The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Read Free

ofsocial life and graceful only in the air. Poets trafficked with the infinite. In the work of Mallarmé, this led to a changed notion of poetry itself. As the poet pulled away from the social world the words in a poem pulled away from referential meaning. Poetry was an art near to music. It did not reach down to the mere world of objects. It made a music which lifted the traces of objects where they half survived in the referential meaning of words—street, apple, tree—toward a place where they lived a little in the eternal stillness of the poem. Something like this idea—it went by the name of symbolism—was inherited by the last, decadent or Parnassian, generation of nineteenth-century poets. The poem was to have as little commerce as possible with the middle-class world, and the poet, in his isolation, served only his art, which was itself in the service of beauty.
    If there is any doubt that this ambience was felt by the young Rilke, it is dispelled by a description of him in provincial Prague at the age of twenty-one. “He went about,” one of his contemporaries wrote, “wearing an old-world frock coat, black cravat, and broad-brimmed black hat, clasping a long-stemmed iris and smiling, oblivious of the passersby, a forlorn smile into ineffable horizons.” His attachment to the role of decadent and aesthete was qualified, however, by his interest in Nietzsche, particularly Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, who had given a name to the yearning place that the young poet had already hollowed out in himself: the death of God. And it was Nietzsche who had defined the task of art: God-making. This interest of Rilke’s was intensified by one of the important events in his life; he met a remarkable older writer, Lou Andreas-Salomé. She was thirty-four at the time. When she was eighteen, Nietzsche had fallen in love with her and proposed marriage. It was already part of her legend that her refusal of him was responsible for the philosopher’s derangement. Later, she would become an associate of Sigmund Freud’s. In 1913 she brought Rilke, who was terrified by the idea of mental health, to a Psycho-analytic Congress and introduced him to Freud, an experience which issued in Rilke’s own descent into what he called “the mother experience” in the Third Duino Elegy. But in 1899, she took the young poet for a lover and, in that year and the next, accompanied him on a pair of trips to Russia.
    His first readable work, the prose
Tales of God
and
The Book of Hours
, comes out of his experience of Russia and Nietzsche and Lou. The poems are written, appropriately enough, in the persona of a young Russian monk. A young monk because that could stand for Rilke’s sense of his own apprenticeship and for the God who he felt was only just coming into being. Russian because it was on this trip, in the immense open spaces of the Russian countryside andin the bell-ringing churches of old Moscow, that Rilke first discovered a landscape which he felt corresponded to the size and terror and hushed stillnesses of his own inner life. The poems themselves are a beginning—they already have the qualities of Rilke’s mind and imagination, but formally they belong to the dreamy, musical mold of the symbolist lyric. This is a reason why, I think, they sometimes seem more interesting in English translation than they really are. Here is an example. To understand the point I’m trying to make, the reader without German has to attend to it anyway and try reading the poem out loud, noticing the tinkling regularity of the meter and the neat finality of the rhymes,
Abendbrot
and
tot, geht
and
steht.
                   Manchmal steht einer auf beim Abendbrot
                   und geht hinaus und geht und geht und geht,—
                   weil eine Kirche wo im Osten steht.
                   Und seine Kinder segnen ihn wie tot.
                   Und einer, welcher stirbt in seinem