(To Magda von Hattingberg, February 11, 1914)
Self-Portrait, 1906 (Probably Paris, spring 1906)
Spanish Dancer (Paris, June 1906)
Tombs of the Hetaerae (Rome, early in 1904)
Hetaerae: Courtesans.
Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes (Rome, early in 1904)
According to Ovid: After Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife, died of a snakebite, the poet descended to the land of shadows to retrieve her, and held the whole underworld spellbound by the beauty of his song.
Neither the dark queen
nor the lord who rules the underworld could deny
what he in his song had asked for, and they called
Eurydice. She was there among the shades
just recently arrived, and now walked toward them,
slowly, the wound still fresh upon her ankle.
Orpheus took her, with the one condition:
if he should turn to look at her before
they had passed the dismal valleys of Avernus,
the gift would be revoked.
They climbed the path
through the deep silence, wrapped in total darkness.
They had almost reached the rim of the upper world
when he, afraid that she might slip, impatient
to see her bright, beloved face, looked back:
and in an instant, she began to fade,
reaching out, struggling desperately to hold on
to him, or to be held; but her hands could grasp
nothing but thin air. She didn’t blame
her appalled husband for this second death
(how could she blame such love?) and, calling out
a last Farewell!, which he could barely hear,
she vanished.
(Ovid, Metamorphoses X, 46 ff.)
Hermes: The messenger of the gods and the guide (psychopompos) who took the souls of the dead to the underworld.
l. 15, in the blue cloak: In Homer, dark blue is the color of mourning.
Alcestis (Capri, between February 7 and 10, 1907)
Several years after King Admetus’ marriage, Death arrived to announce that Admetus had been condemned to die immediately, and could be saved only if someone else was willing to be taken in his stead. Only Alcestis, his wife, volunteered. Later, Hercules was so moved by Admetus’ mourning that he pursued Death, snatched Alcestis away from him, and brought her back to Admetus. (This myth is the theme of the tragicomic Alcestis by Euripides.)
l. 1, the messenger: Hermes (the poem was originally entitled “Admetus. Alcestis. Hermes”).
l. 72, she: The goddess Artemis, who was offended because Admetus had forgotten the customary prenuptial sacrifice to her.
Archaic Torso of Apollo (Paris, early summer 1908)
The inspiration for this sonnet, which is the first poem in New Poems, Second Part, was the early-fifth-century B.C. Torso of a Youth from Miletus in the Salle Archaïque of the Louvre.
The incomparable value of these rediscovered Things lies in the fact that you can look at them as if they were completely unknown. No one knows what their intention is and (at least for the unscientific) no subject matter is attached to them, no irrelevant voice interrupts the silence of their concentrated reality, and their duration is without retrospect or fear. The masters from whom they originate are nothing; no misunderstood fame colors their pure forms; no history casts a shadow over their naked clarity—: they are. That is all. This is how I see ancient art. The little tiger at Rodin’s is like that, and the many fragments and broken pieces in the museums (which you pass by many times without paying attention, until one day one of them reveals itself to you, and shines like a first star …)
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, August 15, 1903)
The companion piece, “Early Apollo,” is the first poem in New Poems (Part One):
… so ist in seinem Haupte
nichts was verhindern könnte, daß der Glanz
aller Gedichte uns fast tödlich träfe;
denn noch kein Schatten ist in seinem Schaun,
zu kühl für Lorbeer sind noch seine Schläfe
und später erst wird aus den Augenbraun …
… so, in his head,
nothing can stop the radiance of all
poems from nearly burning us to death;
for there is still no shadow in his gaze,
his forehead is too cool for a laurel-wreath,
and not for another century will his eyebrows
blossom …
Washing the Corpse (Paris, summer 1908)
Black Cat (Paris, summer 1908)
The Flamingos (Paris, autumn 1907, or Capri, spring 1908)
l. 1, Fragonard: Jean-Honoré Fragonard (pronounced Fragonar), 1732–1806, French painter.
l. 8, Phryne (fourth century B.C.): Greek courtesan, famous for her beauty.
Buddha in Glory (Paris, summer 1908)
This is the final poem in New Poems, Second Part.
Soon after supper I retire, and am in my little house by 8:30 at the latest. Then I have in front of me the vast blossoming starry night, and below, in front of the window, the gravel walk goes up a little hill on which, in fanatic taciturnity, a statue of the Buddha rests, distributing, with silent discretion, the unutterable self-containedness of his gesture beneath all the skies of the day and night. C’est le centre du monde [He is the center of the world], I said to Rodin.
(To Clara Rilke, September 20, 1905)
Cf. the two earlier poems called “Buddha” in the first part of New Poems (“As though he were listening. Silence: something far” and “From far away the awe-struck pilgrim feels”).
FROM REQUIEM (1909)
Requiem for a Friend (Paris, October 31–November 2, 1908)
Written in memory of Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907). See Introduction, this page.
The fate that I tried to tell of and to lament in the Requiem is perhaps the essential conflict of the artist: the opposition and contradiction between objective and personal enjoyment of the world. It is no less conclusively demonstrated in a man who is an artist by necessity; but in a woman who has committed herself to the infinite transpositions of the artist’s existence the pain and danger of this choice become inconceivably visible. Since she is physical far into her soul and is designed for bearing children of flesh and blood, something like a complete transformation of all her organs must take place if she is to attain a true fruitfulness of soul.
The birth processes which, in a purely spiritual way, the male artist enjoys, suffers, and survives, may, in a woman who is capable of giving birth to a work of art, broaden and be exalted into something that is of the utmost spirituality. But these processes undergo just a gradual intensification, and still remain, in unlimited ramifications, within the realm of the physical. (So that, exaggerating, one could say that even what is most spiritual in woman is still body: body become sublime.) Therefore, for her, any relapse into a more primitive and narrow kind of suffering, enjoying, and bringing forth is an overfilling of her organs with the blood that has been augmented for another, greater circulation.
Long ago I had a presentiment of this fate; but I experienced it in all its intensity when it actually brushed against me: when it stood in front of me, so huge and close that I could not shut my eyes.
(To Hugo Heller, June 12, 1909; in Berliner Tageblatt, November 29, 1929)
l. 5, return:
… his body became indescribably touching to him and of no further use than to be purely and cautiously present in, just as a ghost [Revenant], already dwelling elsewhere, sadly enters the realm that was tenderly laid aside, in order to belong once again, even if inattentively, to this once so indispensable world.
(“An Experience,” 1913, SW 6, 1038)
ll. 49 f., a country / you never saw: Rilke was probably thinking of Egypt here. Both he and Paula Becker were deeply impressed by the Egyptian sculptures in the Louvre. (H. W. Petzet, Das Bildnis des Dichters: Paula Modersohn-Becker und Rainer Maria Rilke, Frankfurt am
Main: Insel Verlag, 1976, pp. 49 f.)
l. 80, your naked body: This probably refers to the wonderful Self-Portrait on her Fifth Anniversary (1906), where Paula Becker is wearing her amber necklace and is naked to the hips. There are two other self-portraits from 1906, half-length, in which she appears naked, wearing the amber necklace, and with pink flowers in her hands and hair. (Those interested should consult Gillian Perry, Paula Modersohn-Becker, New York: Harper & Row, 1979, which contains twenty-five color plates and ninety-three duotone illustrations.)
l. 83, and didn’t say: I am that; no: this is: In one of his great letters on Cézanne, Rilke wrote:
You notice better each time you look at these paintings how necessary it was to go beyond even love. It is of course natural to love each one of these Things if you have made them. But if you show that, you make them less well; you judge them instead of saying them. You cease to be impartial; and what is best of all, the love, remains outside the work, does not enter it, is left untransformed beside it. That is how mood-painting arose (which is in no way better than realism). They painted: I love this; instead of painting: here it is. In the latter, everyone must then look carefully to see whether I have loved it. That is not shown at all, and many people would even say that there is no love in it. So utterly has it been consumed in the act of making. This consuming of love in anonymous work, out of which such pure Things arise—perhaps no one has so completely succeeded in doing that as this old man.
(To Clara Rilke, October 13, 1907)
ll. 85 f., of such true / poverty:
Any kind of work delighted him: he worked even during meals, he read, he drew. He drew as he walked along the street, and quite early in the morning he drew the sleepy animals in the Jardin des Plantes. And when pleasure did not tempt him to work, poverty drove him to it. Poverty, without which his life would be unthinkable. He never forgets that it included him with the animals and flowers, without possessions among all those who are without possessions, and who have only God to depend on.
(Auguste Rodin, 1907, SW 5, 228)
l. 117, someone: Otto Modersohn.
ll. 129 ff., the objective world expanded … : Paula’s pregnancy.
l. 223, Nikē:
I have seen such beautiful things in the Louvre.… The Nikē of Samothrace, the goddess of victory on the ship’s hull, with the wonderful movement and the vast sea-wind in her clothes, is a miracle and seems like a whole world.
(To Clara Rilke, September 26, 1902)
l. 232, the freedom of a love:
For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been given to us, the ultimate, the final problem and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation.… Love does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person … Rather, it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for another’s sake.… We are only just now beginning to consider the relation of one individual to a second individual objectively and without prejudice, and our attempts to live such relationships have no model before them. And yet in the changes brought about by time there are already many things that can help our timid novitiate.
The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex.… This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be surprised and struck by it. Someday … there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being.
This advance will (at first much against the will of the outdistanced men) transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into a relation of one human being to another, no longer of man to woman. And this more human love (which will fulfill itself with infinite consideration and gentleness, and kindness and clarity in binding and releasing) will resemble what we are now preparing painfully and with great struggle: the love that consists in this—that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.
(To Franz Xaver Kappus, May 14, 1904)
l. 235, letting each other go: In describing his admiration for the “incomparable” Leonora Christina Ulfeldt, daughter of King Christian IV of Denmark, who, because her husband had been accused of high treason, was imprisoned in the Blue Tower in Copenhagen from 1663 until 1685, Rilke wrote:
It seems to me that you could predict her conduct in prison if you knew of a certain little scene that was enacted just before her arrest in England. At this critical moment it happened that a young officer who was sent to her misunderstood his orders and demanded that she take off all the jewelry she was wearing and hand it over to him. Although this ought to have startled her (since she was not yet aware that she was in any danger) and thrown her into the utmost alarm, nevertheless, after a moment’s consideration, she takes off all her jewels—the earrings, the necklaces, the brooches, the bracelets, the rings—and puts them into the officer’s hands. The young man brings these treasures to his superior, who, at first terrified, then enraged, at this imprudence, which threatens to upset the whole undertaking, orders him, curtly and in the coarsest language, to return and give everything back to the Countess, and to beg her forgiveness, in any way he can think of, for his unauthorized blunder. What happened now is unforgettable. After considering for a moment, not longer than that first moment was, Countess Ulfeldt gestures for the bewildered officer to follow her, walks over to the mirror, and there takes the magnificent necklaces and brooches and rings from his hands, as if from the hands of a servant, and puts them on, with the greatest attentiveness and serenity, one after another.
Tell me, dear friend, do you know any other story in which it is so sublimely evident how we ought to behave toward the vicissitudes of life? This went through and through me: this same repose vis-à-vis giving up and keeping, this repose that is so filled with power. This should truly be taken to heart: it is perhaps nothing more than what individual saints have done, who, because they have lost what they love or were reminded of the continual possibility of loss, threw off all possessions and condemned the very desire for possession (: for that may be an enormous, hardly surpassable achievement—.) But this is more human, more patient, more adequate. That gesture of renunciation is magnificent, thrilling,—but it is not without arrogance, which is again cancelled only because it, in its own way, already belongs to heaven. But this silent, composed keeping and letting go, on the contrary, is full of moderation, is still earthly, through and through, and yet is already so great as to be incomprehensible.
(To Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin, February 4, 1912)
l. 245, fame:
Rodin was solitary before he was famous. And fame, when it arrived, made him perhaps even more solitary. For fame is, after all, only the sum of all the misunderstandings that gather around a new name.
(Auguste Rodin, 1902, SW 5, 141)
ll. 264 f., an ancient enmity / between our daily life and the great work:
The modest domestic circumstances of Tolstoy, the lack of comfort in Rodin’s rooms—it all points to the same thing: that one must make up one’s mind: either this or that. Either happiness or art. On doit trouver le bonheur dans son art [one must find happiness in one’s art]: that too, more or less, is what Rodin said. And it is all so clear, so clear. The great artists have all let their lives become ov
ergrown like an old path and have borne everything in their art. Their lives have become atrophied, like an organ they no longer use.
(To Clara Rilke, September 5, 1902)
Someday people will understand what made this great artist so great: the fact that he was a worker, who desired nothing but to enter, completely and with all his powers, into the humble and austere reality of his art. In this there was a certain renunciation of life. But precisely by such patience did he win life: for the world offered itself to his art.
(Auguste Rodin, 1902, SW 5, 201)
FROM THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE
(1910; begun in Rome, February 8, 1904; written mostly during 1908/1909; finished in Leipzig, January 27, 1910)
The speaker in these passages is Malte Laurids Brigge, a twenty-eight-year-old Danish writer living in Paris.
[The Bird-feeders]
ll. 32f. painted figurehead:
The so-called galleon-figures: carved and painted statues from the bow of a ship. The sailors in Denmark sometimes set up these wooden statues, which have survived from old sailing-ships, in their gardens, where they look quite strange.
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 10, 1925)
[Ibsen]
l. 34, and now you were among the alembics:
where the most secret chemistry of life takes place, its transformations and precipitations.
(Ibid.)
l. 40, You couldn’t wait:
Life, our present life, is hardly capable of being presented on stage, since it has wholly withdrawn into the invisible, the inner, communicating itself to us only through “august rumors.” The dramatist, however, couldn’t wait for it to become showable; he had to inflict violence upon it, this not yet producible life; and for that reason too his work, like a wand too strongly bent back, sprang from his hands and was as though it had never been done.