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

pass over into the country it represents. This explains to me why I have always thought that Rilke’s attitude toward art seemed slightly mortuary, Poe-esque. There is something vaguely necrophiliac about it. “Archaic Torso” is primarily, stunningly, a poem about the hunger for life, but its last, darkest echoes carry the suspicion that its true provenance is death.
    I think I should report that when I first recognized this impulse in these poems, I had a very strong, divided response. It made me feel, on the one hand, that Rilke was a very great poet, that he had gone deeper than almost any poet of his age and stayed there longer, and I felt, on the other hand, a sudden restless revulsion from the whole tradition of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century poetry, or maybe from lyric poetry as such, because it seemed, finally, to have only one subject, the self, and the self—which is not life; we know this because it is what in us humans stands outside natural processes and says, “That’s life over there”—had one subject, the fact that it was not life and must, therefore, be death, or if not death, death’s bride, or if not death’s bride, its lover and secret. It is not only that this portrait of the self’s true dialectic has terrifying implications for our age—implications which the reader can conjure by imagining my friend Fred in his battered journalist’s trenchcoat patiently interviewing the last philosopher in Europe on the prospects for our imminent and total extermination while the young on Boulevard St.-Michel dye their hair turquoise, dress in black, and wear buttons that say, “No Future” (so much for finding the Rilke of 1908)—but that it also has the effect of making my own self seem like a disease to me. This is very much a case of blaming the messenger. Rilke has clearly not abandoned the symbolist quest for the absolute in
New Poems
, he has dragged it, like a sick animal, into the twentieth century and brought it alive before us.
    What about human relationships? They are more or less what we mean by life, once nature and art have been disposed of. Rilke had marked views on the subject. The short version is that he thought they were distraction and evasion. The purest creatures of his imagination, the angels of the Elegies, don’t need relationship because they are complete as they are. They are “
mirrors
, which scoop up the beauty that has streamed from their face / and gather it back, intothemselves, entire.” In a late poem about childhood, he pictures a child at home by himself, beginning to feel his strange solitariness in the world. Then his parents come home and ruin everything. And in his version of the story of the prodigal son, the young man leaves home because he couldn’t stand the fact that people loved him there, because what that really meant was that they wanted him to be their mirrors. “In their eyes he could see observation and sympathy, expectation, concern; in their presence he couldn’t do anything without giving pleasure or pain. But what he wanted in those days was that profound indifference of heart which sometimes, early in the morning, in the fields, seized him with such purity …” And there is his version of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. As he tells it, Eurydice is lucky to be in the underworld, where she is finally complete. She is not full of that hungry emptiness that made her open to love. “Her sex had closed / like a young flower at nightfall.” And, in Rilke’s version, Orpheus wants to ruin that, out of his need for her, and bring her back into the transitory world. But she is “no longer that man’s property,” and when Orpheus turns around to look at her, she is saved. The poem is stranger and more beautiful than this summary conveys, and the translation is one of Stephen Mitchell’s triumphs.
    The most extraordinary poem Rilke ever wrote on this theme is the “Requiem” of 1908. Its occasion was the death of his friend,