[iii]
Lofty god of distant harmonies
I sense you everywhere deep in every Thing
upon the gently patterned slope the trees
stand silent as when first they heard you sing
[iv]
Mirror, you doppelgänger of space! O mirror, into you go
plunging the halves of smiles / perhaps the sweetest; for how
often the master’s preliminary brushstroke, upon the
provisional page more fruitfully leaps up than, later,
the more controlled outline does on the ready background:
So do you, O unsayable presence, smile forth
your morning’s descent and freedom into the ever-
accepting mirrors
[v]
Forever, O nymph, how long / I have marveled at you, amazed,
though you never stepped into my sight from out of the closed-in tree—.
I am the time that is passing—you are the youngest age,
all that you asked from the gods has remained here, forever new.
Dein ist die Wiese, sie schwankt noch jetzt von dem Sprunge,
jenem mit dem du zuletzt in die Ulme verschwandst.
Einst in der christlichen Früh. Und ist nicht, du junge,
Dir unser erstes Gefühl in den Frühling gepflanzt.
Eh uns ein Mädchen noch rührt, bist du die gemeinte
[vi]
………. Braun’s
……… an den sonoren
trockenen Boden des Walds
trommelt das Flüchten des Fauns
[vii]
Dies ist das schweigende Steigen der Phallen
[viii]
Von meiner Antwort weiß ich noch nicht
wann ich sie sagen werde.
Aber, horch eine Harke, die schon schafft.
Oben allein im Weinberg spricht
schon ein Mann mit der Erde.
[ix]
Hast du des Epheus wechselnde Blättergestalten
[x]
Wahre dich besser
wahre dich Wandrer
mit dem selber auch gehenden Weg
Yours is the meadow, even now it sways from the leap
with which you finally vanished into the elm.
Once, in the christian dawn. And our earliest hope:
for your sake isn’t it planted into the springtime?
Before we are moved by a girl, it is you that we think of
[vi]
………. of the brown
………. on the sonorous
dried-up earth of the forest
drums the flight of the faun
[vii]
This is the silent rising of the phalli
[viii]
About my answer: I still don’t know
when I will bring it forth.
But listen, a harrow that already creates.
Up there in the vineyard someone, alone,
already speaks with the earth.
[ix]
Have you [?ever observed] the changing leaf-forms of the ivy
[x]
Protect yourself better
protect yourself wanderer
with the road that is walking too
[xi]
Laß uns Legenden der Liebe hören.
Zeig uns ihr kühnes köstliches Leid.
Wo sie im Recht war, war alles Beschwören,
hier ist das meiste verleugneter Eid.
[xi]
Gather us now to hear love’s legends.
Tell us of its daring, exquisite throes.
Where it was right, all things could be summoned;
here there are mostly abandoned vows.
Notes
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, p. 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 world 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 W
itold 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 old 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,” this page)
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.
(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, April 12, 1923)
l. 13, our interpreted world:
We, with a word or finger-sign,
gradually make the world our own,
though perhaps its weakest, most precarious part.
(Sonnets to Orpheus XVI, First Part)
l. 36, women in love:
Certainly I have no window on human beings. They yield themselves to me only insofar as they take on words within me, and during these last few years they have been communicating with me almost entirely through two forms, upon which I base my inferences about human beings in general. What speaks to me of humanity—immensely, with a calm authority that fills my hearing with space—is the phenomenon of those who have died young and, even more absolutely, purely, inexhaustibly: the woman in love. In these two figures humanity gets mixed into my heart whether I want it to or not. They step forward on my stage with the clarity of the marionette (which is an exterior entrusted with conviction) and, at the same time, as completed types, which nothing can go beyond, so that the definitive natural-history of their souls could now be written.
As for the woman in love (I am not thinking of Saint Theresa or such magnificence of that sort): she yields herself to my observation much more distinctly, purely, i.e., undilutedly and (so to speak) unappliedly in the situation of Gaspara Stampa, Louize Labé, certain Venetian courtesans, and, above all, Marianna Alcoforado, that incomparable creature, in whose eight heavy letters woman’s love is for the first time charted from point to point, without display, without exaggeration or mitigation, drawn as if by the hand of a sibyl. And there—my God—there it becomes evident that, as a result of the irresistible logic of woman’s heart, this line was finished, perfected, not to be continued any further in the earthly realm, and could be prolonged only toward the divine, into infinity.
(To Annette Kolb, January 23, 1912)
l. 46, Gaspara Stampa (1523–1554): An Italian noblewoman who wrote of her unhappy love for Count Collaltino di Collalto in a series of some two hundred sonnets.
l. 36, those who died young:
In Padua, where one sees the tombstones of many young men who died there (while they were students at the famous university), in Bologna, in Venice, in Rome, everywhere, I stood as a pupil of death: stood before death’s boundless knowledge and let myself be educated. You must also remember how they lie resting in the churches of Genoa and Verona, those youthful forms, not envious of our coming and going, fulfilled within themselves, as if in their death-spasms they had for the first time bitten into the fruit of life, and were now, forever, savoring its unfathomable sweetness.
(To Magda von Hattingberg, February 16, 1914)
l. 67, Santa Maria Formosa: A church in Venice, which Rilke had visited in 1911. The reference is to one of the commemorative tablets, inscribed with Latin verses, on the church walls—probably the one that reads (in translation): “I lived for others while life lasted; now, after death, / I have not perished, but in cold marble I live for myself. / I was Willem Hellemans. Flanders mourns me, / Adria sighs for me, poverty calls me. / Died October 16, 1593.”
l. 86, through both realms:
Death is the side of life that is turned away from us and not illuminated. We must try to achieve the greatest possible consciousness of our existence, which is at home in both these unlimited realms, and inexhaustibly nourished by both. The true form of life extends through both regions, the blood of the mightiest circulation pulses through both: there is neither a this-world nor an other-world, but only the great unity, in which the “angels,” those beings who surpass us, are at home.
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)
l. 93, the lament for Linus: This ritual lament is mentioned in the Iliad, as part of a scene that Hephaestus fashioned on the shield of Achilles:
Girls and young men, with carefree hearts and innocent laughter, were carrying the honey-sweet grapes, piled up in wicker baskets; in their midst, a boy performed the ancient music of yearning, plucking his clear-toned lyre and singing the lament for Linus with his lovely voice, while the others moved to the powerful rhythm, their feet pounding in the dance, leaping and shouting for joy.
(Iliad 18, 567 ff.)
According to one myth, Linus was a poet who died young and was mourned by Apollo, his father. Other versions state that he was the greatest poet of all time and was killed by Apollo in a jealous rage; or that he invented music and was the teacher of Orpheus.
The Second Elegy (Duino, late January–early February, 1912)
l. 3, Tobias: A young man in the apocryphal Book of Tobit. The story portrays, in passing, the easy, casual contact between a human being and an angel: “And when he went to look for a man to accompany him to Rages, he found Raphael, who was an angel. But Tobias did not know that.… And when Tobias had prepared everything necessary for the journey, his father Tobit said, ‘Go with this man, and may God prosper your journey, and may the angel of God go with you.’ So they both departed, and the young man’s dog went along with them.”
Tobit 5:4, 16 (in the Codex Vaticanus)
l. 12, pollen of the flowering godhead:
What is shown so beautifully in the world of plants—how they make no secret of their secret, as if they knew that it would always be safe—is exactly what I experienced in front of the sculptures in Egypt and what I h
ave always experienced, ever since, in front of Egyptian Things: this exposure of a secret that is so thoroughly secret, through and through, in every place, that there is no need to hide it. And perhaps everything phallic (as I fore-thought in the temple of Karnak, for I couldn’t yet think it) is just a setting-forth of the human hidden secret in the sense of the open secret of Nature. I can’t remember the smile of the Egyptian gods without thinking of the word “pollen.”
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 20, 1914)
ll. 16 f., mirrors: which scoop up the beauty …:
The case of the Portuguese nun is so wonderfully pure because she doesn’t fling the streams of her emotion on into the imaginary, but rather, with infinite strength, conducts this magnificent feeling back into herself: enduring it, and nothing else. She grows old in the convent, very old; she doesn’t become a saint, or even a good nun. It is repugnant to her exquisite tact to apply to God what, from the very beginning, had never been intended for him, and what the Comte de Chamilly could disdain. And yet it was almost impossible to stop the heroic onrush of this love before its final leap: almost impossible, with such a powerful emotion pulsing in her innermost being, not to become a saint. If she—that measurelessly glorious creature—had yielded for even a moment, she would have plunged into God like a stone into the sea. And if it had pleased God to attempt with her what he continually does with the angels, casting all their radiance back into them—: I am certain that, immediately, just as she was, in that sad convent, she would have become an angel, in her deepest self.