The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  (Ibid.)

  l. 67, go away from the window:

  Ibsen spent his last days beside his window, observing with curiosity the people who passed by and in a way confusing these real people with the characters he might have created.

  (Ibid.)

  [The Temptation of the Saint]

  l. 1, those strange pictures: The reference is to the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder or of Hieronymus Bosch.

  [The Prodigal Son]

  Cf. Luke 15:11–32.

  l. 23, Tortuga: Island off northwest Haiti. In the seventeenth century it was a base for the French and English pirates who ravaged the Caribbean.

  l. 23, Campeche: Port in southeastern Mexico, frequently raided by pirates during the seventeenth century.

  l. 24, Vera Cruz: The chief port of entry of Mexico. It was looted by pirates in 1653 and 1712.

  l. 26, Deodatus of Gozon: A fourteenth-century member of the Order of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem (Knights of Malta). Because so many had lost their lives trying to kill the famous dragon of Rhodes, the Grand Master of the Order had forbidden all knights even to approach its cave. Deodatus went ahead and killed the dragon, but because of his disobedience he was stripped of his knighthood. Later he was pardoned, and in 1346 he himself became Grand Master.

  l. 103, Les Baux:

  Magnificent landscape in Provence, a land of shepherds, even today still imprinted with the remains of the castles built by the princes of Les Baux, a noble family of prodigious bravery, famous in the 14th and 15th centuries for the splendor and strength of its men and the beauty of its women. As far as the princes of Les Baux are concerned, one might well say that a petrified time outlasts this family. Its existence is, as it were, petrified in the harsh, silver-gray landscape into which the unheard-of castles have crumbled. This landscape, near Arles, is an unforgettable drama of Nature: a hill, ruins, and village, abandoned, entirely turned to rock again with all its houses and fragments of houses. Far around, pasture: hence the shepherd is evoked: here, at the theater of Orange, and on the Acropolis, moving with his herds, mild and timeless, like a cloud, across the still-excited places of a great dilapidation. Like most Provençal families, the princes of Les Baux were superstitious gentlemen. Their rise had been immense, their good fortune measureless, their wealth beyond compare. The daughters of this family walked about like goddesses and nymphs, the men were turbulent demigods. From their battles they brought back not only treasures and slaves, but the most unbelievable crowns; they called themselves, by the way, “Emperors of Jerusalem.” But in their coat-of-arms sat the worm of contradiction: to those who believe in the power of the number seven, “sixteen” appears the most dangerous counter-number, and the lords of Les Baux bore in their coat-of-arms the 16-rayed star (the star that led the three kings from the East and the shepherds to the manger in Bethlehem: for they believed that the family originated from the holy king Balthazar). The “good fortune” of this family was a struggle of the holy number “7” (they possessed cities, villages, and convents always in sevens) against the “16” rays of their coat-of-arms. And the seven succumbed.

  (To Witold Hulewicz, November 10, 1925)

  l. 108, Alyscamps: The ancient cemetery near Arles, with its uncovered sarcophagi.

  ll. 139 f., “sa patience de supporter une âme”: “his patience in enduring a soul.”

  This comes, I think, from Saint Theresa (of Avila).

  (To Witold Hulewicz, November 10, 1925)

  UNCOLLECTED POEMS, 1913–1918

  The Spanish Trilogy (Ronda, between January 6 and 14, 1913)

  ll. 41 f., the distant call of birds / already deep inside him:

  Later, he remembered certain moments in which the power of this moment was already contained, as in a seed. He thought of the hour in that other southern garden (Capri) when the call of a bird did not, so to speak, break off at the edge of his body, but was simultaneously outside and in his innermost being, uniting both into one uninterrupted space in which, mysteriously protected, only one single place of purest, deepest consciousness remained. On that occasion he had closed his eyes, so that he might not be confused, in so generous an experience, by the outline of his body, and the Infinite passed into him from all sides, so intimately that he believed he could feel the stars which had in the meantime appeared, gently reposing within his breast.

  (“An Experience,” 1913, SW 6, 1040)

  l. 54, the daily task of the shepherd:

  What I most took part in when I was in Ronda was the life of the shepherds on the great stony hillsides with the picturesque stone-oaks, each of them filling up with darkness the way a cloud’s shadow moves over the fields. The morning departure, when after their night’s rest the shepherds walk out carrying their long staffs on their shoulders; their quiet, lingering, contemplative outdoor presence, through which, in all its breadth, the greatness of the day pours down; and the evenings when they unrecognizably, with the twilight, climb up out of the valley in the air echoing with their flocks, and, above, on the valley’s rim, again darkly gather themselves into the simplest of forms; and that they still use the long slings woven of bast, just like the one which David put his stone into, and with an exactly aimed throw, frighten back a straying animal into the mass of the flock; and that the air knows the color and weave of their thick clothing and treats it as it treats the other tempered presences of Nature; in short, that there are people there who are placed out in the overflowing fullness which we are only sometimes aware of, when we step out of the world of human relationships or when we look up from a book: how such a figure is and endures and, almost godlike, walks on, unhurried, over the hurrying events in which we spend our lives: all this could be counted among the pure experiences which could teach us the days and nights and everything that is most elemental.

  (To Katharina Kippenberg, March 27, 1913)

  Ariel (Ronda, early in 1913)

  (after reading Shakespeare’s Tempest): Rilke had just read the play for the first time.

  l. 1, you had set him free: Cf. The Tempest, I.ii.250 ff.

  l. 12, to give up all your magic: Cf. The Tempest, V.i.50 ff.

  I know now that psychoanalysis would make sense for me only if I were really serious about the strange possibility of no longer writing, which during the completion of Malte I often dangled in front of my nose as a kind of relief. Then one might let one’s devils be exorcised, since in daily life they are truly just disturbing and painful. And if it happened that the angels left too, one would have to understand this as a further simplification and tell oneself that in the new profession (which?), there would certainly be no use for them.

  (To Lou Andreas-Salomé, January 24, 1912)

  [Straining so hard against the strength of night] (Paris, late February, 1913)

  The Vast Night (Paris, January 1914)

  [You who never arrived] (Paris, winter 1913/1914)

  Turning-point (Paris, June 20, 1914)

  Lou, dear, here is a strange poem, written this morning, which I am sending you right away because I involuntarily called it “Turning-point,” because it describes the turning-point which no doubt must come if I am to stay alive.

  (To Lou Andreas-Salomé, June 20, 1914)

  Epigraph, sacrifice: Rilke had defined sacrifice as “the boundless resolve, no longer limitable in any direction, to achieve one’s purest inner possibility.” (To Magda von Hattingberg, February 17, 1914)

  Epigraph, Kassner: Rudolf Kassner (1873–1959), Austrian writer. The Eighth Elegy is dedicated to him.

  l. 1, For a long time he attained it in looking:

  I love in-seeing. Can you imagine with me how glorious it is to in-see a dog, for example, as you pass it—by in-see I don’t mean to look through, which is only a kind of human gymnastic that lets you immediately come out again on the other side of the dog, regarding it merely, so to speak, as a window upon the human world lying behind it: not that; what I mean is to let yourself precisely into the dog’s center,
the point from which it begins to be a dog, the place in it where God, as it were, would have sat down for a moment when the dog was finished, in order to watch it during its first embarrassments and inspirations and to nod that it was good, that nothing was lacking, that it couldn’t have been better made. For a while you can endure being inside the dog; you just have to be alert and jump out in time, before its environment has completely enclosed you, since otherwise you would simply remain the dog in the dog and be lost for everything else. Though you may laugh, dear confidante, if I tell you where my very greatest feeling, my world-feeling, my earthly bliss was, I must confess to you: it was, again and again, here and there, in such in-seeing—in the indescribably swift, deep, timeless moments of this godlike in-seeing.

  (To Magda von Hattingberg, February 17, 1914)

  Lament (Paris, early July 1914)

  ‘We Must Die Because We Have Known Them’ (Paris, July 1914)

  Ptah-hotep: A high official under the pharaoh Asosi, during the Fifth Dynasty (ca. 2600 B.C.).

  To Hölderlin (Irschenhausen, September 1914)

  Hölderlin: Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), one of the greatest German poets.

  During the past few months I have been reading your edition of Hölderlin with extraordinary feeling and devotion. His influence upon me is great and generous, as only the influence of the richest and inwardly mightiest can be.… I cannot tell you how deeply these poems are affecting me and with what inexpressible clarity they stand before me.

  (To Norbert von Hellingrath, July 24, 29, 1914)

  l. 20, for years that you no longer counted: Hölderlin went incurably insane in 1806.

  [Exposed on the cliffs of the heart] (Irschenhausen, September 20, 1914)

  Death (Munich, November 9, 1915)

  Rilke told me how this poem arose. He was walking, alone as always, in a Munich park. All at once he seemed to see a hand before his eyes; on its level back a cup was standing. He saw this quite distinctly, and the verses describing it formed by themselves. He didn’t quite know what to make of this, and went home still hazy about the meaning of what had been begun. As in a dream he continued the poem to its conclusion—and understood. And suddenly the last three lines were there, in strongest contrast to the preceding ones. As for the shooting star, he had seen it in Toledo. One night he had been walking across the bridge and suddenly a glorious meteor had plunged across the sky, from the zenith down to the dark horizon, and vanished.—That was death, in all its wonder.

  (Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria Rilke, München-Berlin-Zürich: R. Oldenbourg, 1932, pp. 80 f.)

  l. 1, There stands death:

  Tolstoy’s enormous experience of Nature (I know hardly anyone who had so passionately entered inside Nature) made him astonishingly able to think and write out of a sense of the whole, out of a feeling for life which was permeated by the finest particles of death, a sense that death was contained everywhere in life, like a peculiar spice in life’s powerful flavor. But that was precisely why this man could be so deeply, so frantically terrified when he realized that somewhere there was pure death, the bottle full of death or the hideous cup with the handle broken off and the meaningless inscription “Faith, love, hope,” out of which people were forced to drink a bitterness of undiluted death.

  (To Lotte Hepner, November 8, 1915)

  l. 17, O shooting star:

  At the end of the poem “Death,” the moment is evoked (I was standing at night on the wonderful bridge of Toledo) when a star, falling through cosmic space in a tensed slow arc, simultaneously (how should I say this?) fell through my inner space: the body’s dividing outline was no longer there. And whereas this happened then through my eyes, once at an earlier time (in Capri) the same unity had been granted me through my hearing.

  (To Adelheid von der Marwitz, January 14, 1919)

  To Music (Munich, January 11–12, 1918)

  Written in the guestbook of Frau Hanna Wolff, after a concert at her house.

  DUINO ELEGIES (1923)

  The Elegies take their name from Duino Castle, on the Adriatic Sea, where Rilke spent the winter of 1911/1912 as a guest of his friend Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe (1855–1934); they are dedicated to her in gratitude, as having belonged to her from the beginning.

  Rilke later told me how these Elegies arose. He had felt no premonition of what was being prepared deep inside him; though there may be a hint of it in a letter he wrote: “The nightingale is approaching—” Had he perhaps felt what was to come? But once again it fell silent. A great sadness came over him; he began to think that this winter too would be without result.

  Then, one morning, he received a troublesome business letter. He wanted to take care of it quickly, and had to deal with numbers and other such tedious matters. Outside, a violent north wind was blowing, but the sun shone and the water gleamed as if covered with silver. Rilke climbed down to the bastions which, jutting out to the east and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by a narrow path along the cliffs, which abruptly drop off, for about two hundred feet, into the sea. Rilke walked back and forth, completely absorbed in the problem of how to answer the letter. Then, all at once, in the midst of his thoughts, he stopped; it seemed that from the raging storm a voice had called to him: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?”

  He stood still, listening. “What is that?” he whispered. “What is coming?”

  Taking out the notebook that he always carried with him, he wrote down these words, together with a few lines that formed by themselves without his intervention. He knew that the god had spoken.

  Very calmly he climbed back up to his room, set his notebook aside, and answered the difficult letter.

  By the evening the whole First Elegy had been written.

  (Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria Rilke, pp. 40 f.)

  The Second Elegy was written shortly afterward, along with a number of fragments, the Third and most of the Sixth a year later, and the Fourth in 1915. Then, after years of excruciating patience, the other Elegies came through during a few days in February 1922.

  My dear friend,

  late, and though I can barely manage to hold the pen, after several days of huge obedience in the spirit—, you must be told, today, right now, before I try to sleep:

  I have climbed the mountain!

  At last! The Elegies are here, they exist.…

  So.

  Dear friend, now I can breathe again and, calmly, go on to something manageable. For this was larger than life—during these days and nights I have howled as I did that time in Duino—but, even after that struggle there, I didn’t know that such a storm out of mind and heart could come over a person! That one has endured it! that one has endured.

  Enough. They are here.

  I went out into the cold moonlight and stroked the little tower of Muzot as if it were a large animal—the ancient walls that granted this to me.

  (To Anton Kippenberg, February 9, 1922)

  A year before his death, Rilke wrote to his Polish translator:

  Affirmation of life-AND-death turns out to be one in the Elegies.… We of the here-and-now are not for a moment satisfied in the world of time, nor are we bound in it; we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. In that vast “open” world, all beings are—one cannot say “contemporaneous,” for the very fact that time has ceased determines that they all are. Everywhere transience is plunging into the depths of Being.… It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again, “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible. The Elegies show us at this work, the work of the continual conversion of the beloved visible and tangible w
orld into the invisible vibrations and agitation of our own nature … Elegies and Sonnets support each other constantly—, and I consider it an infinite grace that, with the same breath, I was permitted to fill both these sails: the little rust-colored sail of the Sonnets and the Elegies’ gigantic white canvas.

  (To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

  The First Elegy (Duino, between January 12 and 16, 1912)

  ll. 1 f., among the angels’ / hierarchies:

  The angel of the Elegies is that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible, which we are accomplishing, already appears in its completion …; that being who guarantees the recognition of a higher level of reality in the invisible.—Therefore “terrifying” for us, because we, its lovers and transformers, still cling to the visible.

  (To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)

  “There is really everything in the ancient churches, no shrinking from anything, as there is in the newer ones, where only the ‘good’ examples appear. Here you see also what is bad and evil and horrible; what is deformed and suffering, what is ugly, what is unjust—and you could say that all this is somehow loved for God’s sake. Here is the angel, who doesn’t exist, and the devil, who doesn’t exist; and the human being, who does exist, stands between them, and (I can’t help saying it) their unreality makes him more real to me.”

  (“The Young Workman’s Letter,” February 12–15, 1922, SW 6, 1120 f.)

  l. 5, the beginning of terror:

  More and more in my life and in my work I am guided by the effort to correct our old repressions, which have removed and gradually estranged from us the mysteries out of whose abundance our lives might become truly infinite. It is true that these mysteries are dreadful, and people have always drawn away from them. But where can we find anything sweet and glorious that would never wear this mask, the mask of the dreadful? Life—and we know nothing else—, isn’t life itself dreadful? But as soon as we acknowledge its dreadfulness (not as opponents: what kind of match could we be for it?), but somehow with a confidence that this very dreadfulness may be something completely ours, though something that is just now too great, too vast, too incomprehensible for our learning hearts—: as soon as we accept life’s most terrifying dreadfulness, at the risk of perishing from it (i.e., from our own Too-much!)—: then an intuition of blessedness will open up for us and, at this cost, will be ours. Whoever does not, sometime or other, give his full consent, his full and joyous consent, to the dreadfulness of life, can never take possession of the unutterable abundance and power of our existence; can only walk on its edge, and one day, when the judgment is given, will have been neither alive nor dead. To show the identity of dreadfulness and bliss, these two faces on the same divine head, indeed this one single face, which just presents itself this way or that, according to our distance from it or the state of mind in which we perceive it—: this is the true significance and purpose of the Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus.