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

contain us,
                   we vanish inside and around him. And those who are beautiful,
                   oh who can retain them? Appearance ceaselessly rises
                   in their face, and is gone. Like dew from the morning grass,
                   what is ours floats into the air, like steam from a dish
                   of hot food. O smile, where are you going? O upturned glance:
                   new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart …
                   alas, but that is what we
are.
Does the infinite space
                   we dissolve into, taste of us then? …
    The subject is the volatility of emotion; what is extraordinary is the volatility of the writing itself. Beginning with a communal
we
, it becomes a young woman addressing her lover, the lover she addresses, a man gazing at beautiful women, and then, moving from the expression of faces to dew on the grass to steam coming off food to waves receding from shore, leaps to a metaphor of space. This energy and freedom of movement become, in the long run, not justhow the poem is written but what it is about. But it was ten years before that recognition was accomplished.
    The narrative here becomes complicated. The facts are that Rilke moved from place to place before the war broke out. He was in Germany at the time and so was detained there, for the most part bored, passive, and unhappy. Then he wandered for three more years, from 1919 to 1922, before he settled in Switzerland. The Third Elegy—the Freud Elegy, if you will, or the one in which he uses what he had seen of psychoanalysis to construct an argument against sexuality as a home for desire—had been finished in Paris in 1913. Most of the Sixth, which he called the Hero Elegy, was written in the same year in Spain. It is an attempt to pursue the questions that end the Third, I think, and sits rather uneasily in its position in the final text. The Fourth was written in Germany during the war. It came in a burst of creative energy which ended very quickly because Rilke was drafted, a grim enough event for a man whose only permanent hatred was for the military academy of his adolescence. The poem seems almost to anticipate the event. It is one of his darkest, full of the atmosphere of the war years, though it is about other things—the father he could not please, the women he could not live with, the self he had chosen to inhabit which seemed to have no meaning but its own death. It is full of disgust with the obsessive scenery and the repetitive melodrama of his own heart, but it is also stubborn:
                                 am I not right
                   to feel as if I
must
stay seated, must
                   wait before the puppet stage, or, rather,
                   gaze at it so intensely that at last,
                   to balance my gaze, an angel has to come and
                   make the stuffed skins startle into life.
                   Angel and puppet: a real play, finally.
    He can’t get rid of the wish for the angel, but the puppet, one remembers from the essay on dolls, is akin to those wooden, wide-eyed creatures that teach us the indifference of the angels by receiving impassively the pure ardor of our childish affections. There is a glimpse of reconciliation here. At the end of the poem, with a glance at the war, he redefines his task:
                                 Murderers are easy
                   to understand. But this: that one can contain
                   death, the whole of death, even before
                   life has begun, can hold it to one’s heart
                   gently, and not refuse to go on living,
                   is inexpressible.
    This