The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke Read Free Page A

Haus,
                   bleibt drinnen wohnen, bleibt in Tisch und Glas,
                   so dass die Kinder in die Welt hinaus
                   zu jener Kirche ziehn, die er vergass.
    Here is the poem in the vigorous, unrhymed, unmetered translation of Robert Bly:
                   Sometimes a man stands up during supper
                   and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
                   because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
                   And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
                   And another man, who remains inside his own house,
                   stays there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
                   so that his children have to go far out into the world
                   toward that same church, which he forgot.
    Rilke’s theme is already present, the abandonment of ordinary life for the sake of a spiritual quest. And so is his intensity. Robert Bly has muted it, byhaving the father
stay
rather than
die
in the house, but in either case the poem insists that the spirit will have no rest until the quest is undertaken, which is probably Rilke’s understanding of his relationship to his own father. But the poem has a feeling of being too neat, too pat, which disappears, I think, in the English translation. A way to hear this might be to look at an English poem on a similar theme. Yeats’s “Lake Isle of Innisfree” is a little more luxuriant, but it has the same end-of-the-century music and the same desire to escape:
                   I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
                   And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
                   Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
                   And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
    Imagine if you can a translation of this stanza into twentieth-century free verse:
                   I’m going to get up now, and go west to Innisfree,
                   and I’ll build a small cabin there out of reeds and clay.
                   I’ll make nine rows of beans and a hive for honeybees
                   and I’ll live by myself in that bee-loud valley.
    What goes are the wistfulness and the music. They are replaced by a sense of active will and specificity, which aren’t really in the original poem.
    There is something else to notice in this comparison. In both Yeats and Rilke, the spiritual search or the aim of art does not occur inside life, but somewhere eise. For Yeats and his readers, Innisfree could stand for the wild naturalness of the west of Ireland and for Irish nationalism and for the elsewhere of symbolist art. In Rilke’s poem, a comfortably symbolic “church in the East” does similar work. It is easy to see, biographically, how potent a symbol it was for him. It combined the experience of Russia, his Nietzschean spiritual strivings, his artistic vocation, and his first serious love affair. Heady stuff. But a church in the East is a long way from that tattered hut in the first Sonnet to Orpheus. In order to get there, Rilke had to descend into the terrible and painful sense of his own emptiness, which lay behind the hunger for the ideal. That, finally, is why
The Book of Hours
seems like apprentice work and why it seems so limited by the dexterity and gracefulness of its writing.
    Rilke needed to think less about art as visionary recital and more about it as a practice. The next phase of his development gave him a chance to do that. It took him, almost directly upon his return from Russia, to Worpswede,an artists’ colony in the fen country near Bremen. The atmosphere combined fresh air, the sensibility of the English arts-and-crafts movement, and landscape painting—it was here