II, 23 (Muzot, February 17/23, 1922)
Rilke’s note: “To the reader.”
l. 3, a dog’s imploring glance:
Alas, I have not completely gotten over expecting the “nouvelle opération” to come from some human intervention; and yet, what’s the use, since it is my lot to pass the human by, as it were, and arrive at the extreme limit, the edge of the earth, as recently in Cordova, when an ugly little bitch, in the last stage of pregnancy, came up to me. She was not a remarkable animal, was full of accidental puppies over whom no great fuss would be made; but since we were all alone, she came over to me, hard as it was for her, and raised her eyes enlarged by trouble and inwardness and sought my glance—and in her own there was truly everything that goes beyond the individual, to I don’t know where, into the future or into the incomprehensible. The situation ended in her getting a lump of sugar from my coffee, but incidentally, oh so incidentally, we read Mass together, so to speak; in itself, the action was nothing but giving and receiving, yet the sense and the seriousness and our whole silent understanding was beyond all bounds.
(To Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, December 17, 1912)
II, 24 (Muzot, February 19/23, 1922)
l. 5, Gods:
Does it confuse you that I say God and gods and, for the sake of completeness, haunt you with these dogmatic words (as with a ghost), thinking that they will have some kind of meaning for you also? But grant, for a moment, that there is a realm beyond the senses. Let us agree that from his earliest beginnings man has created gods in whom just the deadly and menacing and destructive and terrifying elements in life were contained—its violence, its fury, its impersonal bewilderment—all tied together into one thick knot of malevolence: something alien to us, if you wish, but something which let us admit that we were aware of it, endured it, even acknowledged it for the sake of a sure, mysterious relationship and inclusion in it. For we were this too; only we didn’t know what to do with this side of our experience; it was too large, too dangerous, too many-sided, it grew above and beyond us, into an excess of meaning; we found it impossible (what with the many demands of a life adapted to habit and achievement) to deal with these unwieldy and ungraspable forces; and so we agreed to place them outside us.—But since they were an overflow of our own being, its most powerful element, indeed were too powerful, were huge, violent, incomprehensible, often monstrous—: how could they not, concentrated in one place, exert an influence and ascendancy over us? And, remember, from the outside now. Couldn’t the history of God be treated as an almost never-explored area of the human soul, one that has always been postponed, saved, and finally neglected … ?
And then, you see, the same thing happened with death. Experienced, yet not to be fully experienced by us in its reality, continually overshadowing us yet never truly acknowledged, forever violating and surpassing the meaning of life—it too was banished and expelled, so that it might not constantly interrupt us in the search for this meaning. Death, which is probably so close to us that the distance between it and the life-center inside us cannot be measured, now became something external, held farther away from us every day, a presence that lurked somewhere in the void, ready to pounce upon this person or that in its evil choice. More and more, the suspicion grew up against death that it was the contradiction, the adversary, the invisible opposite in the air, the force that makes all our joys wither, the perilous glass of our happiness, out of which we may be spilled at any moment.…
All this might still have made a kind of sense if we had been able to keep God and death at a distance, as mere ideas in the realm of the mind—: but Nature knew nothing of this banishment that we had somehow accomplished—when a tree blossoms, death as well as life blossoms in it, and the field is full of death, which from its reclining face sends forth a rich expression of life, and the animals move patiently from one to the other—and everywhere around us, death is at home, and it watches us out of the cracks in Things, and a rusty nail that sticks out of a plank somewhere, does nothing day and night except rejoice over death.
(To Lotte Hepner, November 8, 1915)
II, 28 (Muzot, February 19/23, 1922)
Rilke’s note: “To Vera.”
II, 29 (Muzot, February 19/23, 1922)
Rilke’s note: “To a friend of Vera’s.”
l. 3, like a bell:
With this bell tower the little island, in all its fervor, is attached to the past; the tower fixes the dates and dissolves them again, because ever since it was built it has been ringing out time and destiny over the lake, as though it included in itself the visibility of all the lives that have been surrendered here; as though again and again it were sending their transitoriness into space, invisibly, in the sonorous transformations of its notes.
(To Countess Aline Dietrichstein, June 26, 1917)
l. 4, What feeds upon your face:
O und die Nacht, die Nacht, wenn der Wind voller Weltraum uns am Angesicht zehrt— …
Oh and the night, the night, when the wind full of cosmic space feeds upon our face—…
(First Elegy, ll. 18 f.)
Erkennst du mich, Luft, du, voll noch einst meiniger Orte?
Do you recognize me, Air, still full of places once mine?
(Sonnets to Orpheus II, 1, l. 12)
l. 10, in their magic ring:
[The poet’s] is a naive, aeolian soul, which is not ashamed to dwell where the senses intersect [sich kreuzen], and which lacks nothing, because these unfolded senses form a ring in which there are no gaps …
(“The Books of a Woman in Love,” 1907, SW 6, 1018)
UNCOLLECTED POEMS, 1923–1926
Imaginary Career (Schöneck, September 15, 1923)
[As once the wingèd energy of delight] (Muzot, mid-February 1924)
[What birds plunge through is not the intimate space] (Muzot, June 16, 1924)
Duration of Childhood (Ragaz, July 4 or 5, 1924)
Dedication, E.M.: Erika Mitterer. In May 1924, at the age of eighteen, she had sent Rilke two poems, initiating an extensive correspondence in verse, from which this poem and “Dove that ventured outside” are taken.
[World was in the face of the beloved] (Ragaz, mid-July 1924)
Palm (Muzot, around October 1, 1924)
Gravity (Muzot, October 5, 1924)
This “taking life heavily” that my books are filled with … means nothing (don’t you agree?) but a taking according to true weight, and thus according to truth: an attempt to weigh Things by the carat of the heart, instead of by suspicion, happiness, or chance.
(To Rudolf Bodländer, March 13, 1922)
He who is solitary … can remember that all beauty in animals and plants is a silent, enduring form of love and yearning, and he can see animals, as he sees plants, patiently and willingly uniting and increasing and growing, not out of physical pleasure, not out of physical pain, but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain, and more powerful than will and withstanding. If only human beings could more humbly receive this mystery—which the world is filled with, even in its smallest Things—, could bear it, endure it, more solemnly, feel how terribly heavy it is, instead of taking it lightly. If only they could be more reverent toward their own fruitfulness, which is essentially one, whether it is manifested as mental or physical …
(To Franz Xaver Kappus, July 16, 1903)
Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit …
(Ibid., May 14, 1904)
O Lacrimosa (Paris, May or June 1925)
O Lacrimosa: “O tearful [woman].” The epithet usually refers to Mary lamenting for Jesus at the foot of the cross.
Ernst Křenek (1900–1991): Austrian composer. His setting for this poem, for “high voice” with piano accompaniment, was published in 1926 as his opu
s 48.
You know that, in general, all attempts to surprise my verses with music have been unpleasant for me, since they are unrequested additions to something already complete in itself. It has rarely happened that I have written verses which seemed either suited for, or in need of, stirring up the musical element, out of a mutual center. With the little trilogy “O Lacrimosa” (which would like to pretend an imaginary Italian origin, in order to be still more anonymous than it already is—) something remarkable happened to me: this poem arose for music—, and then came the wish that sometime (sooner or later) it might be your music in which these impulses could find their fulfillment and their permanence.
(To Ernst Křenek, November 5, 1925)
[Now it is time that gods came walking out] (Muzot, mid-October 1925)
[Rose, oh pure contradiction] (In the testament of October 27, 1925)
Idol (First line: Paris, summer 1925; completed: Muzot, November, 1925)
Gong (Muzot, November 1925)
[Four Sketches] (Muzot, December 8, 1925)
The “little notebook with four prose-pieces” was sent to Monique Briod on December 10.
l. 8, Rustic Chapel: The small St. Anne chapel next to Muzot.
… the abandoned rustic chapel which I take care of; because of its decrepitude, no mass is read in it any longer, and so it is now given back to all the gods and is always filled with open simple homage.
(To Clara Rilke, April 23, 1923)
l. 17, “Farfallettina”: Little butterfly.
l. 26, bilboquet: A wooden toy, consisting of a cord with a ball on one end and a stick on the other; the object of the game is to catch the ball on the spike-end of the stick.
Elegy (Muzot, June 8, 1926)
Dedication, Marina Tsvetayeva (1892–1941): One of the great modern Russian poets. She and Rilke never met in person, but they exchanged a number of intense letters during the spring and summer of 1926. Her long elegy, “Novo-godnee” (“For the New Year”), written early in 1927, describes the impact of Rilke’s death on her.
l. 18, Kom Ombo: Probably a stop on Rilke’s trip to Egypt in 1911.
l. 20, marks as a signal on the doors: Cf. Exodus 12:7, 13.
[Dove that ventured outside] (Ragaz, August 24, 1926)
Written to Erika Mitterer after she had undergone a serious operation.
That a person who through the horrible obstructions of those years had felt himself split to the very depths of his soul, into a Once and an irreconcilable, dying Now: that such a person should experience the grace of perceiving how in yet more mysterious depths, beneath this torn-open split, the continuity of his work and of his spirit was being re-established—this seems to me more than just a private event. For with it, a measure is given for the inexhaustible stratification of our nature; and many people who, for one reason or another, believe that they have been torn apart, might draw special comfort from this example of continuability. (The thought occurs to me that this comfort too may somehow have entered into the achievement of the great Elegies, so that they express themselves more completely than they could have done without endangerment and rescue.)
(To Arthur Fischer-Colbrie, December 18, 1925)
AFTERWORD
R.M.R. in memoriam
You honored what is heaviest. You knew
the pull of earth; and you were pulled apart
by the dark angel’s voice that seemed as though
it called from somewhere outside your own heart.
You chose the tao of suffering, which led
past every common joy, past the humane
fulfillments, and delivered you instead
to cancer, in a Nessus’-shirt of pain.
Now, breathless, weightless, you can only fall
into yourself: the invisible, unheard
center that you sang. Ahead of all
parting, you might lean back against your chair
and see a sun-lit garden path. A bird
might whistle through you, in the cool morning air.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Michael André Bernstein, Chana Bloch, Jonathan Galassi (my editor), W. S. Merwin, and Robert Pinsky for their many valuable comments. A letter from Ralph Freedman persuaded me to include the two sections of early poems. I had help with the German of several of the uncollected poems from Jutta Hahne, and with the French prose-poems from my brother, to whom this book is dedicated, with love.
During the months when I was studying the Elegies, I lived in close daily contact with Jacob Steiner’s great line-by-line commentary, Rilkes Duineser Elegien (Bern/München: Francke Verlag, 1962), and found it an almost never-failing source of illumination.
Finally, I must acknowledge my debt to the work of J. B. Leishman, M. D. Herter Norton, and C. F. MacIntyre, and to the Young, Boney, Guerne, and Gaspar versions of the Elegies, the Poulin Elegies and Sonnets, the Betz Cahiers de M. L. Brigge, and miscellaneous translations by Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Robert Bly, W. D. Snodgrass, and Rika Lesser.
And my greatest debt: to Vicki.
INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES
(English)
A ghost, though invisible, still is like a place
A god can do it. But will you tell me how
A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
Ah, poems amount to so little
Ah, Women, that you should be moving
Alcestis
All this stood upon her and was the world
And it was almost a girl who, stepping from
And night and distant rumbling; now the army’s
Antistrophes
Archaic Torso of Apollo
Ariel
As on all its sides a kitchen-match darts white
As once the wingèd energy of delight
At first a childhood, limitless and free
Autumn Day
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were
Before Summer Rain
[Bird-feeders, The]
Black Cat
Blindman’s Song, the
Buddha in Glory
But tell me, who are they, these wanderers, even more
But you now, dear girl, whom I loved like a flower whose name
Call me to the one among your moments
Center, how from all beings
Center of all centers, core of cores
Death
Dove that ventured outside
Drinking from this cup
Drunkard’s Song, The
Duration of Childhood
Dwarf's Song, The
Eighth Elegy, The
Elegy
Enchanted thing: how can two chosen words
Erect no gravestone to his memory; just
Evening
Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas
Everything is far
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there
[Faces]
[Fears]
Fifth Elegy, The
Fig-tree, for such a long time I have found meaning
First Elegy, The
Flamingos, The
For a long time he attained it in looking
[For the Sake of a Single Poem]
[Four Sketches]
Fourth Elegy, The
[Fragment of an Elegy]
From this cloud, look!, which has so wildly covered
Gazelle, The
God or goddess of the sleep of cats
Going Blind
Gong
Gravity
Grownup, The
Have I said it before?
How well I understand those strange pictures
I am blind, you outsiders. It is a curse
I am lying in my bed five flights up
I am, O Anxious One. Don’t you hear my voice
I don’t underestimate it
I find you, Lord, in all Things and in all
I have my dead, and I have let them go
[Ibsen]
Idiot’s Song, The
Idol
Imaginary Career
In the eyes: dream. The brow as if it could feel
Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk
It is one thing to sing the beloved. Another, alas
It wasn’t in me. It went out and in
It would be difficult to persuade me
Lament (Everything is far)
Lament (Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely)
Last Evening, The
Long afternoons of childhood.…, not yet really
Look at the flowers, so faithful to what is earthly
Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by
Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps
My soul itself may be straight and good
Ninth Elegy, The
No longer for ears … : sound
Not wooing, no longer shall wooing, voice that has outgrown it
Now it is time that gods came walking out
Now shall I praise the cities, those long-surviving
O Lacrimosa
O trees of life, when does your winter come?
Often I gazed at you in wonder: stood at the window begun
Oh come and go. You, almost still a child
Oh tear-filled figure who, like a sky held back
Oh the delight, ever new, out of loosened soil!
Oh the losses into the All, Marina, the stars that are falling!
Oh this is the animal that never was
Once, somewhere, somehow, you had set him free
Only in the realm of Praising should Lament
[Original Version of the Tenth Elegy]
Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes
Palm
Panther, The
Portrait of My Father as a Young Man
Praising is what matters! He was summoned for that
[Prodigal Son, The]
Requiem for a Friend