient, most innocent ages, whose secret is all but lost to us. The content of the “initiations” was, I am sure, nothing but the communicating of a “key” that allowed people to read the word “death” without negation; like the moon, surely life has a side permanently turned away from us which is not its opposite but its counterpart toward completion, toward wholeness, toward the actual perfect and full sphere and globe of being.

  (To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923)

  l. 21, the church:

  The Christian experience enters less and less into consideration; the primordial God outweighs it infinitely. The idea that we are sinful and need to be redeemed as a prerequisite for God is more and more repugnant to a heart that has comprehended the earth. Sin is the most wonderfully roundabout path to God—but why should they go wandering who have never left him? The strong, inwardly quivering bridge of the Mediator has meaning only where the abyss between God and us is admitted—; but this very abyss is full of the darkness of God; and where someone experiences it, let him climb down and howl away inside it (that is more necessary than crossing it). Not until we can make even the abyss our dwelling-place will the paradise that we have sent on ahead of us turn around and will everything deeply and fervently of the here-and-now, which the Church embezzled for the Beyond, come back to us; then all the angels will decide, singing praises, in favor of the earth!

  (To Ilse Jahr, February 22, 1923)

  l. 62, the vast landscape of Lament:

  The land of Lament, through which the elder Lament guides the dead youth, is not to be identified with Egypt, but is only, as it were, a reflection of the Nile-land in the desert clarity of the consciousness of the dead.

  (To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

  ll. 73–88, But as night approaches …/… the indescribable outline:

  Go look at the Head of Amenophis the Fourth in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin; feel, in this face, what it means to be opposite the infinite world and, within such a limited surface, through the intensified arrangement of a few features, to form a weight that can balance the whole universe. Couldn’t one turn away from a starry night to find the same law blossoming in this fa
ce, the same grandeur, depth, inconceivableness? By looking at such Things I learned to see; and when, later, in Egypt, many of them stood before me, in their extreme individuality, insight into them poured over me in such waves that I lay for almost a whole night beneath the great Sphinx, as though I had been vomited out in front of it by my whole life.

  You must realize that it is difficult to be alone there; it has become a public square; the most irrelevant foreigners are dragged in en masse. But I had skipped dinner; even the Arabs were sitting at a distance, around their fire; one of them noticed me, but I got away by buying two oranges from him; and then the darkness hid me. I had waited for nightfall out in the desert, then I came in slowly, the Sphinx at my back, figuring that the moon must already be rising (for there was a full moon) behind the nearest pyramid, which was glowing intensely in the sunset. And when at last I had come around it, not only was the moon already far up in the sky, but it was pouring out such a stream of brightness over the endless landscape that I had to dim its light with my hand, in order to find my way among the heaps of rubble and the excavations. I found a place to sit down on a slope near the Sphinx, opposite that gigantic form, and I lay there, wrapped in my coat, frightened, unspeakably taking part. I don’t know whether my existence ever emerged so completely into consciousness as during those night hours when it lost all value: for what was it in comparison with all that? The dimension in which it moved had passed into darkness; everything that is world and existence was happening on a higher plane, where a star and a god lingered in silent confrontation. You too can undoubtedly remember experiencing how the view of a landscape, of the sea, of the great star-flooded night inspires us with the sense of connections and agreements beyond our understanding. It was precisely this that I experienced, to the highest degree; here there arose an image built on the pattern of the heavens; upon which thousands of years had had no effect aside from a little contemptible decay; and most incredible of all was that this Thing had human features (the fervently recognizable features of a human face) and that, in such an exalted position, these features were enough. Ah, my dear—I said to myself, “This, this, which we alternately thrust into fate and hold in our own hands: it must be capable of some great significance if even in such surroundings its form can persist.” This face had taken on the customs of the universe; single parts of its gaze and smile were damaged, but the rising and setting of the heavens had mirrored into it emotions that had endured. From time to time I closed my eyes and, though my heart was pounding, I reproached myself for not experiencing this deeply enough; wasn’t it necessary to reach places in my astonishment where I had never been before? I said to myself, “Imagine, you could have been carried here blindfolded and been set down on a slope in the deep, barely-stirring coolness—you wouldn’t have known where you were and you would have opened your eyes—” And when I really did open them, dear God: it took quite a long time for them to endure it, to take in this immense being, to achieve the mouth, the cheek, the forehead, upon which moonlight and moonshadows passed from expression to expression. How many times already had my eyes attempted this full cheek; it rounded itself out so slowly that there seemed to be room up there for more places than in our world. And then, as I gazed at it, I was suddenly, unexpectedly, taken into its confidence, I received a knowledge of that cheek, experienced it in the perfect emotion of its curve. For a few moments I didn’t grasp what had happened. Imagine: this: Behind the great projecting crown on the Sphinx’s head, an owl had flown up and had slowly, indescribably audibly in the pure depths of the night, brushed the face with her faint flight: and now, upon my hearing, which had grown very acute in the hours-long nocturnal silence, the outline of that cheek was (as though by a miracle) inscribed.