All this might still have made a kind of sense if we had been able to keep God and death at a distance, as mere ideas in the realm of the mind—: but Nature knew nothing of this banishment that we had somehow accomplished—when a tree blossoms, death as well as life blossoms in it, and the field is full of death, which from its reclining face sends forth a rich expression of life, and the animals move patiently from one to the other—and everywhere around us, death is at home, and it watches us out of the cracks in Things, and a rusty nail that sticks out of a plank somewhere, does nothing day and night except rejoice over death.
(To Lotte Hepner, November 8, 1915)
XXV (Muzot, February 19/23, 1922)
(Companion-piece to the first spring-song of the children in the First Part of the Sonnets)
—Rilke’s note
XXVI (Muzot, February 19/23, 1922)
XXVII (Muzot, February 19/23, 1922)
l. 4, Demiurge: In the Gnostic tradition, a lower deity who created the world of time.
XXVIII (Muzot, February 19/23, 1922)
(to Vera)
—Rilke’s note
XXIX (Muzot, February 19/23, 1922)
(to a friend of Vera’s)
—Rilke’s note
l. 3, like a bell:
With this bell tower the little island, in all its fervor, is attached to the past; the tower fixes the dates and dissolves them again, because ever since it was built it has been ringing out time and destiny over the lake, as though it included in itself the visibility of all the lives that have been surrendered here; as though again and again it were sending their transitoriness into space, invisibly, in the sonorous transformations of its notes.
(To Countess Aline Dietrichstein, June 26, 1917)
l. 4, What feeds upon your face:
Oh and the night, the night, when the wind full of cosmic space / feeds upon our face—
(The First Elegy, ll. 18 f.)
Breathe-in the darkness of earth and again
look up! Again. Airy and faceless,
from above, the depths bend toward you. The face that is dissolved
and contained in the night will give more space to your own.
“Overflowing heavens of lavished stars,” this page)
l. 10, in their magic ring:
[The poet’s] is a naïve, aeolian soul, which is not ashamed to dwell where the senses intersect [sich kreuzen], and which lacks nothing, because these unfolded senses form a ring in which there are no gaps.
(“The Books of a Woman in Love,” SW 6, 1018)
APPENDIX TO THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
My dear, hardly had Strohl sent me back the little book with the 25 Orpheus Sonnets when this thread proceeded further, into a new fabric—a quantity of additional Sonnets have arisen these past few days, perhaps fifteen or more, but I won’t keep them all—I am now so rich that I can afford to choose! What a world of grace we live in, after all! What powers are waiting to fill us, constantly shaken vessels that we are. We think we are under one kind of “guidance”—but they are already at work inside us. The only thing that belongs to us, as completely ours, is patience; but what immense capital that is—and what interest it bears in its time!—Consolation enough for eighthundredthirtyseven lives of average length.
(To Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, February 18, 1922)
[I] (Muzot, approximately February 3, 1922; first version of Sonnet VII, First Part)
And I would appreciate it if you could replace the VIIth Sonnet with the enclosed variant (just the first stanza of the previous version remains—the rest always embarrassed me by its exaggerated pathos, and I have long since crossed it out).
(To Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, March 18, 1922)
l. 14, Golden Fleece: In some versions of the myth, Orpheus accompanied Jason and the Argonauts on their voyage.
[II] (Muzot, February 2/5, 1922; originally Sonnet XXI, First Part)
[III] (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
[IV] (Muzot, February 15/17, 1922)
l. 1, stela: cf. the Second Elegy, ll. 66 ff., and the notes on this page.
[V] (Muzot, February 16/17, 1922)
This Sonnet probably refers to Goethe, who at the age of seventy-four fell in love with the nineteen-year-old Ulrike von Levetzow.
l. 9, Hymen: Greek god of marriage, usually depicted as a handsome young man crowned with a wreath and holding a wedding-torch.
l. 12, laments: Goethe commemorated his love in a poem known as the Marienbad Elegy.
[VI] (Muzot, February 16/17, 1922)
l. 3, Villa d’Este: Italian Renaissance palace near Tivoli, famous for its fountains and terraced gardens.
[VII] (Muzot, February 16/17, 1922)
[VIII] (Muzot, February 17/19, 1922)
[IX] (Muzot, approximately February 23, 1922)
FRAGMENTS
[i] (Muzot, approximately February 3; written between Sonnets VIII and IX, First Part)
[ii] (Muzot, approximately February 3, 1922; related to Sonnet XI, First Part)
[iii] (Muzot, approximately February 4, 1922; written between Sonnets XVII and XVIII, First Part)
[iv] (Muzot, February 12 or 13, 1922; draft of Sonnet II, Second Part)
[v] (Muzot, February 16/17, 1922)
[vi] (Muzot, February 16/17, 1922)
[vii] (Muzot, February 17/19, 1922)
[viii] (Muzot, February 19/23, 1922; draft of Sonnet XXV, Second Part)
[ix] (Muzot, February 19/23, 1922)
[x] (Muzot, approximately February 23, 1922)
[xi] (Muzot, approximately February 23, 1922)
*This and the note to Sonnet XI, Second Part are the only two notes Rilke himself ever published. The others marked “Rilke’s note” were handwritten in a copy of the Sonnets which he sent to Herr and Frau Leopold von Schlözer on May 30, 1923.
Acknowledgments
I would like once again to thank Michael André Bernstein, Chana Bloch, Jonathan Galassi (my editor at Random House), John Herman (my editor at Simon & Schuster), W. S. Merwin, Robert Pinsky, and Alan Williamson for their many helpful suggestions. A letter from Ralph Freedman persuaded me to include the two sections of early poems. I had help with the German of several of the uncollected poems from Jutta Hahne, with two German prose-poems from Brother David Steindl-Rast, and with the French prose-poems from my brother, to whom I dedicated The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.
I owe a great deal to Robert Hass for his brilliant essay “Looking for Rilke,” which was the introduction to The Selected Poetry and was later included in his Twentieth Century Pleasures.
During the months when I was studying the Elegies, I lived in close daily contact with Jacob Steiner’s great line-by-line commentary, Rilkes Duineser Elegien (Bern/München: Franke Verlag, 1962), and found it an almost never-failing source of illumination.
Finally, I must acknowledge my debt to the work of J. B. Leishman, M. D. Herter Norton, and C. F. MacIntyre, and to the Young, Boney, Guerne, and Gaspar version of the Elegies, the Poulin Elegies and Sonnets, the Betz Cahiers de M. L. Brigge, and miscellaneous translations by Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, Robert Bly, W. D. Snodgrass, and Rika Lesser.
And my greatest debt (unpayable, and paid): to Vicki.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting
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