The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke Read Free Book Online

under himself the ground of his own art. It is hard to know what is most breathtaking about the moment, the shock of self-understanding or the stifled cry.
    The angels embody the sense of absence which had been at the center of Rilke’s willed and difficult life. They are absolute fulfillment. Or rather, absolute fulfillment if it existed, without any diminishment of intensity, completely outside us. You feel a sunset open up an emptiness inside you which keeps growing and growing and you want to hold on to that feeling forever; only, you want it to be a feeling of power, of completeness and repose: that is longing for the angel. You feel a passion for someone so intense that the memory of their smell makes you dizzy and you would gladly throw yourself down the well of that other person, if the long hurtle in the darkness would then be perfect inside you: that is the same longing. The angel is desire, if it were not desire, if it were pure being. Lived close to long enough, it turns every experience into desolation, because beauty is not what we want at those moments, death is what we want, an end to limit, an end to time. And—it is hard to think of Rilke as ironic, as anything but passionately earnest, but the Elegies glint with dark, comic irony—death doesn’t even want us; it doesn’t want us or not want us. All of this has come clear suddenly in Rilke’s immensely supple syntax. He has defined and relinquished the source of a longing and regret so pure, it has sickened the roots of his life. It seems to me an act of great courage. And it enacts a spiritual loneliness so deep, so lacking in consolation, that there is nothing in modern writing that can touch it. The company it belongs to is the third act of
King Lear
and certain passages in Dostoevsky’s novels.
    Only the first two poems came to him at Duino in the winter of 1912. But the conception of them—that there would be ten, that they would arrive somewhere—came in a flash with these first few lines. He wrote down the beginning of the last Elegy, “Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight, / let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels,” and made a start on several others, then the impulse died away. It is not surprising that it did. He had committed himself to taking all of his yearning inside himself, its beauty and destructive contradictions, everything he had seen—thrust oftower and cathedral, the watercolor sadness of the city embankments of European rivers, night, spring, dogs, plaintiveness of violins, as if he were swallowing
Malte
—and to integrate it somehow so that he could emerge praising. The project needed to gestate and he needed to live with his desolation. The record of the last years before the war is restless traveling, inability to write, make-work, a little real work, discontent. Even his letters echo the decision of the First Elegy:
    I am sick to death of Paris, it is a city of the damned. I always knew that; but in the old days an angel interpreted their torments to me. Now I have to explain them to myself and I can find no decent elucidation.
    It was going to cost him a great deal, but the gains were already great. The main one is the incredible fluidity of the early Elegies. It is as if, not having a place to stand, the author of these poems is everywhere. Really, they are the nearest thing in the writing of the twentieth century to the flight of birds. They dive, soar, swoop, belly up, loop over. Look again at a passage that I quoted earlier:
                   But we, when moved by deep feeling, evaporate; we
                   breathe ourselves out and away; from moment to moment
                   our emotion grows fainter, like a perfume. Though someone may tell us:
                   “Yes, you’ve entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime
                   is filled with you …”—what does it matter? he can’t