which jump, quiver, and fall with a tinny ring
whenever some better marksman scores. Onward he lurches from cheers
to chance; for booths courting each curious taste
are drumming and barking. And then—for adults only—
a special show: how money breeds, its anatomy, not some charade:
money’s genitals, everything, the whole act
from beginning to end—educational and guaranteed to make you
virile . . . . . . . .
.… Oh, but just beyond that,
behind the last of the billboards, plastered with signs for “Deathless,”
that bitter beer which tastes sweet to those drinking it
as long as they have fresh distractions to chew…,
just beyond those boards, just on the other side: things are real.
Children play, lovers hold each other, off in the shadows,
pensive, on the meager grass, while dogs obey nature.
The youth is drawn farther on; perhaps he’s fallen in love
with a young Lament . . . . . He pursues her, enters meadowland. She says:
“It’s a long way. We live out there…”
Where? And the youth follows.
Something in her bearing stirs him. Her shoulders, neck—,
perhaps she’s of noble descent. Still, he leaves her, turns around,
glances back, waves … What’s the use? She’s a Lament.
Only the youthful dead, in the first state
of timeless equanimity, the phase of the unburdening,
follow her with loving steps. The girls
she waits for and befriends. Gently lets them see
the things that adorn her. Pearls of grief and the delicate
veils of suffrance. —When with young men
she walks on in silence.
Later, though, in the valley where they live, an older one, one of the elder Laments,
adopts the youth when he asks questions: —Long ago,
she says, we Laments were a powerful race. Our forefathers
worked the mines in those giant mountains; among humans
sometimes you’ll find a fragment of polished primeval grief,
or, from an old volcano, a slag of petrified wrath.
Yes, it came from here. We used to be rich.—
And she guides him quietly through the wide landscape of Laments,
shows him the columns of temples, or the ruins
of those strongholds from which, long ago, Lament-Kings
wisely governed the land. Shows him the tall
trees of tears and the fields of flowering melancholy
(the living know them only as tender leaves):
shows him the animals of sorrow, grazing, —and sometimes
a bird startles, flies low through their lifted gazes, extends
into the distance the ancient glyph of its desolate cry.—
At evening she leads him out to the ancestral tombs
of the House of Lament, those of the sybils and the dire prophets.
But as night approaches, they move more slowly, until
suddenly, rising up moon-like, there appears: the great sepulchre
that watches over everything. Twin brother
to the one on the Nile, the exalted Sphinx—: visage
of the hidden chamber.
And they marvel at that kingly head, which silently,
for all time, has weighed the human face
in the stars’ balance.
His sight can’t grasp it, still unsteady
from recent death. But their gazing
flushes an owl out from behind the corona’s rim. And the bird,
gliding with slow downstrokes along the cheek,
the one with the fullest curve,
inscribes faintly in the dead youth’s new
sense of hearing, as across a doubly
unfolded page, the indescribable outline.
And higher, the stars. New ones. The stars of the Land of Pain.
Slowly the Lament names them: “There, look—
the Rider, the Staff, and that constellation with so many stars
they call: Calyx. And then farther, toward the pole:
Cradle; Path; Puppet; Window; The Burning Book.
But in the southern sky, pure as if held in the palm
of a sacred hand: that clear, gleaming M
that means Mothers . . . . . .”
But the dead youth must go on, and the elder Lament
leads him in silence as far as the wide ravine,
where they see shimmering in moonlight:
the Font of Joy. She names it
reverently, saying, “Among the living
it becomes a powerful stream.”
They stand at the foot of the range.
And she embraces him there, weeping.
He climbs on alone, into the mountains of primeval grief.
And no step rings back from that soundless fate.
But suppose the endlessly dead were to wake in us some emblem:
they might point to the catkins hanging
from the empty hazel trees, or direct us to the rain
descending on black earth in early spring.—
And we, who always think of happiness
rising, would feel the emotion
that almost baffles us
when a happy thing falls.
NOTES
Preface
1. Fürstin Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria Rilke (Munich and Berlin, 1932), pp. 40–41. Rilke and this remarkable woman twenty years his senior became intimate friends; she was arguably the most important abiding presence in the last fifteen years of his life. They corresponded about practically everything. (There are 120 letters from 1912 and 1913 alone: see Briefwechsel mit Marie von Thurn und Taxis, 2 vols., Frankfurt, 1986 [1951].) Here is Princess Marie answering, in a letter of March 9, 1913, one of Rilke’s frequent “complaints”:
Oh Dottor Serafico [her nickname for him], I envy you! I think you are the most fortunate man on God’s earth (now you are getting mad as a bug—con rispetto parlando—but nevertheless it is true,—if only your remarkable eyes, which see everything with such extraordinary clarity, could see yourself as well). Very well, I will enumerate. You are a great poet, you know it perfectly well. You are in love (don’t quibble, you are in love and always will be, where or with whom or for how long is beside the point). You have a small atelier in Paris—and it is March—the whole glorious spring is knocking at your door—Come in! I’m Dottor Serafico! Consider me—I’m a woman—and a woman my age should tear out every hair on her head every time she looks at herself in the mirror and then hang herself with the nearest rope. I have had so much trouble and worry in my life … And yet a blossoming fruit-tree and a golden sunbeam make me wild with delight! [in English in the original]. But, on the other hand, if you weren’t so desperate you probably wouldn’t write so wonderfully. So be desperate! Be really desperate, be even more desperate!
2. For a selection of the poems that remained uncollected in Rilke’s notebooks and a discussion of the poet’s curious neglect of that body of work, see Rainer Maria Rilke: Uncollected Poems, trans. Edward Snow (New York, 1996).
3. For the German text of “Antistrophes” and a translation, see Rainer Marie Rilke: Uncollected Poems, pp. 142–45. The poem is so different in style and voice from the other elegies that it is difficult to believe Rilke actually planned, until the last moment, to make it one of them. The forty-six-line poem praises women (“you”) by contrasting them, in short counterpoised stanzas, to men (“we”):
Childhood’s breaking-off
did you no harm. All at once
you stood there, complete,
as if made manifest in the god.
We, as if broken from cliffs,
even as young boys sharp
at the edges, though sometimes
perhaps smoothly
cut;
we, like large shards of stone
dumped over flowers.
Flowers of the deeper soil,
loved by all roots,
you, Eurydice’s sisters,
always full of sacred turning-back
behind the ascending man.
4. Erinnerungen, pp. 93–94.
5. Letter to Arthur Fischer-Colbrie, December 18, 1925.
6. Letter to the Countess Sizzo, June 1, 1923, quoted and translated in Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M. D. Herder Norton (New York, 1943), pp. 10–11.
7. Letter to Clara Rilke, April 23, 1923.
THE FIRST ELEGY
Many of the passages in the Elegies establish a shorthand, elliptical relationship to highly articulated figures in Rilke’s imagination. About “women who love” Rilke wrote, just after completing “The First Elegy”:
I have no window on human beings. They give themselves to me only insofar as they make themselves heard within me, and during these last few years they have been communicating with me almost entirely through two forms, from which I infer things about human beings in general. What speaks to me of humanity, immensely, with a self-possessed calm that makes my hearing broad and spacious, is the phenomenon of the dead youth and, even more absolutely, purely, inexhaustibly: the woman who loves. In these two figures humanity gets stirred into my heart whether I want it to or not. They step forward on my stage with the clarity of the marionette (which is an outwardness entrusted with conviction) and, at the same time, as completed types, beyond which nothing can proceed, so that the natural history of their souls can be written.
As for the woman who loves—I am not thinking of Saint Theresa and such grandiloquence as that—she gives herself to my attention much more distinctly, purely, i.e., undilutedly and (so to speak) unappliedly in the case of Gaspara Stampa, Louise Labé, certain Venetian courtesans, and, above all, Marianna Alcoforado [the “Portuguese Nun”], that incomparable creature, in whose eight weighty letters woman’s love is for the first time traced from point to point, without ostentation, without exaggeration or mitigation, as if by the hand of a sibyl. And there, my God, there it becomes evident that, as a result of the inexorable logic of the female heart, this line was finished, perfected, not to be continued any further in the earthly realm, and could only be prolonged toward the divine, into infinity … Man, as a lover, was done with, finished with, outloved—if one may put it so circumspectly, outloved, as a glove is outworn … What a sad figure he plays in the history of love … How very much on one side, that of the woman, everything performed, endured, accomplished contrasts with man’s absolute insufficiency in love.
(To Annette Kolb, January 23, 1912)
An Italian noblewoman, Gaspara Stampa (1523–54) fell in love with Count Collatino di Collalto at the age of twenty-six and was deserted by him three years later. She responded by recording the story of their love and her experience of solitude and loss in a series of two hundred sonnets.
A famous church in Venice, which Rilke visited twice in 1911. The reference is to one of the commemorative tablets on the church walls—it isn’t known which one, though there has been much speculation.
An obscure figure of ancient Greek myth. Several legends refer to him, always in connection with music, early death, and his relation to Apollo—either as kin (brother, son) or slain, would-be rival. Some commentaries on “The First Elegy” cite stories in which the void left by Linos’ death was so sudden and severe that its trembling amazement was called music. Others make reference to the ritual lament for Linos, supposedly related to music’s origin because those who were numbed by his death were revived by the song of Orpheus. Whatever Rilke’s sources (and they are fragmentary at best), he conflates the cosmological and the psychological to construct his own elliptical myth of grief: in the beginning plenitude, full space nurturing an “almost divine” youth; then fullness transformed into emptiness (the void is not originary here; it comes into being as the absence of presence) when the youth suddenly, inexplicably “steps out of it,” “leaves,” “is gone” (the word “death” is studiously avoided); then the penetration (equally inexplicable) of this absence—characterized not as a realm of lament but as shock petrifying into rigidity, numbness, an almost Golgotha-like aridity of feeling—by a music that is ambiguously both “first” and “adventuring” (the music is already there; no Orphic maker or source is indicated); so that the desert-spell is broken, the void comes alive—not with music per se but with “vibrations,” phenomena prior to melodies heard or feelings felt. It is these same vibrations which “now” enrapture us, help us, and provide us solace.
Compare Rilke’s use of this term in his remarkable statement to his Polish translator about the whole of the Elegies:
Nature, the things we move among and use, are provisional and perishable; but they are, for as long as we are here, our possession and our friendship, sharers in our trouble and our happiness, just as they were once the confidants of our ancestors. Therefore it is crucial not only that we not corrupt and degrade what constitutes the here and now, but, precisely because of the provisionality it shares with us, that these appearances and objects be comprehended by us in a most fervent understanding and transformed. Transformed? Yes, for our task is to stamp this provisional, perishing earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its being may rise again, “invisibly,” in us. We are the bees of the Invisible. Nous butinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l’accumuler dans la grande ruche d’or de l’Invisible [We wildly gather the honey of the visible, in order to store it in the great golden hive of the Invisible]. The Elegies show us at this work, this work of the continual conversion of the dear visible and tangible into the invisible vibration [Schwingung] and agitation of our nature, which introduces new vibration-numbers [Schwingungszahlen] into the vibration-spheres [Schwingungs-Sphären] of the universe. (For, since the various materials in the cosmos are only different vibration-rates [Schwingungsexponenten], we are preparing in this way, not only intensities of a spiritual kind, but—who knows?—new bodies, metals, nebulae, and constellations.)
(To Witold von Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)
THE SECOND ELEGY
A figure from the Apocryphal book of Tobit. Ordered by his dying father to travel from Nineveh to Media to retrieve a sum of money being held for him there by another man, Tobias looks for someone who knows the way, and encounters a youth his own age who is the archangel Raphael in disguise. The angel agrees to accompany him, “and so the two went forth, and the young man’s dog went with them.”
Ancient Greek marble tombstones or funerary plaques, often carved with scenes of intimate, everyday human interaction.
THE FOURTH ELEGY
Rilke’s cousin, Egon von Schiele (1873–80), to whose memory the eighth sonnet of the Second Part of the Sonnets to Orpheus is dedicated. Rilke wrote of him:
I often think of him and keep on returning to his figure, which has remained for me indescribably affecting. Much “childhood,” the sadness and helplessness of childhood, is embodied for me in his form, in the ruff he wore, in his neck, in his chin, in his beautiful brown eyes, disfigured by a squint. So I invoked him once more in connection with that eighth Sonnet, which expresses transitoriness, after he had already served as the prototype for little Erick Brahe, the dead child, in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
(To Phia Rilke, January 24, 1924; in Carl Sieber, René Rilke: Die Jugend Rainer Maria Rilke [Leipzig, 1932], p. 59f.)
THE FIFTH ELEGY
Frau Hertha Koening was a lyricist who in December 1914 had purchased, perhaps at Rilke’s suggestion, Picasso’s 1905 painting La famille des saltimbanques. Rilke subsequently wrote to her asking permission to reside in her Munich apartment while she was away on her country vacation. She granted his request, and he spent the summer and early fall of 1915 living beside “the great Picasso.” The human figures who stand quietly, almost abstractedly in Picasso’s painting do influence ?
??The Fifth Elegy” (though as much in ontological mood as in detail), but they mingle in Rilke’s imagination with a troupe of real-life acrobats he observed with fascination during his first years in Paris. (“And so now the ‘Saltimbanques’ too are there, who had such a profound impact on me during my earliest stay in Paris and who have been packed away inside me ever since,” Rilke wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé on February 20, 1922, just days after finishing “The Fifth Elegy.”) These actual acrobats inspired an entry in one of Rilke’s notebooks dated July 14, 1907. Comparing it to Picasso’s so differently haunting tableau may suggest something of the complex alchemy at work in “The Fifth Elegy”:
In front of the Luxembourg Gardens, near the Panthéon, Père Rollin and his troupe have spread themselves out again. The same carpet lies there, the same thick winter overcoats have been removed and piled on top of a chair so that there is just enough room for the little boy, the old man’s grandson, to come and sit down on its edge during breaks. He still needs to—he’s a beginner, after all—and his feet hurt from those steep jumps out of high somersaults onto the ground. He has a large face that can hold a great many tears, and yet they often well up all the way to the edge of his widened eyes. Then he has to carry his head very cautiously, like an overfull cup. It’s not that he’s sad, not at all; he wouldn’t even notice if he were. It’s simply the pain that cries, and he has no choice but to let it cry. It will grow fainter with the passage of time and eventually disappear. The father has long since forgotten what it was like, and the grandfather, well, it’s been sixty years since he forgot it, otherwise he wouldn’t be so famous. But look, Père Rollin, who has become a legend at all the fairs, doesn’t “work” anymore. He no longer lifts huge weights and he (once the most eloquent of all) says nothing now. He’s been assigned the drum. Touchingly patient, he stands there with his long-gone athlete’s face, whose features sag loosely into one another, as if a weight had been hung on each one and pulled it down. Dressed like a commoner, a knitted sky-blue tie around his colossal neck, he has withdrawn at the height of his fame into this coat and into this modest position upon which, so to speak, glory no longer falls. But any one of these young people who has ever seen him knows that in those sleeves are hidden the famous muscles whose slightest play would cause the weights to leap. That person has vivid memories of one such masterful performance, and he says a few words to his neighbor and points across, and then the old man feels their eyes on him, pensive and uncertain and respectful. That strength is still there, young people, he thinks; it’s not as available as it used to be, that’s all; it has descended into the roots; it’s still there somewhere, all of it. And it’s really far too much for just beating a drum. And he pounds away. But he pounds too rapidly. His son-in-law whistles over to him and signals him to stop; he was right in the middle of his spiel. The old man breaks off, frightened, and makes excuses with his heavy shoulders and shifts his weight ponderously onto his other leg. But already he has to be whistled off again. Diable. Père! Père Rollin! He’s already started drumming again. He scarcely realizes it. He could drum on forever and ever, they mustn’t think he’d get tired. But there, now his daughter is talking; sharp-witted and sturdy and solid and with more brains than the others. She now holds the thing together; it’s a joy to watch her. The son-in-law does good work, no one can deny that, and he does it willingly, as if that’s his function. But she has it in her blood, one can see that. It’s something she was born to. She’s ready: “Musique!” she shouts. And the old man drums away like fourteen drummers. “Père Rollin, hey, Père Rollin,” calls one of the spectators, and steps right up, recognizing him. But he only gives him a slight nod; his drumming is a sacred trust, and he takes it with utmost seriousness.