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

brings us to Muzot and the winter of 1922. Rilke was forty-seven years old, settled in a small house in the Valais region. Suddenly, in less than a month, he finished the Elegies and wrote the fifty-nine
Sonnets to Orpheus.
It is fairly astonishing, not just because of the quantity and quality of work produced in so short a time, but because it represents a transformation of the terms of his art. Simply—as simply as he himself announces it in the First Sonnet—Orpheus replaces the angel:
                   A tree ascended there. Oh pure transcendence!
                   Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear!
                   And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence
                   a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared.
    This is a shudder of hearing and seeing. It is also almost giddy with pleasure—how that tall tree in the ear has offended literal-minded critics! Rilke had not written a poem that mattered to him in four years, he had written very little for almost twice that long. And now the inner music has begun again. What is happening in this poem is that he recognizes it and greets it.
    It is possible to say something about what this means. If the angel is the personal demon of Rilke’s inner life, it is also a figure for a very old habit of human spirituality, as old, at least, as the Vedic hymns. All dualisms spring from it, and all cult religions of death and resurrection. For Rilke, however, the angels were never hermetic knowledge. They were the ordinary idea, the one that belongs to children at home by themselves looking in the mirror, to lovers bewildered by the intensity of their feelings, to solitaries out walking after dinner: whenever our souls make us strangers to the world. Everyone knows that impulse—and the one that follows from it, the impulse to imagine that we were meant to be the citizens of some other place. It is from this sensation that the angels come into existence, creating in this world their ambience of pure loss. It is the ambience in which Rilke had moved and the one that Orpheus sweeps away.
    He is, of course, a figure for poetry, as an energy that moves inside this world, not outside it. He is that emotion or imagination of estrangement as it returns to the world, moving among things, touching them with the knowledge of death which they acquire when they acquire their names in human language.Through Orpheus, Rilke has suddenly seen a way to hack at the taproot of yearning and projection that produced the angels. It is a phenomenal moment, for announcing, as Nietzsche did, that God is dead is one thing—this was, after all, a relief, no more patriarch, no more ultimate explanation, which never made any sense in the first place, of human suffering—but to take the sense of abandonment which follows from that announcement, and the whole European spiritual tradition on which it was based, inside oneself and transform it there, is another. For once the angel is gone, once it ceases to exist as a primary term of comparison by which all human life is found wanting, then life itself becomes the measure and source of value, and the task of poetry is not god-making, but the creation and affirmation of the world.
    The death of a young girl prompted this discovery, but it was the experience of hearing the music rise in himself to greet Vera Knoop’s death and all of his own unassuageable grief, I think, that finally jarred Rilke loose. He
felt
the energy of life starting up out of death in this most profound and ordinary way. That is why Orpheus also represents more than poetry. He stands where human beings stand, in the middle of life and death, coming and going. And so Rilke is also able not only to greet his presence, but to accept his absence:
                   Erect no gravestone to his memory; just
                   let the rose blossom each year for his