Reading Rilke

by William H. Gass

  In a remarkable poem written in Paris in 1907 which its author chose to cut from his first collection of New Poems, Rilke displays not only his ambivalence about puppets, but his disapproval of his own psychological makeup. It was an excision for which he never gave a reason, but one which W. L. Graff examines expertly in his Rainer Maria Rilke: Creative Anguish of a Modern Poet.5 It is Graff’s opinion that Rilke omitted the poem because it was too revelatory. “Marionettentheater” promptly fell through criticism’s cracks, although there was enough evidence elsewhere (in “The Fourth Elegy,” in the autobiographical fiction, Ewald Tragy, and in the essay on dolls) to suggest the same secret: that Rainer Maria Rilke was Napoleonic, not seraphic.

  The poem was occasioned, as Graff points out, by a penitential parade that Rilke witnessed in Furnes, West Flanders. It is a Catholic custom on certain sacred days to carry large statues of saints through the streets (clumsily, in my experience), often in order to reach a pilgrim-like destination, where they’ll be ritually placed in order to be properly revered before being returned to base. A robe-end will be made available to be fondled, or kisses will be placed on the back of an indifferently extended plaster hand. Patient queues of the faithful, like the lines at Lenin’s tomb, ratchet forward toward the kissing spot, which is wiped after each offering, as loo ladies do, though here by solemn children wielding a rag. But Rilke saw, he thought, two sets of puppets, the statues being carried, and the carriers who were being conned by their faith and manipulated by their priests. This scene became the source of an allegorical poem that refers to more personal matters than he at first realized.

  I’ve made my translation a little freer than elsewhere, partly for clarity’s sake, and partly because the poem rhymes (though with reason) relentlessly.

  Behind bars, like beasts,

  they pile up their behavior;

  their voice is not theirs,

  though they swing

  their arms and swords

  with great variety

  as if catching an outcry

  to copy while on the wing.

  Their limbs have no joints,

  and hang awkwardly

  in their rig of wires,

  which doesn’t prevent them

  from killing or dancing,

  or bowing and scraping

  like a courtier to a king.

  With them, memory has no point;

  they wring their awareness dry;

  and all they retain inside them

  they generally employ

  to beat upon their breast

  till it’s unable to resist.

  They know all breasts

  are beaten so.

  Their large and formal faces

  are there for all to see,

  simpler than ours, more

  forceful and ideal;

  open as eyes seem

  when awakening from a dream.

  A sight which makes laughter

  rise from the pit like steam;

  for those on the benches see

  how the puppets pound,

  wound, and frighten one another,

  and collapse in loose heaps,

  dead of their exertions.

  If anyone were to understand it differently,

  and fail to laugh at their consternations,

  the puppets would replace their play

  to reenact a Last Judgment Day.

  They would yank on their wires

  to pull before the painted porch

  the hands that, hidden high above,

  had danced them into their desires—

  hands hideously red, gloved no longer—

  and they would pour from every door,

  and climb those wires and cardboard walls

  to set their former land afire,

  and assassinate those hands.6

  If, from earliest youth, your inmost self had cried out to escape its circumstances; if you’d looked about and wondered why your presence had been needed even for a moment where you were; and if that meant you had to disappear into an inner distance, leaving your face and figure to fend for themselves, seeking a realm where you could claim an absolute autonomy; if, somewhat to your shame, considering your abject and unaccomplished condition, you had immortal longings in you; if you knew without being told, without having seen any evidence, without therefore knowing, that you were unique, that inside your small delicate body, behind your heavy-lidded eyes, a wide world was contained, and every house there was haunted by dreams, dreams of greatness, ambitions that Ewald Tragy, your namesake, gave away in a petulant moment—“I am my own lawmaker and king,” he’d said, “nobody is above me, not even God”—and furthermore, if, to write the great poetry you meant to write, you had first to be a great poet (for where would this sublime stuff come from if not from a sublime soul?), then the fatal division of the self is set; then that hidden ruler must remake both actor and role and push them onto the stage. So his childhood name is eventually altered; so is his handwriting, at Lou Salomé’s suggestion, though that is accomplished through the persistent efforts of his will; consequently he must change his nature, change his life; change … change … with the worry that (in unhappy harmony with his mother’s practice) a fine label would not improve the cheap wine that had been decanted down the bottle’s slender throat to create a successful deception. Henceforward the poet will be nothing but a Poet, and wander if he must, free to find his inspiration, free to wait for the Muses’ touch, despite life’s temptations, despite the need for the crowd’s applause, because he’ll be Orpheus, singing though he seems only a head now, floating downriver in the furious flux of things, for really he’ll be whole, head and heart will be at last one. Yet in all this there is the possibility that he’ll fail in the role he has assigned himself: which is? that the perfect self (an Angel) must play the part of a perfect appearance (the puppet); in other words, in the first place, that the poetry won’t come, and he’ll be an ape or a mimic, or, in the second place, that the audience will not be there to applaud, will see the puppet is a puppet, and that, in the third place, the puppet, full of resentment at having lost a normal life for nothing, will turn upon this inside Angel and pull upon his strings, the strings once, solely in his hands, and haul him down from on high (since he’s not as on-high as all that, not as perfect as the imagined Angels of the Elegies); whereupon the whole show will be over, Doctor Serafico will have failed to heal himself—and there will be no Angel, no poetry, and no poet.

  Erect no memorial stone. Let the rose

  bloom each year just for his sake.

  There Orpheus is. His metamorphosis

  is in this, is this. We don’t need to take

  on other names. It is always Orpheus

  when there’s song. He comes and goes.

  Isn’t it enough that he can be with us

  a few days longer than a bowl of roses?

  Oh, he has to vanish so you’ll know,

  though he dreads his disappearance.

  Even while his word transcends our souls,

  he’s already where we cannot go.

  The lyre’s strings do not bind his hands.

  And he obeys while breaking all the bans.7

  Vindication came that February of 1921, and the inside Angel and the puppet poet came together in the guise of Orpheus, who could be called to, who could come, and who did. Rilke felt an immeasurable relief. Yet, during his career, as he thought about what he’d written and would write, Rilke realized that if the puppet, who had sprung into an unpuppetty life to become a person, had written these poems—not just the Elegies he was struggling to complete, but his entire oeuvre—that puppet-poet-person could not be Rainer Maria Rilke. Even in his laments, his singular outcries, as local as their environment was, as momentary as their occasion, as different from others as his life; even with these, it could not be Rilke who was writing them, not if they were going to appeal to the world, not if a reader was going to be willing to put Rilke’s words
into his or her own mouth, to beg the Lord to be allowed to make one single thing, as if they both were in Spain, at Ronda, in anguish, in despair.

  On July 29, 1920, before the great storm has burst, Rilke writes to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart: “Ultimately there is only one poet, that infinite one who makes himself felt, here and there through the ages, in a mind that can surrender to him.” I have already interpreted Rilke’s esthetic position in Kantian terms, and one could continue that perspective to include even Ewald Tragy’s boast about autonomy, since it could be considered as a claim to be a noumenal self. “True art,” Rilke writes in the fall of that same year, to another correspondent, “can issue only from a purely anonymous center.”8

  If poetry issues from an anonymous center, it certainly gets individualized by the time it reaches the suburbs. Although it is sometimes difficult to tell a cubist painting by Braque from one by Picasso, or a poem by Dryden from a poem by Pope, it is nevertheless generally true that works of art reveal the individuality of the artist in their every brushstroke and semicolon. Where is this anonymous center, especially when we are considering a prototypical Romantic poet? Ewald Tragy says he is unique. “There’s no one like me.” Rilke might reply that the poet has access to this humanly shared nature, he is not simply governed by it. He can and does sometimes demand an audience, and then he can and sometimes does become its ambassador.

  A more compelling reply may be found in the poetry itself. It is not simply at those times when there is a dialogue between Angel and Puppet that the problem of poetry is confronted. It occurs at every intersection: heart roads, lyre strings. And we know that when Rilke issues a command, it is himself he is commanding. Such is the case with the sonnet I call “Dance the Orange.”

  Wait … that tastes good … But already gone.

  … A little music now, a tapping, a humming—:

  you girls who are silent, you radiant girls,

  dance the taste of the fruit you are tasting.

  Dance the orange. Who can forget it,

  how, drowning in its wealth, it grew

  against its sweetness. You have possessed it,

  as it transforms the delicious into you.

  Dance the orange. Fling its sunny clime

  from you, so that ripeness may shine

  in native breezes. All aglow,

  peel perfume from perfume! Share the relation

  that the supple pure reluctant rind

  has with the juice that fills the joyous fruit.9

  Wait? There is no waiting room for Time. And fruit, as we know, speaks win and loss into the mouth. Like everything else, the taste is gone before you know it. It is the young women again—Mädchen—who are called upon to perform the familiar transformation, whether it is hearing the line that Nature has drawn across our skull, and shivering as though suddenly cold, or out of a bitter taste making wine, or, like Daphne, at her father’s wish, turning into a tree, already leafy, awaiting her breeze and the embrace of Apollo. It’s not the reputed apple from the tree of knowledge which Adam is somehow handing back to Eve, but the orange—symbol of a rich warm southern life. Dance the sweetness that has become you so that this northern world will feel the sunshine, too. Crucially, the young women are to express the relation between a protective outer appearance and an inner worth.

  The rind conceals and protects, but it is not merely an actor, pretending with its peel that the orange is a rock, because the rind is also real. When the poet dies, the praised-over parts of the world, which had become his face because he had so intensely looked at them, will disappear—dissolve to reveal the soft inner core. Rilke, I think, liked to believe that the world he so often watched from a distance, through a window, was a kind of skin, and had its core, too, as he had his. “Ripeness is all” is something he would surely have been willing to repeat, and did, in his own way, often. The poem, too, lets us speak of life and death together—indeed, as he says, in the same breath.

  The poem is thus a paradox. It is made of air. It vanishes as the things it speaks about vanish. It is made of music, like us, “the most fleeting of all” yet it is also made of meaning that’s as immortal as immortal gets on our mortal earth; because the poem will return, will begin again, as spring returns: it can be said again, sung again, is our only answered prayer; the poem can be carried about more easily than a purse, and I don’t have to wait, when I want it, for a violinist to get in key, it can come immediately to mind—to my mind because it is my poem as much as it is yours—because, like a song, it can be sung in many places at once—and danced as well, because the poem becomes a condition of the body, it enlivens our bones, and they dance the orange, they dance the Hardy, the Hopkins, the Valéry, the Yeats; because the poem is a state of the soul, too (the soul we once had), and these states change as all else does, and these states mingle and conflict and grow weak or strong, and even if these verbalized moments of consciousness suggest things which are unjust or untrue when mistaken for statements, when rightly written they are real; they themselves are as absolutely as we achieve the Real in this unrealized life—are—are with a vengeance; because, oddly enough, though what has been celebrated is over, and one’s own life, the life of the celebrant, may be over, the celebration is not over. The celebration goes on.

  THE DEATH OF THE POET

  He lay. His pillow-propped face could only stare

  with pale refusal at the quiet coverlet,

  now that the world and all his knowledge of it,

  stripped from his senses to leave them bare,

  had fallen back to an indifferent year.

  Those who had seen him living could not know

  how completely one he was with all that flowed;

  for these: these deep valleys, each meadowed place,

  these streaming waters were his face.

  Oh, his face embraced this vast expanse,

  which seeks him still and woos him yet;

  now his last mask squeamishly dying there,

  tender and open, has no more resistance,

  than a fruit’s flesh spoiling in the air.

  THE DUINO ELEGIES OF

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  Among the papers of the Duchess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe

  THE FIRST ELEGY

  Who, if I cried, would hear me among the Dominions

  of Angels? And even if one of them suddenly

  held me against his heart, I would fade in the grip

  of that completer existence—a beauty we can barely

  endure, because it is nothing but terror’s herald;

  and we worship it so because it serenely disdains

  to destroy us. Every Angel is awesome.

  And so I master myself and stifle the beseeching

  heart’s cry that’s my mating song. Alas, who is there

  we can call on? Not Angels, not men,

  and even the observant animals are aware

  that we’re not very happily home here

  in this—our interpreted world. Perhaps

  some tree on a slope remains for us, allowing our look,

  day after day; perhaps yesterday’s walk,

  and a habit that liked us, like an aging retainer,

  loyally stays, and never gives notice.

  Oh, then there’s Night, when a wind, full of the hollow where the world is,

  feeds on our faces: who could refuse her,

  when she’ll gently let us down, though so long longed for

  by our heart’s solitude? Is she lighter for lovers?

  Ah, they only hide their loneliness in one another.

  Don’t you know that yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms

  to broaden the spaces we breathe—maybe then birds

  will feel the amplified air with more fervent flight.

  Yes, the springtimes have needed you. There’ve been stars

  to solicit your seeing. In the past, perhaps,

  waves rose to greet you, or out an open window,

/>   as you passed, a violin was giving itself

  to someone. This was a different commandment.

  But could you obey it? Weren’t you always

  anxiously peering past them, as though

  they announced a sweetheart’s coming? (Where would you

  have hidden her, with those heavy foreign thoughts

  tramping in and out and often staying overnight?)

  But should you long like this, sing of love’s ultimate lovers:

  the fame of their feeling is not yet immortal enough.

  Those—the forsaken—you envied them almost, they so outstripped

  all love-appeased lovers in loving. Begin

  continually to accomplish their unachievable praise.

  Think: the hero endures, even his fading

  is a phase of renewal, he burns fresh each day.

  But weary Nature gathers back her lovers,

  as if she had no second strength to send them forth again.

  Have you thought sufficiently of Gaspara Stampa yet,

  so that any jilted maiden might, from that more praiseworthy

  fashion of loving, feel: can I become like you?

  Should not these ancient sorrows finally be

  more fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that we lovingly