(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, June 1, 1923)
XVII (Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
XVIII (Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
XIX (Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
XX (Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
And imagine, one thing more, in another connection (in the “Sonnets to Orpheus,” twenty-five sonnets, written, suddenly, in the prestorm, as a monument for Vera Knoop), I wrote, made, the horse, you know, the free happy white horse with the hobble on his foot, who once, as evening fell, on a Volga meadow, came bounding toward us at a gallop—:
how
I made him, as an “ex-voto” for Orpheus!—What is time?—When is Now? Across so many years he bounded, with his absolute happiness, into my wide-open feeling.
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 11, 1922)
There is also an account of the incident in Lou Andreas-Salomé’s travel diary:
As we were standing by the Volga, a neigh resounded through the silent evening, and a frisky little horse, having finished its day of work, came quickly trotting toward the herd, which was spending the night somewhere, far away, in the meadow-steppes. In the distance one could now and then see the shepherds’ fire blazing in the clear night. After a while a second little horse, from somewhere else, followed, more laboriously: they had tied a wooden hobble to one of his legs, in order to stop him from wildly leaping into the wheatfield.
(Briefwechsel, p. 611)
l. 13, cycle of myths:
It is done, done! / The blood- and myth-cycle of ten (ten!) strange years has been completed.—It was (now for the first time I feel it entirely) like a mutilation of my heart, that this did not exist. And now it is here.
(To Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, February 10, 1922)
XXI (Muzot, February 9, 1922; inserted here as a replacement for the original sonnet; see this page)
The little spring-song seems to me, as it were, an “interpretation” of a remarkable, dancing music that I once heard sung by the convent children at a morning Mass in the little church at Ronda (in southern Spain). The children, who kept leaping to a dance rhythm, sang a text I didn’t know, to the accompaniment of triangle and tambourine.
—Rilke’s note*
If the Sonnets to Orpheus were allowed to reach publication, probably two or three of them, which, I now see, just served as conduits for the stream (e.g., the XXIst) and after its passage-through remained empty, would have to be replaced by others.
(To Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, February 7, 1922)
It makes me uncomfortable to think of that XXIst poem, the “empty” one in which the “transmissions” appear (“The New, my friends, is not a matter of”)…, please paste it over, right now, with this child’s-spring-song, written today, which, I think, enriches the sound of the whole cycle and stands fairly well, as a pendant, opposite the white horse.
This little song, which had risen into my consciousness when I woke up this morning, fully formed up to the eighth line, and the rest of it immediately afterward, appears to me like an interpretation of a “Mass”—a real Mass, gaily accompanied as if with hanging garlands of sound: the convent children sang it to I don’t know what text, but in this dance-step, in the little nuns’-church at Ronda (in southern Spain—); sang it, one can hear, to tambourine and triangle!—It fits, doesn’t it, into these interrelationships of the Sonnets to Orpheus: as the brightest spring-tone in them? (I think it does.)
(Does the paper more-or-less match? I hope it is the same.)
Only this—and only because that XXIst is like a blot on my conscience.
(To Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, February 9, 1922)
XXII (Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
XXIII (Muzot, February 13, 1922)
This Sonnet I have—at least temporarily—inserted as the XXIII, so that what has become the first part of the Sonnets now contains twenty-six poems.
(To Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, March 18, 1922)
XXIV (Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
XXV (Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
(to Vera)
—Rilke’s note
XXVI (Muzot, February 2/5, 1922)
l. 2, rejected:
Three years went by, but Orpheus still refused
to love another woman: so intense
his grief was, for his lost Eurydice;
or else because he had vowed to stay alone.
But many women desired him, and raged
at his abrupt rejection.
(Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 78 ff.)
l. 2, attacked:
From a nearby hill the frenzied women, bristling
in skins of savage beasts, at last caught sight
of Orpheus, as he sat absorbed in music,
accompanied by the sweet lyre. One of them,
her long hair streaming in the wind, cried out:
“Look! there he is, that man who shows us such
contempt.” And, with a yell, she hurled her spear
straight at the singing mouth …
(Ibid. XI, 3 ff.)
l. 5, could not destroy your head or your lyre:
His limbs lay scattered; but the river Hebrus
took the head and lyre, and as they floated
down its stream, the lyre began to play
a mournful tune, and the lifeless tongue sang out
mournfully, and both the river-banks
answered, with their own, faint, mournful echo.
(Ibid. XI, 50 ff.)
l. 7, stones:
Another threw a stone; but in mid-flight,
overwhelmed by the beauty of the song,
it fell at his feet, as though to beg forgiveness
for its violent intention.
(Ibid. XI, 10 ff.)
l. 9, At last they killed you:
Such music would have moved to softness all
these stones and spears; except that the wild shrieking,
shrill flutes, the blare of trumpets, drumbeats, howls
of the enraged bacchantes had completely
drowned out the lyre’s voice. Until at last
the unhearing stones reddened with poet’s blood.
(Ibid. XI, 15 ff.)
SECOND PART
I (Muzot, approximately February 23, 1922; the last of the Sonnets to be written)
II (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
III (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
l. 7, sixteen-pointer: A large stag, with sixteen points or branches to its antlers.
IV (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
Any “allusion,” I am convinced, would contradict the indescribable presence of the poem. So in the unicorn no parallel with Christ is intended; rather, all love of the non-proven, the non-graspable, all belief in the value and reality of whatever our heart has through the centuries created and lifted up out of itself: that is what is praised in this creature.… The unicorn has ancient associations with virginity, which were continually honored during the Middle Ages. Therefore this Sonnet states that, though it is nonexistent for the profane, it comes into being as soon as it appears in the “mirror” which the virgin holds up in front of it (see the tapestries of the 15th century) and “in her,” as in a second mirror that is just as pure, just as mysterious.
(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, June 1, 1923)
V (Muzot, February 15, 1922; chronologically the first poem of the Second Part)
l. 7, so overpowered with abundance:
I am like the little anemone I once saw in the garden in Rome: it had opened so wide during the day that it could no longer close at night. It was terrifying to see it in the dark meadow, wide open, still taking everything in, into its calyx, which seemed as if it had been furiously torn back, with the much too vast night above it. And alongside, all its prudent sisters, each one closed around its small measure of profusion.
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, June 26, 1914)
VI (Muzot, February 15, 1922)
the rose of antiquity was a simple “eglantine,” red a
nd yellow, in the colors that appear in flame. It blooms here, in the Valais, in certain gardens.
—Rilke’s note
Every day, as I contemplate these admirable white roses, I wonder whether they aren’t the most perfect image of that unity—I would even say, that identity—of absence and presence which perhaps constitutes the fundamental equation of our life.
(To Madame M.-R., January 4, 1923)
VII (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
By the brook I picked marsh-marigolds, almost green, a bit of quite fresh yellow painted into the calyx at the last moment. Inside, around the stamens, an oil-soaked circle, as if they had eaten butter. Green smell from the tubelike stems. Then to find it left behind on my hand, closely related through it. Girl friends, long ago in childhood, with their hot hands: was it this that so moved me?
(Spanish Notebook, 1913; quoted in Rilke und Benvenuta,
Wien: W. Andermann, 1943, p. 157)
VIII (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
l. 4, the lamb with the talking scroll:
The lamb (in medieval paintings) which speaks only by means of a scroll with an inscription on it.
—Rilke’s note
Dedication, Egon von Rilke (1873–1880): Youngest child of Rilke’s father’s brother. He also appears in the Fourth Elegy, this page.
I think of him often and keep returning to his image, which has remained indescribably moving to me. So much “childhood”—the sad and helpless side of childhood—is embodied for me in his form, in the ruff he wore, his little neck, his chin, his beautiful disfigured eyes. So I evoked him once more in connection with that eighth sonnet, which expresses transience, after he had already served, in the Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, as the model for little Erik Brahe, who died in childhood.
(To Phia Rilke, January 24, 1924; in Carl Sieber, René Rilke: Die
Jugend Rainer Maria Rilkes, Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1932, pp. 59 f.)
IX (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
X (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
XI (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
Refers to the way in which, according to an ancient hunting-custom in certain regions of Karst, the strangely pale grotto-doves are caught. Hunters carefully lower large pieces of cloth into the caverns and then suddenly shake them. The doves, frightened out, are shot during their terrified escape.
—Rilke’s note
Meanwhile I went along on a dove-hunting expedition to one of the Karst grottos, quietly eating juniper berries while the hunters forgot me in their concentration on the beautiful wild doves flying with loud wingbeats out of the caves.
(To Katharina Kippenberg, October 31, 1911)
l. 4, Karst: A region along the Dalmatian coast (north of Trieste and not far from Duino Castle) known for its limestone caverns.
XII (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
l. 13, Daphne: A nymph pursued by Apollo and transformed into a laurel. See Ovid, Metamorphoses I, 452 ff.
XIII (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
In a letter telling Vera’s mother about the unexpected appearance of the second part of the Sonnets, Rilke wrote:
Today I am sending you only one of these sonnets, because, of the entire cycle, it is the one that is closest to me and ultimately the one that is the most valid.
(To Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, March 18, 1922)
The thirteenth sonnet of the second part is for me the most valid of all. It includes all the others, and it expresses that which—though it still far exceeds me—my purest, most final achievement would someday, in the midst of life, have to be.
(To Katharina Kippenberg, April 2, 1922)
l. 14, cancel the count:
Renunciation of love or fulfillment in love: both are wonderful and beyond compare only where the entire love-experience, with all its barely differentiable ecstasies, is allowed to occupy a central position: there (in the rapture of a few lovers or saints of all times and all religions) renunciation and completion are identical. Where the infinite wholly enters (whether as minus or plus), the ah so human number drops away, as the road that has now been completely traveled—and what remains is the having arrived, the being!
(To Rudolf Bodländer, March 23, 1922)
XIV (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
XV (Muzot, February 17, 1922)
XVI (Muzot, February 17/19, 1922)
XVII (Muzot, February 17/19, 1922)
XVIII (Muzot, February 17/19, 1922)
XIX (Muzot, February 17/23, 1922)
XX (Muzot, February 17/23, 1922)
l. 5, Fate:
What we call fate does not come into us from the outside, but emerges from us.
(To Franz Xaver Kappus, August 12, 1904)
l. 10, fish:
… I sank, weighted down with a millstone’s torpor, to the bottom of silence, below the fish, who only at times pucker their mouths into a discreet Oh, which is inaudible.
(To Princess Marie von Thurn und
Taxis-Hohenlohe, January 14, 1913)
l. 13, a place:
Jacobsen once wrote how annoyed he was that his remarkable short novel had to be called “Two Worlds”; again and again he had felt compelled to say: “Two World.” In the same way, it often happens that one is at odds with the outward behavior of language and wants something inside it, an innermost language, a language of word-kernels, a language which is not plucked from stems, up above, but gathered as language-seeds—wouldn’t the perfect hymn to the sun be composed in this language, and isn’t the pure silence of love like heart-soil around such language-kernels? Ah, how often one wishes to speak a few levels deeper; my prose in “Proposal for an Experiment” [“Primal Sound”] lies deeper, gets a bit farther into the essential, than the prose of the Malte, but one penetrates such a very little way down, one remains with just an intuition of what kind of speech is possible in the place where silence is.
(To Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, February 4, 1920)
XXI (Muzot, February 17/23, 1922)
l. 3, Ispahan (mod., Isfahan) or Shiraz: Persian cities famous for their magnificent gardens. Shiraz also contains the tombs of the poets Hafiz and Sa’di.
XXII (Muzot, February 17/23, 1922)
l. 5, bell:
For me it was Easter just once; that was during the long, excited, extraordinary night when, with the whole populace crowding around, the bells of Ivan Veliky crashed into me in the darkness, one after another. That was my Easter, and I think it is huge enough for a whole lifetime.…
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, March 31, 1904)
l. 7, Karnak: See note on this page.
XXIII (Muzot, February 17/23, 1922)
(to the reader)
—Rilke’s note
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 way 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)
XXIV (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 g
host), 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 unwieldly 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.…