(To Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy, April 12, 1923)
l. 13, our interpreted world:
Wir machen mit Worten und Fingerzeigen
uns allmählich die Welt zu eigen,
vielleicht ihren schwächsten, gefährlichsten Tell.
We, with words and pointing fingers, / gradually make the world our own— / (though) perhaps its weakest, most precarious part.
(Sonnets to Orpheus I, 16)
l. 36, women in love:
Certainly I have no window on human beings. They yield themselves to me only insofar as they take on words within me, and during these last few years they have been communicating with me almost entirely through two forms, upon which I base my inferences about human beings in general. What speaks to me of humanity—immensely, with a calm authority that fills my hearing with space—is the phenomenon of those who have died young and, even more absolutely, purely, inexhaustibly: the woman in love. In these two figures humanity gets mixed 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 exterior entrusted with conviction) and, at the same time, as completed types, which nothing can go beyond, so that the definitive natural-history of their souls could now be written.
As for the woman in love (I am not thinking of Saint Theresa or such magnificence of that sort): she yields herself to my observation much more distinctly, purely, i.e., undilutedly and (so to speak) unappliedly in the situation of Gaspara Stampa, Louize Labé, certain Venetian courtesans, and, above all, Marianna Alcoforado, that incomparable creature, in whose eight heavy letters woman’s love is for the first time charted from point to point, without display, without exaggeration or mitigation, drawn as if by the hand of a sibyl. And there—my God—there it becomes evident that, as a result of the irresistible logic of woman’s heart, this line was finished, perfected, not to be continued any further in the earthly realm, and could be prolonged only toward the divine, into infinity.
(To Annette Kolb, January 23, 1912)
l. 46, Gaspara Stampa (1523–1554): An Italian noblewoman who wrote of her unhappy love for Count Collaltino di Collalto in a series of some two hundred sonnets.
l. 63, those who died young:
In Padua, where one sees the tombstones of many young men who died there (while they were students at the famous university), in Bologna, in Venice, in Rome, everywhere, I stood as a pupil of death: stood before death’s boundless knowledge and let myself be educated. You must also remember how they lie resting in the churches of Genoa and Verona, those youthful forms, not envious of our coming and going, fulfilled within themselves, as if in their death-spasms they had for the first time bitten into the fruit of life, and were now, forever, savoring its unfathomable sweetness.
(To Magda von Hattingberg, February 16, 1914)
l. 67, Santa Maria Formosa: A church in Venice, which Rilke had visited in 1911. The reference is to one of the commemorative tablets, inscribed with Latin verses, on the church walls—probably the one that reads (in translation): “I lived for others while life lasted; now, after death, / I have not perished, but in cold marble I live for myself. / I was Willem Hellemans. Flanders mourns me, / Adria sighs for me, poverty calls me. / Died October 16, 1593.”
l. 86, through both realms:
Death is the side of life that is turned away from us and not illuminated. We must try to achieve the greatest possible consciousness of our existence, which is at home in both these unlimited realms, and inexhaustibly nourished by both. The true form of life extends through both regions, the blood of the mightiest circulation pulses through both: there is neither a this-world nor an other-world, but only the great unity, in which the “angels,” those beings who surpass us, are at home.
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)
l. 93, the lament for Linus: This ritual lament is mentioned in the Iliad, as part of a scene that Hephaestus fashioned on the shield of Achilles:
Girls and young men, with carefree hearts and innocent laughter, were carrying the honey-sweet grapes, piled up in wicker baskets; in their midst, a boy performed the ancient music of yearning, plucking his clear-toned lyre and singing the lament for Linus with his lovely voice, while the others moved to the powerful rhythm, their feet pounding in the dance, leaping and shouting for joy.
(Iliad 18, 567 ff.)
According to one myth, Linus was a poet who died young and was mourned by Apollo, his father. Other versions state that he was the greatest poet of all time and was killed by Apollo in a jealous rage; or that he invented music and was the teacher of Orpheus.
The Second Elegy (Duino, late January–early February, 1912)
l. 3, Tobias: A young man in the apocryphal Book of Tobit. The story portrays, in passing, the easy, casual contact between a human being and an angel: “And when he went to look for a man to accompany him to Rages, he found Raphael, who was an angel. But Tobias did not know that.… And when Tobias had prepared everything necessary for the journey, his father Tobit said, ‘Go with this man, and may God prosper your journey, and may the angel of God go with you.’ So they both departed, and the young man’s dog went along with them.”
Tobit 5:4, 16 (in the Codex Vaticanus)
l. 12, pollen of the flowering godhead:
What is shown so beautifully in the world of plants—how they make no secret of their secret, as if they knew that it would always be safe—is exactly what I experienced in front of the sculptures in Egypt and what I have always experienced, ever since, in front of Egyptian Things: this exposure of a secret that is so thoroughly secret, through and through, in every place, that there is no need to hide it. And perhaps everything phallic (as I fore-thought in the temple of Karnak, for I couldn’t yet think it) is just a setting-forth of the human hidden secret in the sense of the open secret of Nature. I can’t remember the smile of the Egyptian gods without thinking of the word “pollen.”
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 20, 1914)
ll. 16 f., mirrors, which scoop up the beauty …:
The case of the Portuguese nun is so wonderfully pure because she doesn’t fling the streams of her emotion on into the imaginary, but rather, with infinite strength, conducts this magnificent feeling back into herself: enduring it, and nothing else. She grows old in the convent, very old; she doesn’t become a saint, or even a good nun. It is repugnant to her exquisite tact to apply to God what, from the very beginning, had never been intended for him, and what the Comte de Chamilly could disdain. And yet it was almost impossible to stop the heroic onrush of this love before its final leap: almost impossible, with such a powerful emotion pulsing in her innermost being, not to become a saint. If she—that measurelessly glorious creature—had yielded for even a moment, she would have plunged into God like a stone into the sea. And if it had pleased God to attempt with her what he continually does with the angels, casting all their radiance back into them—: I am certain that, immediately, just as she was, in that sad convent, she would have become an angel, in her deepest self.
(To Annette Kolb, January 23, 1912)
l. 20, like a perfume: The reference in the original text is to ambergris or incense burning on a hot coal. (Ernst Zinn, editor’s note, SW 1, 792)
ll. 56–59, you touch so blissfully because … / you feel pure duration: In a letter to Princess Marie about her translation of this Elegy into Italian, Rilke wrote, “I am concerned about this passage, which is so dear to me,” and after quoting it, he continued:
This is meant quite literally: that the place where the lover puts his hand is thereby withheld from passing away, from aging, from all the near-disintegration that is always occurring in our integral nature—that simply beneath his hand, this place lasts, is. It must be possible, just as literally, to make this clear in Italian; in any paraphrase it is simply lost. Don’t you agree? And I think of these lines with a special joy in having been able to write them.
(To Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, December 16
, 1913)
l. 66, Weren’t you astonished: This is said to the lovers.
ll. 66 f., the caution of human gestures / on Attic gravestones:
Once, in Naples I think, in front of some ancient gravestone, it flashed through me that I should never touch people with stronger gestures than the ones depicted there. And I really think that sometimes I get so far as to express the whole impulse of my heart, without loss or destiny, by gently placing my hand on someone’s shoulder. Wouldn’t that, Lou, wouldn’t that be the only progress conceivable within the “restraint” that you ask me to remember?
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, January 10, 1912)
One of his most definite emotions was to marvel at Greek gravestones of the earliest period: how, upon them, the mutual touching, the resting of hand in hand, the coming of hand to shoulder, was so completely unpossessive. Indeed, it seemed as if in these lingering gestures (which no longer operated in the realm of fate) there was no trace of sadness about a future parting, since the hands were not troubled by any fear of ending or any presentiment of change, since nothing approached them but the long, pure solitude in which they were conscious of themselves as the images of two distant Things that gently come together in the unprovable inner depths of a mirror.
(Notebook entry, early November 1910; quoted in F.W. Wodtke, Rilke und Klopstock, Kiel diss., 1948, p. 28)
The Third Elegy (The beginning—probably the whole first section—: Duino, January/February 1912; continued and completed in Paris, late autumn 1913)
ll. 26 ff., Mother, you made him small …:
O night without objects. Dim, outward-facing window; doors that were carefully shut; arrangements from long ago, transmitted, believed in, never quite understood. Silence on the staircase, silence from adjoining rooms, silence high up on the ceiling. O mother: you who are without an equal, who stood before all this silence, long ago in childhood. Who took it upon yourself to say: Don’t be afraid; I’m here. Who in the night had the courage to be this silence for the child who was frightened, who was dying of fear. You strike a match, and already the noise is you. And you hold the lamp in front of you and say: I’m here; don’t be afraid. And you put it down, slowly, and there is no doubt: you are there, you are the light around the familiar, intimate Things, which are there without afterthought, good and simple and sure. And when something moves restlessly in the wall, or creaks on the floor: you just smile, smile transparently against a bright background into the terrified face that looks at you, searching, as if you knew the secret of every half-sound, and everything were agreed and understood between you. Does any power equal your power among the lords of the earth? Look: kings lie and stare, and the teller of tales cannot distract them. Though they lie in the blissful arms of their favorite mistress, horror creeps over them and makes them palsied and impotent. But you come and keep the monstrosity behind you and are entirely in front of it; not like a curtain it can lift up here or there. No: as if you had caught up with it as soon as the child cried out for you. As if you had arrived far ahead of anything that might still happen, and had behind you only your hurrying-in, your eternal path, the flight of your love.
(The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, SW 6, 777 f.)
l. 82, some confident daily task:
In the long, complicated solitude in which Malte was written, I felt perfectly certain that the strength with which I paid for him originated to a great extent from certain evenings on Capri when nothing happened except that I sat near two elderly women and a girl and watched their needlework, and sometimes at the end was given an apple that one of them had peeled.
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, January 10, 1912)
The Fourth Elegy (Munich, November 22–23, 1915)
l. 27, It at least is full: This passage was influenced by Heinrich von Kleist’s short essay–dialogue “On the Marionette Theater” (1810), which Rilke called “a masterpiece that again and again fills me with astonishment” (To Princess Marie, December 13, 1913). Kleist’s character Herr C., in comparing the marionette and the human dancer, says that the marionette has two advantages:
First of all, a negative one: that it would never behave affectedly.… In addition, these puppets have the advantage that they are antigravitational. They know nothing of the inertia of matter, that quality which is most resistant to the dance: because the force that lifts them into the air is greater than the force that binds them to the earth.… Puppets need the ground only in order to touch it lightly, like elves, and reanimate the swing of their limbs through this momentary stop. We humans need it to rest on so that we can recover from the exertion of the dance. This moment of rest is clearly no dance in itself; the best we can do with it is to make it as inconspicuous as possible.
l. 35, the boy with the immovable brown eye: Rilke’s cousin, who died at the age of seven. See note to Sonnets to Orpheus II, 8, p. 338.
Beside this lady sat the small son of a female cousin, a boy about as old as I, but smaller and more delicate. His pale, slender neck rose out of a pleated ruff and disappeared beneath a long chin. His lips were thin and closed tightly, his nostrils trembled a bit, and only one of his beautiful dark-brown eyes was movable. It sometimes glanced peacefully and sadly in my direction, while the other eye remained pointed toward the same corner, as if it had been sold and was no longer being taken into account.
(The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, SW 6, 732)
l. 59, Angel and puppet: In Kleist’s essay the narrator goes on to say that
no matter how cleverly he might present his paradoxes, he would never make me believe that a mechanical marionette could contain more grace than there is in the structure of the human body.
Herr C. replied that, in fact, it is impossible for a human being to be anywhere near as graceful as a marionette. Only a god can equal inanimate matter in this respect. Here is the point where the two ends of the circular world meet.
I was more and more astonished, and didn’t know what I should say to such extraordinary assertions.
It seemed, he said, as he took a pinch of snuff, that I hadn’t read the third chapter of the Book of Genesis with sufficient attention; and if a man wasn’t familiar with that first period of all human development, one could hardly expect to converse with him about later periods, and certainly not about the final ones.
I told him that I was well aware what disorders consciousness produces in the natural grace of a human being. [Here follow two anecdotes: the first about a young man who by becoming aware of his physical beauty loses it; the second about a pet bear who can easily parry the thrusts of the most accomplished swordsman.]
“Now, my dear fellow,” said Herr C., “you are in possession of everything you need in order to understand the point I am making. We see that in the world of Nature, the dimmer and weaker intellect grows, the more radiantly and imperiously grace emerges. But just as a section drawn through two lines, considered from one given point, after passing through infinity, suddenly arrives on the other side of that point; or as the image in a concave mirror, after vanishing into infinity, suddenly reappears right in front of us: so grace too returns when knowledge has, as it were, gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form in which consciousness is either nonexistent or infinite, i.e., in the marionette or in the god.”
“Does that mean,” I said, a bit bewildered, “that we must eat again of the Tree of Knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence?”
“Certainly,” he answered. “That is the last chapter in the history of the world.”
There is a complete translation of the essay in TLS, October 20, 1978.
l. 77, a pure event:
Extensive as the “external” world is, with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, the depth-dimensions, of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be, in itself, almost unlimited.… It seems to me more and more as though our ordinary consciousness inhabited the apex of a pyrami
d whose base in us (and, as it were, beneath us) broadens out to such an extent that the farther we are able to let ourselves down into it, the more completely do we appear to be included in the realities of earthly and, in the widest sense, worldly, existence, which are not dependent on time and space. From my earliest youth I have felt the intuition (and have also, as far as I could, lived by it) that at some deeper cross-section of this pyramid of consciousness, mere being could become an event, the inviolable presence and simultaneity of everything that we, on the upper, “normal,” apex of self-consciousness, are permitted to experience only as entropy.