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

that you too were frightened, and even now
                   pulse with your fear, where fear can have no meaning;
                   that you have lost even the smallest fragment
                   of your eternity, Paula, and have entered
                   here, where nothing yet exists; that out there,
                   bewildered for the first time, inattentive,
                   you didn’t grasp the splendor of the infinite
                   forces, as on earth you grasped each Thing …
    The key to this is the idea of mirroring. He imagines the artist as a polished surface, disinterested (and, in that, unlike the face of a parent or a lover), which mirrors the world back to itself and, by wanting nothing of it, makes it real. This is how he sees Paula Becker’s calm self-portraits:
                   And at last, you saw yourself as a fruit, you stepped
                   out of your clothes and brought your naked body
                   before the mirror, you let yourself inside
                   down to your gaze; which stayed in front, immense,
                   and didn’t say: I am that; no: this is.
                   So free of curiosity your gaze
                   had become, so unpossessive, of such true
                   poverty, it had no desire even
                   for you yourself; it wanted nothing: holy.
    I don’t think Rilke ever made a plainer statement of what he wanted art to be: cessation of desire; a place where our inner emptiness stops generating that need for things which mutilates the world and turns it into badly handled objects, where it becomes instead a pure, active, becalmed absence:
                             And that is how I have cherished you—deep inside
                   the mirror, where you put yourself, far away
                   from all the world. Why have you come like this
                   and so denied yourself?
    The stubbornness of Rilke’s conviction—and the wholeness of his imagination—only dawns on us when we see, later in the poem, how he takes up the idea of Paula’s pregnancy. Flawed, somehow, by her own desire or by her husband’s possessiveness, she has, he imagines, broken the perfect circuit of mirroring energy in her painting:
                   Let us lament together that someone pulled you
                   out of your mirror’s depths. Can you still cry?
                   No: I see you can’t. You turned your tears’
                   strength and pressure into your ripe gaze,
                   and were transforming every fluid inside you
                   into a strong reality, which would rise
                   and circulate, in equilibrium, blindly.
                   Then, for the last time, chance came in and tore you
                   back, from the last step forward on your path,
                   into a world where bodies have their will.
    This distrust of birth seems so strange in the twentieth century, so literal, that it is as if it were drawn from an ancient text, the Tibetan or Egyptian Book of the Dead; as if Paula were Pandora opening the box, initiating, through desire, the whole endless natural cycle of birth and death:
                   Ah let us lament. Do you know how hesitantly,
                   how reluctantly your blood, when you called it back,
                   returned from its incomparable circuit?
                   How confused it was to take up once again
                   the body’s narrow circulation; how,
                   full of mistrust and