Rilke has been reading Hölderlin again, and studying with admiration Goethe’s Roman Elegies, soaking his soul in the distich, the poetry of the flute, rather than that of the lyre. His own practice will be irregular and free, but the rhythm is nevertheless fundamentally there: a foot which always falls, the dactyl (), and a pair of lines which does the same, dropping from six feet to five. Rilke’s Elegies will end when happiness falls. The human faculty the Elegies invoke is memory, since their subject is loss, but this gives them distance, makes them meditative. The problems the Elegies address are not removable. Their mood is one of quiet mourning, of sober lamentation, then, because they are concerned to sing a sorrow no longer immediate and sharp, but one full of conciliation, acceptance, and repose.
Rilke’s Elegies do not weep for Adonais, and nature is too indifferent to mankind’s plight to make mountains frown or the sky shed tears. The “I” of the Duino Elegies is the “I” we all are: not mankind en masse, but “we” one after the other. Although some of the poetic personae of the Elegies are present in “Lament,” written in Paris just before the fatal August of 1914—“heart,” “lament,” “tree,” “angels,” and not excluding the important condition of invisibility—the poem is about no one else than its author. It is a grim summing up, and hardly elegiac.
Who will you complain to, my heart? Your forsaken path
struggles on through the insensible mass of mankind.
All the more futile, perhaps, for maintaining its aim,
pushing on toward a future already lost.
Once before. You lamented? What was it for? A fallen unripe
berry of celebration. But now the entire tree is being broken,
by the storm it is shaken, my slowly grown tree of celebration.
Loveliest in my invisible
landscape, you that made me better known
to the also invisible angels.2
For the fully fledged elegy we need a mountain at whose peak we shall look down upon the world and try to find our place in it, though we stand atiptop while we do. And a tutelary spirit of feminine gender will also be required to attend us while we philosophize. The German name for this sort of thing is Bildung, and perhaps the most famous example is Schiller’s “Der Spaziergang,” an elegy sometimes felt to initiate the genre. In the tenth of the Duino Elegies we shall get our tutelary spirit and our mountain, too, however the metaphysical bent of the Elegies involves a far more general point of view than Bildung does.
Nevertheless (and this is I think a real oddity), the Elegies, because they resemble a revelation, are so utterly identified with the moment of their initial onset that the Duino cliffs and the bora which is cleansing the battlements are a part of the poem, are where the voice is heard, are where we are when we read and hear them. Mouth them, actually, for these poems are the most oral I know; they are meant not only to be listened to as one listens to, say, Wallace Stevens, but they must be spoken—not merely by but for yourself, as if you were the one who wondered whether you had anyone you could call to, anything you could, in your condition, make use of. This demand—that the reader become the poem—is there, even in translation, in any decent version, for the voice-making quality of these lines goes beyond their music. They are an utterance.
To sharpen my point: James Joyce’s various Anna Livia Plurabelles are certainly as musical as prose gets, literally lilting on all the time, and they, too, ask to be performed, as most great prose and all great poetry does. But we perform them in order to hear them. We perform the Elegies in order to say them. To make their words ours.
Nor does the wanderer bring down a handful of earth
from his high mountain slope to the valley (for earth, too, is mute),
but a word he has plucked from the climbing: the yellow and blue
gentian. Are we, perhaps, here just to utter: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window—
at most: column, tower … but to utter them, remember,
to speak in a way which the named never dreamed
they could be.3
And to speak in a way we never dreamed we could speak.
We must add, then, to such mental preparation for the final inundation as the reading of Goethe and Hölderlin, Rilke’s installation in the tower of Muzot. Not a castle, though the Germans will call a shoebox a Schloss, but a quadrangular tower at least, on a mountain slope, lifting its crenellated roof up into the trees, and boasting a view across a ravine and down toward a tiny town. It contained a lot of dinky rooms, three to each of its three stories, their windows set higgledy-piggledy across Muzot’s face; yet it also possessed a tower … a tower of which Yeats would have been proud. Covered for many months by Swiss snow, at a place not easily reached, in a climate which forced solitude even on its atmosphere, engulfed by a landscape rich and various, in winter surrounded by white-fingered fruit trees, Muzot provided a security unusual for Rilke, and at long last.
The season is also suitable. January and February are the poet’s best months. The first two Elegies entered him at Duino in January, but they were also preceded by the poems which constituted The Life of Mary, extending that exclamatory time. To be followed then by anxiety and sadness. Because Desperation is another preparation for inspiration, and Rilke was to have years of desperation: initially in Paris, where he suffered it while in the tolls of his Notebooks, and again in the tens of towns and in the scores of borrowed rooms where he dwelled during the decade sombered by the war, a decade which began shortly after the Elegies announced themselves.
The Duino outburst had made Rilke at first fancy he was like St. John receiving the Apocalypse on Patmos (remembering Hölderlin’s majestic poem as he would a decade later), only to be cast back into a disappointing silence as he was by the grim castle most times in any case. “Near,” Hölderlin begins, “Near and hard to grasp is God.” The revelation had been too partial, perhaps premature, and even when Rilke ran naked along the seashore, his face in the wind as it had been on the parapet, the Elegies did not reannounce themselves. Rilke hid in the castle’s large but undisciplined library and considered exploring its rich collection of Venetian material in order, perhaps, to write a biography of Admiral Carlo Zeno, whose great age (eighty-four at his death in 1418) invited a long look back (by a poet who was thirty-eight) … yet at what?… if not at growing old and becoming faintly quaint. His letters multiplied and lengthened, as did his desperations. When you have no daily work to go to, to stabilize your life and make it useful, especially when you are like a ghost caught in daylight; when there is no protective routine with its reassuring tedium to lull the nerves, and no one about to get on them either; then you go to hell instead; and Rilke found himself in rooms full of his previous pacing, everywhere in front of him volumes he’d pulled from their shelves but part way; and in some corner that he had neglected, unresolved problems were seated like judges in robes; what to do about his divorce from Clara; how to escape his enigmatic lovelife—in Rome entangled with Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin (“Sidie,” a shortening dearly needed), while in Venice beset by Mimi Romanelli—and consequently how to cleanse his consciousness of guilt and distraction; next how to avoid sliding further into the generous hands of the Princess Marie or her closing social circle; moreover, what to do or where to go in order to escape those migraines that troubled one end of him and the hemorrhoids that pained the other; because, if the sirocco and the bora were insufferable at Duino, there was the foehn to make Munich miserable, not to omit most of Switzerland, and his neuroses to ruin the rest.
Rilke’s teeth ached. He had little strength. He woke with stiff joints. According to Freedman, he felt as if lemon juice had been squeezed into his blood. Still, at the suggestion of the princess, he tried to put her library in order, and stood staring at its stacks instead. The princess, discerning his difficulties—and after a period when he ricocheted between Duino and Venice, driven there by ill-formed plans, drawn back by hesitations—generously offered h
im her mezzanino in the Palazzo Valmarana, where Rilke might enjoy its luxurious appointments, its wide views of the Grand Canal, while practicing much-needed economies. Rilke wanted to be Spartan, and refused. Finally, out of sorts and out of sous, he accepted. His head was soon clogged with society like a sinus.
Rilke was as restless as one who hoped to leave his pain in the parlor when he enters the dining room, and his worries in the bedroom when he comes down for breakfast, only to find them spread over his toast and clouding every view. This condition was common, and appeared to announce another flight, yet before Rilke could flee with his Muse to Spain, he fell into a friendship with Eleonora Duse, whose theatricalized life absorbed Rilke’s attention like a sponge, and allowed him no time to moon about the state of his soul. The Duse, aging, off the boards and out of limelight, was struggling to keep an actor and hopeful impresario, Alexander Moissi, as well as a young playwright, Lina Poletti, in her weakening orbit. Rilke perceived the relation between the young woman and the Duse as one which resembled his own unhappy service with Rodin, and the actress’s plight a forecast for the poet’s aging self. Caught in her storms, he rocked from side to side, only, ultimately, to be marooned. The triangle dissolved, and Rilke fell back into his own.
After a series of séances arranged by the princess (too embarrassing to sane minds to be described here), Rilke’s spirit was beckoned to Spain by the spirit of the planchette. Nonetheless, the country the poet sought existed only in the paintings of El Greco, which contained angels worthy of the Elegies, nor did Toledo, seen through such a framer as the painter, disappoint. One night, standing on one of the bridges that spans the Tagus, Rilke watched a meteor sear the dark sky, and retained its image for several poems. Were the Elegies to arrive in a brightness like the meteor’s, only to burn up in the blaze of their own being?
“The Spanish Trilogy,” three of the finest poems he managed during the Great Ten-Year Drought (which wasn’t so dry after all), were written in the following January at Ronda. The first of these poems is particularly extraordinary because, for all of Rilke’s orality, he rarely imposes on a poem a purely rhetorical order. He will often adopt a dramatic form, and speak from a particular point of view—a beggar’s, a blind man’s, and so on—but he is only occasionally the orator. This prayer—for that is what it is, a desperate prayer—we listen to, but we cannot, could not, utter. Prayers are too personal. We overhear.
From this cloud—look!—which has so stormily hid
the star that just now shone there—(and from me),
from this dark huddle of hills which holds the night,
the night-winds, for a while—(and from me),
from this valley’s stream which reshines
the tumult of the night sky—(and from me);
from me, and all of this, to make, Lord,
some single thing: from me and the feeling
with which the herd, penned in its stalls,
accepts with a long slow sigh
the darkening departure of the world—
from me and every glimmer of light
amid the dimness of many houses, Lord:
to make one thing; from strangers,
since I know not one, Lord, and from me, from me,
to make one thing; from the sleepers,
those bereft old men in the hospice
who, with importance, cough in bed,
from children sleepdrunk on the breasts of strangers,
from so much that’s uncertain, and always from me,
from me alone and all I don’t know,
to make the Thing, Lord Lord Lord, the Thing
that, both earthly and cosmic like a meteor,
takes for its heaviness only the sum of its flight,
to weigh nothing but arrival.4
With the artistic and physical geography in place, with his stand-up desk and a tiled stove delivered, with housewarming Christmas gifts of chandeliers and lamps from friends, Rilke can write a few letters to his lady loves (it is difficult not to become caustic)—to Clara, to his daughter, Ruth, to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, to Lou Salomé, Baladine Klossowska—yes, to his new love called Merline now, or Mouky in private—and almost by the way, to Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, informing her of his daughter’s forthcoming marriage, inasmuch as she and Gertrud Knoop’s daughter Wera had once been friends. Wera, who had hoped to become a dancer, had fallen ill of leukemia and died at 19, two years before. Now Rilke chooses to console the mother, and an exchange of letters ensues, leading to another gift: the diary Wera had kept during her painful months of dying. A dying which her diary will, for Rilke, ironically forecast.
If things constantly come into being only to pass away, patterns nevertheless persist and appear and reappear with remarkable frequency and stubbornness. In 1913, Rilke acknowledges the receipt of a copy of Paula Becker’s diary, sent to him by her brother, informing him of what his “Requiem” for her had already said: that this was the death which had shaken him more than any other.
The death of a beautiful young woman—it was Edgar Allan Poe’s opinion—was the best choice for a great poem’s appropriately poetic subject. Certainly such a death—its tragic yet uplifting meaning—had obsessed Rilke during nearly his entire life. Not only did it seem that a girl had to die to make room in the world for him, but it also seemed that this otherwise sad prematurity preserved the child’s possibilities along with her innocence. Victimized by death, she could not be victimized by life. The stoicism which made up a great part of Rilke’s moral character also glorified, for him, acts of relinquishment and ascetism. Lovers who loved and lost but who continued more devotedly to love, like Gaspara Stampa (an Italian noblewoman who composed two hundred sonnets to commemorate her unhappy passion) were his sort of saint. These were the sentimental reasons. Rilke’s jilted ladies (and all were left in some sort of lurch) ought to love him the more for his resistance. And they did.
Baladine Klossowska, the painter with whom the poet had conjugated at Muzot for a few weeks before winter’s onset, had thumbtacked a postcard reproduction of Orpheus, sitting under a tree surrounded by tamely attentive wild animals, above Rilke’s writing desk. Furthermore, Rilke had just completed his translation of Michelangelo’s sonnets and was thinking about experimenting with the form. All the requisite elements were assembled. On February 2, he began a few of them, dedicated to the memory of a young woman he had scarcely known (just as earlier he had written a requiem for a poet, Count Wolf von Kalckreuth, whom he had never met). Wera had become a musician by force of fatal circumstance, so that the choice of Orpheus was certainly appropriate. As if he were hearing another voice, there, suddenly, the words were: Da stieg ein Baum. And they weighed nothing but arrival. The storm had begun.
“What is the cause that, among the thousand products of our unconscious activity, some are called to pass the threshold, while others remain below?” Poincaré asks. His answer is significant, I think, and sound.
More generally the privileged unconscious phenomena, those susceptible of becoming conscious, are those which, directly or indirectly, affect most profoundly our emotional sensibility.
We may associate mathematical work solely with the intellect,
but this would be to forget the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true esthetic feeling that all real mathematicians know.
Of course we cannot ignore the differences between mathematical discoveries and poetic connections, because mathematical problems are well-defined and specific (for the most part), whereas poems can seem to pop up like toast from an empty toaster. Moreover, the mathematician is uncovering laws which are already there; they exist in the realm of number, where the pioneer, like a verdant valley, finds them. Making and finding are fundamentally different. Nor should we make light of the gap between the preestablished and formal character of Rilke’s recently practiced sonnet, and the loosely shaped and individual nature of his Elegies. Yet in Rilke’s case
these differences are diminished. In a sense the Elegies were there waiting, too. Whole pieces were present, and fragments suggested the true shapes of the other jars. Rilke had written them over and over already. There is scarcely a line, an image, an idea, that we cannot find, slightly rearranged, in earlier work.
Better than almost any other poet, Rilke understood that relations between elements, not the elements themselves, were at the heart of any art, and that these relations made up its “space,” and were the source of a poem’s “geometry.” “What are the mathematic entities to which we attribute this character of beauty and elegance, and which are capable of developing in us a sort of esthetic emotion?” Poincaré asks. And answers: “They are those whose elements are harmoniously disposed so that the mind without effort can embrace their totality while realizing the details.”5
Mathematical and other conceptual blockages are often the result of the thinker’s remaining with a strategy or set of similar strategies to which he seems wedded. He needs to start off in a fresh direction, but is unable because most first efforts form a track into which the pencil-end of the mind slips, over and over. Hence the helpfulness of the distraction. It allows another idea to appear. I do not believe the completion of the Elegies was delayed for a decade for purely poetic reasons. I suspect that Rilke, first of all, could not satisfactorily fill out his metaphysics, and second, could not find the language which would provide that metaphysics with its justification, and third, was not yet the poet to whom the work could be revealed.
The Elegies were to provide us with a comprehensive outlook or attitude toward the world and in particular the poet’s role in it. We should not ennoble ideas that are made mostly of emotions, moods, and attitudes by calling them philosophical. Nor were they at all religious despite the presence (or absence, actually) of the Angels. The Elegies present us with conclusions, not arguments, so—again—they cannot be philosophical. And they are not revelations supported by a Faith. Their justification—their proof—is poetical and lies in the persuasive power of the language they arrive in. If Rilke could not resolve the oppositions which were everywhere in evidence in his outlook, he could not find the language which would allow him to affirm a solution. In short, he had not yet found the right metaphors; or, in those cases where he had them, he had not yet reached their inner nature.
Reading Rilke Page 10