(To Annette Kolb, January 23, 1912)
l. 20, like a perfume: The reference in the original text is to ambergris or incense burning on a hot coal. (Ernst Zinn, editor’s note, SW 1, 792)
ll. 56–59, you touch so blissfully because …/ you feel pure duration: In a letter to Princess Marie about her translation of this Elegy into Italian, Rilke wrote, “I am concerned about this passage, which is so dear to me,” and after quoting it, he continued:
This is meant quite literally: that the place where the lover puts his hand is thereby withheld from passing away, from aging, from all the near-disintegration that is always occurring in our integral nature—that simply beneath his hand, this place lasts, is. It must be possible, just as literally, to make this clear in Italian; in any paraphrase it is simply lost. Don’t you agree? And I think of these lines with a special joy in having been able to write them.
(To Princess Marie von Thurn und
Taxis-Hohenlohe, December 16, 1913)
l. 66, Weren’t you astonished: This is said to the lovers.
ll. 66 f., the caution of human gestures / on Attic gravestones:
Once, in Naples I think, in front of some ancient gravestone, it flashed through me that I should never touch people with stronger gestures than the ones depicted there. And I really think that sometimes I get so far as to express the whole impulse of my heart, without loss or destiny, by gently placing my hand on someone’s shoulder. Wouldn’t that, Lou, wouldn’t that be the only progress conceivable within the “restraint” that you ask me to remember?
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, January 10, 1912)
One of his most definite emotions was to marvel at Greek gravestones of the earliest period: how, upon them, the mutual touching, the resting of hand in hand, the coming of hand to shoulder, was so completely unpossessive. Indeed, it seemed as if in these lingering gestures (which no longer operated in the realm of fate) there was no trace of sadness about a future parting, since the hands were not troubled by any fear of ending or any presentiment of change, since nothing approached them but the long, pure solitude in which they were conscious of themselves as the images of two distant Things that gently come together in the unprovable inner depths of a mirror.
(Notebook entry, early November 1910; quoted in
F.W. Wodtke, Rilke und Klopstock, Kiel diss., 1948, p. 28)
The Third Elegy (The beginning—probably the whole first section—: Duino, January/February 1912; continued and completed in Paris, late autumn 1913)
ll. 26 ff., Mother, you made him small …:
O night without objects. Dim, outward-facing window; doors that were carefully shut; arrangements from long ago, transmitted, believed in, never quite understood. Silence on the staircase, silence from adjoining rooms, silence high up on the ceiling. O mother: you who are without an equal, who stood before all this silence, long ago in childhood. Who took it upon yourself to say: Don’t be afraid; I’m here. Who in the night had the courage to be this silence for the child who was frightened, who was dying of fear. You strike a match, and already the noise is you. And you hold the lamp in front of you and say: I’m here; don’t be afraid. And you put it down, slowly, and there is no doubt: you are there, you are the light around the familiar, intimate Things, which are there without afterthought, good and simple and sure. And when something moves restlessly in the wall, or creaks on the floor: you just smile, smile transparently against a bright background into the terrified face that looks at you, searching, as if you knew the secret of every half-sound, and everything were agreed and understood between you. Does any power equal your power among the lords of the earth? Look: kings lie and stare, and the teller of tales cannot distract them. Though they lie in the blissful arms of their favorite mistress, horror creeps over them and makes them palsied and impotent. But you come and keep the monstrosity behind you and are entirely in front of it; not like a curtain it can lift up here or there. No: as if you had caught up with it as soon as the child cried out for you. As if you had arrived far ahead of anything that might still happen, and had behind you only your hurrying-in, your eternal path, the flight of your love.
(The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, New York:
Random House, 1983, p. 75 f.)
l. 82, some confident daily task:
In the long, complicated solitude in which Malte was written, I felt perfectly certain that the strength with which I paid for him originated to a great extent from certain evenings on Capri when nothing happened except that I sat near two elderly women and a girl and watched their needlework, and sometimes at the end was given an apple that one of them had peeled.
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, January 10, 1912)
The Fourth Elegy (Munich, November 22–23, 1915)
l. 27, It at least is full: This passage was influenced by Heinrich von Kleist’s short essay-dialogue “On the Marionette Theater” (1810), which Rilke called “a masterpiece that again and again fills me with astonishment” (To Princess Marie, December 13, 1913). Kleist’s character Herr C., in comparing the marionette and the human dancer, says that the marionette has two advantages:
First of all, a negative one: that it would never behave affectedly.… In addition, these puppets have the advantage that they are antigravitational. They know nothing of the inertia of matter, that quality which is most resistant to the dance: because the force that lifts them into the air is greater than the force that binds them to the earth.… Puppets need the ground only in order to touch it lightly, like elves, and reanimate the swing of their limbs through this momentary stop. We humans need it to rest on so that we can recover from the exertion of the dance. This moment of rest is clearly no dance in itself; the best we can do with it is to make it as inconspicuous as possible.
l. 35, the boy with the immovable brown eye: Rilke’s cousin, who died at the age of seven. See note to Sonnets to Orpheus VIII, Second Part, this page.
Beside this lady sat the small son of a female cousin, a boy about as old as I, but smaller and more delicate. His pale, slender neck rose out of a pleated ruff and disappeared beneath a long chin. His lips were thin and closed tightly, his nostrils trembled a bit, and only one of his beautiful dark-brown eyes was movable. It sometimes glanced peacefully and sadly in my direction, while the other eye remained pointed toward the same corner, as if it had been sold and was no longer being taken into account.
(The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, p. 28)
l. 44, within my deepest hope:
As for myself, what has died for me has died, so to speak, into my own heart: when I looked for him, the person who vanished has collected himself strangely and so surprisingly in me, and it was so moving to feel he was now only there that my enthusiasm for serving his new existence, for deepening and glorifying it, took the upper hand almost at the very moment when pain would otherwise have invaded and devastated the whole landscape of my spirit. When I remember how I—often with the utmost difficulty in understanding and accepting each other—loved my father! Often, in childhood, my mind became confused and my heart grew numb at the mere thought that someday he might no longer be; my existence seemed to me so wholly conditioned through him (my existence, which from the start was pointed in such a different direction!) that his departure was to my innermost self synonymous with my own destruction …, but so deeply is death rooted in the essence of love that (if only we are cognizant of death without letting ourselves be misled by the uglinesses and suspicions that have been attached to it) it nowhere contradicts love: where, after all, can it drive out someone whom we have carried unsay ably in our heart except into this very heart, where would the “idea” of this loved being exist, and his unceasing influence (: for how could that cease which even while he lived with us was more and more independent of his tangible presence)… where would this always secret influence be more secure than in us?! Where can we come closer to it, where more purely celebrate it, when obey it better, than when it appears combined with our own voices, as if our heart h
ad learned a new language, a new song, a new strength!
(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, January 6, 1923)
l. 59, Angel and puppet: In Kleist’s essay the narrator goes on to say that
no matter how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe that a mechanical marionette could contain more grace than there is in the structure of the human body.
Herr C. replied that, in fact, it is impossible for a human being to be anywhere near as graceful as a marionette. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. Here is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet.
I was more and more astonished, and didn’t know what I should say to such extraordinary assertions.
It seemed, he said, as he took a pinch of snuff, that I hadn’t read the third chapter of the Book of Genesis with sufficient attention; and if a man wasn’t familiar with that first period of all human development, one could hardly expect to converse with him about later periods, and certainly not about the final ones.
I told him that I was well aware what disorders consciousness produces in the natural grace of a human being. [Here follow two anecdotes: the first about a young man who by becoming aware of his physical beauty loses it; the second about a pet bear who can easily parry the thrusts of the most accomplished swordsman.]
“Now, my dear fellow,” said Herr C., “you are in possession of everything you need in order to understand the point I am making. We see that in the world of Nature, the dimmer and weaker intellect grows, the more radiantly and imperiously grace emerges. But just as a section drawn through two lines, considered from one given point, after passing through infinity, suddenly arrives on the other side of that point; or as the image in a concave mirror, after vanishing into infinity, suddenly reappears right in front of us: so grace too returns when knowledge has, as it were, gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form in which consciousness is either nonexistent or infinite, i.e., in the marionette or in the god.”
“Does that mean,” I said, a bit bewildered, “that we must eat again of the Tree of Knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence?”
“Certainly,” he answered. “That is the last chapter in the history of the world.”
There is a complete translation of the essay in TLS, October 20, 1978.
l. 77, a pure event:
Extensive as the “external” world is, with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, the depth-dimensions, of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited.… It seems to me more and more as though our ordinary consciousness inhabited the apex of a pyramid whose base in us (and, as it were, beneath us) broadens out to such an extent that the farther we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense, worldly, existence, which are not dependent on time and space. From my earliest youth I have felt the intuition (and have also, as far as I could, lived by it) that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper, “normal,” apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience only as entropy.
(To Nora Purtscher-Wydenbruck, August 11, 1924)
The Fifth Elegy (Muzot, February 14, 1922)
This Elegy, the last one to be written, replaced “Antistrophes.”
I had intended to make a copy of the other three Elegies for you today, since it is already Sunday again. But now—imagine!—in a radiant afterstorm, another Elegy has been added, the “Saltimbanques” [“Acrobats”]. It is the most wonderful completion; only now does the circle of the Elegies seem to me truly closed. It is not added on as the Eleventh, but will be inserted (as the Fifth) before the “Hero-Elegy.” Besides, the piece that previously stood there seemed to me, because of its different kind of structure, to be unjustified in that place, though beautiful as a poem. The new Elegy will replace it (and how!), and the supplanted poem will appear in the section of “Fragmentary Pieces” which, as a second part of the book of Elegies, will contain everything that is contemporaneous with them, all the poems that time, so to speak, destroyed before they could be born, or cut off in their development to such an extent that the broken edges show.—And so now the “Saltimbanques” too exist, who even from my very first year in Paris affected me so absolutely and have haunted me ever since.
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 19, 1922)
Dedication, Frau Hertha Koenig: The owner of Picasso’s large (84″ × 90 3/8″) 1905 painting La Famille des Saltimbanques, which she had bought in December 1914. The painting made such a deep impression on Rilke that he wrote to Frau Koenig asking if he could stay in her Munich home while she was away for the summer of 1915, so that he could live beneath the great work, “which gives me the courage for this request.” The request was granted, and Rilke spent four months with the “glorious Picasso.”
The other source for the Fifth Elegy is Rilke’s experience, over a number of years, with a troupe of Parisian circus people. See “Acrobats,” this page.
l. 14, the large capital D: The five standing figures in Picasso’s painting seem to be arranged in the shape of a D.
l. 17, King Augustus the Strong (1670–1733): King of Poland and elector of Saxony. To entertain his guests at the dinner table, he would, with one hand, crush together a thick pewter plate.
l. 64, “Subrisio Saltat.”: “Acrobats’ Smile.” During the printing of the Elegies, Rilke explained this in a note on the proof sheets:
As if it were the label on a druggist’s urn; abbreviation of Subrisio Saltat(orum). The labels on these receptacles almost always appear in abbreviated form.
(Ernst Zinn, “Mitteilungen zu R. M. Rilkes Ausgewählten
Werken,” in Dichtung und Volkstum 40, p. 132)
l. 92, Madame Lamort: Madame Death.
The Sixth Elegy (Begun at Duino, February/March 1912; lines 1–31: Ronda, January/February 1913; lines 42–44: Paris, late autumn 1913; lines 32–41: Muzot, February 9, 1922)
l. 8, Like the god stepping into the swan: Cf. “Leda” (New Poems).
l. 20, Kamak: Rilke spent two months in Egypt early in 1911 and was deeply moved by
the incomprehensible temple-world of Karnak, which I saw the very first evening, and again yesterday, under a moon just beginning to wane: saw, saw, saw—my God, you pull yourself together and with all your might you try to believe your two focused eyes—and yet it begins above them, reaches out everywhere above and beyond them (only a god can cultivate such a field of vision)…
(To Clara Rilke, January 18, 1911)
In the team of galloping horses (l. 19) Rilke is referring to the battle scenes carved on the huge pillars in the Temple of Amun, which depict the pharaoh-generals in their conquering chariots.
l. 31, Samson: Judges 13:2, 24; 16:25 ff.
The Seventh Elegy (Muzot, February 7, 1922; lines 87–end: February 26, 1922)
ll. 2 ff., you would cry out as purely as a bird:
The bird is a creature that has a very special feeling of trust in the external world, as if she knew that she is one with its deepest mystery. That is why she sings in it as if she were singing within her own depths; that is why we so easily receive a birdcall into our own depths; we seem to be translating it without residue into our emotion; indeed, it can for a moment turn the whole world into inner space, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between her heart and the world’s.
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 20, 1914)
l. 7, the silent lover:
Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,
the one attained from a thousand
natures …
(“Turning-point,” this page)
ll. 34 f., one earthly Thing / truly experienced:
These Things, whose essential life you want to expr
ess, first ask you, “Are you free? Are you prepared to devote all your love to me, to lie with me as St. Julian the Hospitaller lay beside the leper, giving him the supreme embrace which no simple, fleeting love of one’s neighbor could accomplish, because its motive is love, the whole of love, all the love that exists on earth.” And if the Thing sees that you are otherwise occupied, with even a particle of your interest, it shuts itself off; it may perhaps give you some slight sign of friendship, a word or a nod, but it will never give you its heart, entrust you with its patient being, its sweet sidereal constancy, which makes it so like the constellations in the sky. In order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time as the only one that exists, as the one and only phenomenon, which through your laborious and exclusive love is now placed at the center of the universe, and which, in that incomparable place, is on that day attended by angels.
(To Baladine Klossowska, December 16, 1920)
l. 36, Don’t think that fate is more than the density of childhood:
What we call fate does not come to us from outside: it goes forth from within us.
(To Franz Xaver Kappus, August 12, 1904)
l. 37, how often you outdistanced the man you loved:
Woman has something of her very own, something suffered, accomplished, perfected. Man, who always had the excuse of being busy with more important matters, and who (let us say it frankly) was not at all adequately prepared for love, has not since antiquity (except for the saints) truly entered into love. The Troubadours knew very well how little they could risk, and Dante, in whom the need became great, only skirted around love with the huge arc of his gigantically evasive poem. Everything else is, in this sense, derivative and second-rate.… You see, after this very salutary interval I am expecting man, the man of the “new heartbeat,” who for the time being is getting nowhere, to take upon himself, for the next few thousand years, his own development into the lover—a long, difficult, and, for him, completely new development. As for the woman—withdrawn into the beautiful contour she has made for herself, she will probably find the composure to wait for this slow lover of hers, without getting bored and without too much irony, and, when he arrives, to welcome him.