Reading Rilke

by William H. Gass

  freed ourselves from our lovers and, although shaken, endure it,

  as the arrow stands in the string to become, upon its momentous release,

  something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.

  Voices, voices. Listen, Oh, my heart, as hitherto only

  holy men have listened, listened so the mighty call

  lifted them straight from the ground, although they kneeled on,

  these magicians—and paid no attention,

  they so utterly listened. Not that you could bear

  the voice of God—far from it. But hear the flowing

  melancholy murmur which is shaped out of silence

  wafting toward you now from those youthfully dead.

  Whenever you entered a church in Rome or in Naples,

  did not their fate speak insistently to you?

  or a lofty inscription impose itself upon you

  as lately the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa?

  What do they want of me? that I should gently cleanse them

  of the tarnish of despair which hinders a little,

  sometimes, the pure passage of their spirits.

  True, it is strange not to live on the earth any longer,

  no longer follow the folkways you’ve only just learned,

  not to interpret roses and other promising things

  in terms of a rich human future;

  then to be no longer the one who once lay

  in ceaselessly anxious hands, and to have to put aside

  even one’s proper name like a broken toy.

  Strange, to wish one’s wishes no longer. Strange,

  to see all that was one time related, fluttering now

  loosely in space. And it’s difficult to be dead.

  There’s all that catching up to do before one feels

  just a little eternity. All of the living, though,

  mistakenly make these knife-like distinctions.

  Often Angels (it’s said) cannot say if they linger

  with the living or the dead. The eternal current

  carries every age through either realm

  forever, and drowns their voices with its roar in both.

  In the end, those taken early no longer need us;

  they are tenderly weaned from worldly things,

  even as one gently outgrows the breasts of a mother.

  But we who have need of such sacred secrets;

  we, for whom sorrow’s so often the source

  of our happiest progress; could we survive without them?

  Is the legend useless that once, in the lamentation for Linos,

  a few adventuresome first notes pierced the barren numbness,

  and in the startled space this almost godlike youth

  had suddenly forsaken forever, vacancy first felt

  the vibration which now carries us, comforts, and helps?1

  THE SECOND ELEGY

  Every Angel is awesome. And yet, alas,

  knowing that, I still sing my welcome to you,

  almost deadly birds of the soul. Where have the days of Tobias gone,

  when one of the most fiery-feathered could stand on a simple threshold

  (disguised for the journey and no longer appalling,

  but a youth to the curious youth who peered out).

  Yet if the archangel, perilous now, were to step but a step

  down toward us from behind the stars, our own heartbeaten

  heart would burst our chest. Who are you?

  Lucky from the cradle, Creation’s chosen darlings,

  mountain ranges, ridges red from the first sun’s rise,

  the pollen of a blossoming godhead, crossroads of light,

  corridors, staircases, thrones,

  space breathed by Being into being, shields of delight, storms

  of uninterrupted rapture, and, suddenly, isolate,

  mirrors, drawing back, as whole as an echo,

  the beauty that has streamed from their face.

  But we, when we feel, evaporate; oh, we

  breathe ourselves away; from coal to coal

  we cool as perfume fades. Though someone may tell us:

  “You’ve got into my blood, into this room, the springtime

  is rich with you …” What good is that? He can’t keep us;

  we disappear within, on either side, of him. And those who are

  beautiful, who can capture them? Expressions go forth from their faces

  only to be reabsorbed. Like dew from morning grass

  we relinquish what is ours as easily as steam from a warm dish.

  O smile, where are you going? O upturned glance:

  gone in the glitter of a fresh splash, and its little ripple across the heart …

  nevertheless, that’s what we are. Does the great world we dissolve in

  taste of us, then? Do the Angels really

  recapture only the radiance that’s streamed out from them,

  or sometimes, by mischance, is there a bit of our being

  brought back? Do we ever figure in their features

  even so little as that light vague look

  which pregnant women wear? a line not noticed

  as they pirouette upon themselves. (Why should they?)

  Lovers, if they knew what Angels know, might write

  strange words on the night air. For it seems everything

  wants to conceal us. Look: trees exist, the houses

  we live in still stand. We alone

  fly freely by things like loose exchanges of air.

  And all conspire to keep quiet about us, partly

  out of shame, perhaps, and partly from wordless hope.

  Lovers, satisfied by one another, I am asking you

  about us. You embrace, but where’s the proof?

  Look, sometimes it happens that my hands grow to know

  one another, or that my weary face seeks their shelter.

  This yields me a slender sensation. But who dares to believe he exists because of that?

  You, though, who from one another’s passion

  grow until, quite overcome, you plead: “No more …”

  you, who beneath one another’s groping swell

  with juice like the grapes of a vintage year;

  you, who may go like a bud into another’s blossoming:

  I am asking you about us. I know

  you touch so blissfully because your touch survives such bliss,

  because just below your finger’s end you feel the tip of pure duration.

  So you expect eternity to entwine itself in your embrace.

  And yet, when you have dealt with your fear of that first look,

  the longing, later, at the window, and your first turn

  about the garden together: lovers, are you any longer what you were?

  When you lift yourselves up to one another’s lips—chalice to chalice—

  and slip wine into wine like an added flavor: oh, how strangely

  soon is each drinker’s disappearance from the ceremony.

  On Attic gravestones, did not the discretion in each human gesture

  amaze you? Weren’t love and parting draped

  so gently on those shoulders they seemed to be made

  of a different stuff from ours? Remember the hands,

  how lightly they lay, despite the power in the torsos.

  These disciplined figures understood: “We can go no nearer,

  this is our limit, this tentative touching; the gods can

  press confidently down on us, but that is the gods’ affair.”

  If only we could reach something human that’s as

  pure, modest and secure—a strip of fruitful land

  between rock and river. For our heart still

  overreaches, as hubris did those others.

  And we can no longer follow it into chastening carvings,

  or into godlike bodies where its very enhancement

  is granted a greater calm.2


  THE THIRD ELEGY

  It is one thing to sing the beloved; another, alas,

  to hymn that river god shamefully hid in the blood.

  A maiden knows her love like the sky the distant grass.

  What does he know of the lord of his lust,

  who frequently from loneliness alone raised up

  its beaded god-head (even before she’s eased him,

  and often as though she didn’t exist)

  to rouse the night into infinite uproar?

  O the Neptune aswim in our blood! O his terrible trident!

  The dark wind from his chest through the curving conch!

  Hear how the night grows hollow as a cave. And you, stars,

  is it not from you that the lover’s longing for that beloved face

  falls? Does not his innermost vision

  of her pure features shine to him from your purer fires?

  No, neither you, alas! nor his mother

  ever bent his brows in such an eager arch;

  nor to meet the maiden who enfolds him in her feeling

  has his mouth begun to ripen like a fall fruit.

  Do you really imagine your light step

  so shook him, when your walk is like a waver in the morning wind?

  Surely you startled his heart; but more primal terrors

  overtook him at the shock of your blameless touch.

  Call him … you can never call him completely from that converse

  with the dark. Really, he wants to, he does escape; relieved,

  he starts to feel at home in your heart, accepts and begins to be himself.

  But could he ever begin himself?

  Mother, you made him small, it was you who began him,

  he was new with you, you arched the friendly world

  over those new eyes, and shut the strange outside.

  Oh, where are the years, now, when your slender form

  stood between him and the drifting chaos of his childhood?

  You hid so much from him then; made harmless

  the night-frightening room, and sent, from the haven of your heart,

  a human space like breath into the substance of his dark.

  Not in that night, no, but within your nearby Being

  you placed a light that shone, as if in friendship, even through solid things.

  Nowhere the rustle of a stair your smile could not explain,

  as though you had long known when the floor would choose to speak …

  And he listened and was soothed. So much did your tender rising

  accomplish; his tall caped fate stepped

  behind the wardrobe, and his alarming future,

  slightly postponing itself, fit into the folds of the drape.

  And he himself—as he lay assuaged, your

  delicate image beneath his drowsy lids

  dissolving like a sweet in the taste of forthcoming sleep—

  seemed safe. But within who could divert

  or dam the seed-flow of instinct inside him?

  Ah, there was no caution in that sleeping child; sleeping

  but dreaming, but fevered: what he let himself in for!

  He, so shy, so untarnished: how interior life entangled

  him in its hungry tendrils, its twisted and savage designs,

  its constricting embrace, the menacing shapes of its preying forms.

  How he handed himself over to it —. Loved.

  Loved his inner world, the wilderness inside himself,

  that primeval forest from among whose toppled trunks,

  accumulated leaves, and silent ruin

  rose his pale green heart like a sapling. Loved. Yet left.

  Went beyond the place his final roots were rooted to that overwhelming origin

  where his own little birth was already outlived. Loving,

  he descended into his ancestral blood, the ravines

  where Gorgons lay gorged like snakes with his fathers.

  And every Terror was his pal and winked with complicity.

  Yes, Ghastlies smiled at him … Seldom

  did you, mother, smile so winsomely. How could

  he not love what smiled such smiles at him? Long before

  your love he loved it, for even as you, also swollen, bore him,

  it was there—dissolved in the fluid that floats the seed.

  Look, we don’t love like flowers, with only one

  springtime behind us; a sap older than memory

  mounts in our arms when we love. O my girl,

  this: that we’ve loved, in ourselves, not the one still to come,

  but a foaming multitude; not one child alone,

  but fathers fallen inside us like the ruins of mountains;

  then the dry riverbeds mothers have become;

  and the whole of that silent landscape under its clear

  or cloudy destiny: this, girl, got here ahead of you.

  And you yourself, how could you know—that you’ve

  set prehistoric time to ticking in your lover. —What emotions

  were exhaled by extinct things. —What women,

  through him, hated you. —What sinister men you

  vivified in his youthful veins. Dead children

  reached out to you … Oh, gently, gently,

  give him a day’s work done with confidence and love. Lead him

  nearby a gracious garden; give him restorative nights …

  Hold him in …3

  THE FOURTH ELEGY

  O trees of life, when will your winter come?

  We’re not in tune. Not like migratory birds.

  Outmoded, late, in haste, we force ourselves on winds

  which let us down upon indifferent ponds.

  Though we’ve had to learn how flowering is fading,

  somewhere lions still roam,

  unaware, in their majesty, of any weakness.

  Bent upon one thing, we begin

  to feel its burden and the beckon of another.

  Hostility’s our neighborhood. Aren’t lovers

  always arriving at the borders of each other,

  although both promised breathing space, unimpeded hunting, home?

  Sometimes a backdrop will be carefully prepared

  so that a figure in the foreground

  will seem frank and open to us;

  but the contours of our feelings stay unknown

  when public pressure shapes the face we show.

  Who has not sat nervously before his own heart’s curtain?

  Up it goes: the scene is set for saying farewell.

  Easy to understand. The familiar garden

  swaying a little before the dancer comes in.

  Not him. Enough. However elegantly he pretends to move,

  he’s just a bourgeois in a costume,

  and enters his house by the kitchen door.

  I will not accept these half-filled masks:

  better, a puppet. It’s whole. I can endure

  the husk it has for body, its wires, its painted face.

  Hey! I’m waiting. Even if the lights go out;

  even if I’m told, “That’s all”; even if absence

  drifts toward me like a gray draft from the stage;

  even if none of my ancestors will sit silently by me anymore,

  nor a woman, nor the boy with the squinting brown eyes:

  I’ll stay in my seat. One can always watch.

  Am I not right? You, father, who found life bitter

  after you tasted mine, the first infusion of my infant self,

  who kept on tasting as my brewing grew,

  till, troubled by the aftertaste of such a foreign future,

  gazed into my cloudy eyes—you, who, so often

  since you died, have lodged your fears about me

  deep in my own hopes, giving up that calm

  the dead deserve, surrendering a peaceable kingdom

  for forebodings about my fate. Am I not right?

  and you
others, too—am I not right?—who must have loved me

  for that first show of love for you I always mislaid

  when the look which formed your face,

  even as I loved it, became remote as a place in the expanse of the world

  where you no longer were … when I’m inclined

  to wait before the puppet stage … no,

  to stare so intensely as to provoke an Angel to appear,

  a player to startle the stuffed skins into life.

  Angel and puppet: a real play at last.

  Then there comes together like clapping hands

  what our being here has pulled apart.

  Then the circuit of all cosmic movement can be seen

  to arise from the cycle of our seasons.

  Then over everything plays the Angel puppeteer.

  Surely the dying must sense what a sham it all is,

  that nothing is really itself. O hours of childhood,

  when behind each shape stood more than the past,

  and what lay before us was less than the future.

  We grew, and sometimes we wanted to hurry our growing,

  partly eager to equal the grown-up

  who had for his prize only that.

  Yet, when alone, we contented ourselves with what could not be clocked.

  We stood there in the pause between world and plaything,

  in that place which, from the first, had been set aside for a pure event.

  Who’ll show a child his proper place? set him among his stars,

  and put the measure of earth’s distance in his hands?

  Who makes the death of a child out of gray bread,

  or leaves it there to harden in the round mouth

  like the ragged core of a sweet apple? Murderers

  aren’t hard to understand. But this: to hold death,

  the whole of death, even before one’s life’s begun,

  to hold it gently, without complaint:

  this exceeds description.4

  THE FIFTH ELEGY

  Dedicated to Frau Hertha Koenig

  But tell me, who are they, these troupers,

  even more transient than we are—driven since childhood,

  and bent (for what? for whom?) by some tireless will?

  Because it wrings them, twists them, swings and flings them,

  tosses and catches them; and they descend

  as if the air were oiled and polished,

  to light on a carpet worn threadbare