The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Read Online Free PDF

one of the great German painters of the early part of the century, Paula Modersohn-Becker. Rilke met her, as we have seen, with Clara Westhoff at Worpswede, and he seems to have fallen in love with them both. Shortly after Paula became engaged to the painter Otto Modersohn, Rilke proposed marriage to Clara. They lived together only for a year or so, long enough to have a child and for Rilke to discover his unsuitability for domestic life. After that, they decided to give themselves the freedom they felt they needed as artists. Paula’s life with Otto Modersohn had a different outcome. He was the director of Worpswede, a much more famous painter than she, and her life in his shadow became filled with domestic tasks. Eventually, she took a year off and went to Paris to be by herself and paint. During that year she was importuned with letters from her husband and her parents, urging her to return to Germany and take up the duties of a wife. Almost as soon as she did so, she became pregnant, and in the winter of 1907 she gave birth to a child and died shortly afterward. She is a very moving and original painter. Rilke, though he loved her company in the year at Worpswede and talked to her long hours about the idea of art (he wrote letters to Clara, one biographer observed, and poems to Paula), seems not to have understood her work while she was alive. It was apparently in the summer after her death, when he attended the Cézanne retrospective in Paris, that he realized, lookingat Cézanne’s late work, what a great painter she had been. Her death was a profound shock to him. “It stood in front of me,” he wrote to a friend, “so huge and close that I could not shut my eyes.” “Requiem” was written in the fall of that year. It was begun, appropriately enough, on the eve of All Hallows.
    Part of its appeal is that it is so raw and personal a poem. It is not Rilke onstage, not the great necromancer of the Elegies with the seductive voice and the breathtaking shifts of argument which leap from image to surprising image. This poem, written in blank-verse paragraphs, proceeds in bursts: it has the awkwardness of grief, which seems to exhaust itself and then breaks out again. It is also full of awkward ideas, contrary emotions. For all these reasons, it is a poem that is probably more revealing and less self-preoccupied than anything else Rilke ever wrote. The opening lines address Paula’s ghost. The anxiety that they express is not feigned.
                   I have my dead, and I have let them go,
                   and was amazed to see them so contented,
                   so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,
                   so unlike their reputation. Only you
                   return; brush past me, loiter, try to knock
                   against something, so that the sound reveals
                   your presence. Oh don’t take from me what I
                   am slowly learning. I’m sure you have gone astray
                   if you are moved to homesickness for anything
                   in this dimension. We transform these Things;
                   they aren’t real, they are only the reflections
                   upon the polished surface of our being.
    The fascination of these opening lines is the depth of Rilke’s identification of art with death. I should confess that it is what put me off reading the poem for many years. It seemed like the poet at his most morbid and talky. It was not until this brilliant translation by Stephen Mitchell taught me to hear the nakedness of the voice in which the poem is spoken that I could even get through it. And when I did, it stunned me. Still, it is very peculiar: this is an Orpheus talking Eurydice
back down
into the underworld, telling her how wonderful it is to be dead:
                   …