This advance will (at first much against the will of the outdistanced men) transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relation of one human being to another, no longer of man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this—that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
(To Franz Xaver Kappus, May 14, 1904)
l. 235, letting each other go: In describing his admiration for the “incomparable” Leonora Christina Ulfeldt, daughter of King Christian IV of Denmark, who, because her husband had been accused of high treason, was imprisoned in the Blue Tower in Copenhagen from 1663 until 1685, Rilke wrote:
It seems to me that you could predict her conduct in prison if you knew of a certain little scene that was enacted just before her arrest in England. At this critical moment it happened that a young officer who was sent to her misunderstood his orders and demanded that she take off all the jewelry she was wearing and hand it over to him. Although this ought to have startled her (since she was not yet aware that she was in any danger) and thrown her into the utmost alarm, nevertheless, after a moment’s consideration, she takes off all her jewels—the earrings, the necklaces, the brooches, the bracelets, the rings—and puts them into the officer’s hands. The young man brings these treasures to his superior, who, at first terrified, then enraged, at this imprudence, which threatens to upset the whole undertaking, orders him, curtly and in the coarsest language, to return and give everything back to the Countess, and to beg her forgiveness, in any way he can think of, for his unauthorized blunder. What happened now is unforgettable. After considering for a moment, not longer than that first moment was, Countess Ulfeldt gestures for the bewildered officer to follow her, walks over to the mirror, and there takes the magnificent necklaces and brooches and rings from his hands, as if from the hands of a servant, and puts them on, with the greatest attentiveness and serenity, one after another.
Tell me, dear friend, do you know any other story in which it is so sublimely evident how we ought to behave toward the vicissitudes of life? This went through and through me: this same repose vis-à-vis giving up and keeping, this repose that is so filled with power. This should truly be taken to heart: it is perhaps nothing more than what individual saints have done, who, because they have lost what they love or were reminded of the continual possibility of loss, threw off all possessions and condemned the very desire for possession (: for that may be an enormous, hardly surpassable achievement—.) But this is more human, more patient, more adequate. That gesture of renunciation is magnificent, thrilling,—but it is not without arrogance, which is again cancelled only because it, in its own way, already belongs to heaven. But this silent, composed keeping and letting go, on the contrary, is full of moderation, is still earthly, through and through, and yet is already so great as to be incomprehensible.
(To Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin, February 4, 1912)
l. 245, fame:
Rodin was solitary before he was famous. And fame, when it arrived, made him perhaps even more solitary. For fame is, after all, only the sum of all the misunderstandings that gather around a new name.
(Auguste Rodin, 1902, SW 5, 141)
ll. 264 f., an ancient enmity / between our daily life and the great work:
The modest domestic circumstances of Tolstoy, the lack of comfort in Rodin’s rooms—it all points to the same thing: that one must make up one’s mind: either this or that. Either happiness or art. On doit trouver le bonheur dans son art [one must find happiness in one’s art]: that too, more or less, is what Rodin said. And it is all so clear, so clear. The great artists have all let their lives become overgrown like an old path and have borne everything in their art. Their lives have become atrophied, like an organ they no longer use.
(To Clara Rilke, September 5, 1902)
Someday people will understand what made this great artist so great: the fact that he was a worker, who desired nothing but to enter, completely and with all his powers, into the humble and austere reality of his art. In this there was a certain renunciation of life. But precisely by such patience did he win life: for the world offered itself to his art.
(Auguste Rodin, 1902, SW 5, 201)
UNCOLLECTED POEMS, 1911–1920
[To Lou Andreas-Salomé] (Duino, November or December 1911)
[The Almond Trees in Blossom] (Ronda, approximately January 1, 1913)
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)
[Ignorant before the heavens of my life] (Paris, spring 1913)
[Overflowing heavens of lavished stars
] (Paris, April 1913)
[Startle me, Music, with rhythmical fury!] (Paris, May 1913)
[Behind the innocent trees] (Heiligendamm, first half of August 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.E.).
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)
[Again and again, however we know the landscape of love] (end of 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, p. 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.
[You, you only, exist] (Berg am Irchel, December 25, 1920)
Haiku (Berg am Irchel, December 25, 1920)
UNCOLLECTED POEMS, 1922–1926
[We, in the struggling nights] (Muzot, February 9, 1922)
Odette R.… (Muzot, December 21, 1922)
Written in a copy of The Notebooks of Make Laurids Brigge for Margarethe Masson-Ruffy, in memory of her sister, Odette Ruffy, a painter, who had died young.
[We say release, and radiance, and roses] (Muzot, approximately May 20, 1923)
Rilke wrote these verses in a book of his poems transcribed by his old friend Marie von Thurn und Taxis for her eldest granddaughter. He added the following inscription: “Written (on Pentecost 1923, during her visit to Muzot) for Princess Marie-Thérèse von Thurn und Taxis, as a ‘clasp’ for the lovingly chosen sequence on the previous pages.”
Imaginary Career (Schöneck, September 15, 1923)
Little Tear-Vase (Schöneck, September 16, 1923)
Second section of “Two Poems (for E.S.),” dedicated to Elisabeth Gundolf-Salomon.
Dedication to M.… (Muzot, November 6 and 8, 1923)
Written for Rilke’s lover, the artist Baladine Klossowska (a.k.a. Merline), in a copy of the Duino Elegies.
For Max Picard (Muzot, November 1923)
Written in a copy of the Duino Elegies. Max Picard was a doctor and writer whom Rilke met in 1918.
For Hans Carossa (Muzot, February 7, 1924)
Hans Carossa was a doctor and a well-known German poet. Rilke wrote this dedication-poem in a copy of the Duino Elegies.
The Magician (Muzot, February 12, 1924)
This poem grew out of some verses written in a copy of the Duino Elegies intended for Gertrud Ouckama Knoop. It is dated “12.II. (around midnight).”
[As once the wingèd energy of delight] (Muzot, mid-February 1924)
[Along the sun-drenched roadside, from the great] (Muzot, beginning of June 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)<
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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)
Mausoleum (Muzot, October 1924)
O Lacrimosa (Paris, May or June 1925)