(To Nora Purtscher-Wydenbruck, August 11, 1924)
The Fifth Elegy (Muzot, February 14, 1922)
This Elegy, the last one to be written, replaced “Antistrophes.”
I had intended to make a copy of the other three Elegies for you today, since it is already Sunday again. But now—imagine!—in a radiant afterstorm, another Elegy has been added, the “Saltimbanques” [“Acrobats”]. It is the most wonderful completion; only now does the circle of the Elegies seem to me truly closed. It is not added on as the Eleventh, but will be inserted (as the Fifth) before the “Hero-Elegy.” Besides, the piece that previously stood there seemed to me, because of its different kind of structure, to be unjustified in that place, though beautiful as a poem. The new Elegy will replace it (and how!), and the supplanted poem will appear in the section of “Fragmentary Pieces” which, as a second part of the book of Elegies, will contain everything that is contemporaneous with them, all the poems that time, so to speak, destroyed before they could be born, or cut off in their development to such an extent that the broken edges show.—And so now the “Saltimbanques” too exist, who even from my very first year in Paris affected me so absolutely and have haunted me ever since.
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 19, 1922)
Dedication, Frau Hertha Koenig: The owner of Picasso’s large (84″ × 90 3/8″) 1905 painting La Famille des Saltimbanques, which she had bought in December 1914. The painting made such a deep impression on Rilke that he wrote to Frau Koenig asking if he could stay in her Munich home while she was away for the summer of 1915, so that he could live beneath the great work, “which gives me the courage for this request.” The request was granted, and Rilke spent four months with the “glorious Picasso.”
The other source for the Fifth Elegy is Rilke’s experience, over a number of years, with a troupe of Parisian circus people.
In front of the Luxembourg Gardens, near the Panthéon, Père Rollin and his troupe have spread themselves out again. The same carpet is lying there, the same coats, thick winter overcoats, taken off and piled on top of a chair, leaving just enough room for the little boy, the old man’s grandson, to come and sit down now and then during breaks. He still needs to, he is still just a beginner, and those headlong leaps out of high somersaults down onto the ground make his feet ache. He has a large face that can contain a great many tears, but sometimes they stand in his widened eyes almost out to the edge. Then he has to carry his head cautiously, like a too-full cup. It’s not that he is sad, not at all; he wouldn’t even notice it if he were; it is simply the pain that is crying, and he has to let it cry. In time it gets easier and finally it goes away. Father has long since forgotten what it was like, and Grandfather—oh it has been sixty years since he forgot, otherwise he wouldn’t be so famous. But look, Père Rollin, who is so famous at all the fairs, doesn’t “work” anymore. He doesn’t lift the huge weights anymore, and though he was once the most eloquent of all, he says nothing now. He has been transferred to beating the drum. Touchingly patient, he stands with his too-far-gone athlete’s face, its features now sagging into one another, as if a weight had been hung on each of them and had stretched it out. Dressed simply, a sky-blue knitted tie around his colossal neck, he has retired at the peak of his glory, in this coat, into this modest position upon which, so to speak, no glitter ever falls. But anyone among these young people who has ever seen him, knows that in those sleeves the famous muscles lie hidden whose slightest touch used to bring the weights leaping up into the air. The young people have clear memories of such a masterful performance, and they whisper a few words to their neighbors, show them where to look, and then the old man feels their eyes on him, and stands pensive, undefined, and respectful. That strength is still there, young people, he says to himself; it’s not so 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 is really far too great forjust beating a drum. He lays into it, and beats it much too often. Then his son-in-law has to whistle over to him and make a warning sign just when he is in the middle of one of his tirades. The old man stops, frightened; he tries to excuse himself with his heavy shoulders, and stands ceremoniously on his other leg. But already he has to be whistled at again. “Diable. Père! Père Rollin!” He has already hit the drum again and is hardly aware he has done it. He could go on drumming forever, they mustn’t think he will get tired. But there, his daughter is speaking to him; quick-witted and strong, and with more brains than any of the others. She is the one who holds things together, it’s a joy to see her in action. The son-in-law works well, no one can deny that, and he likes his work, it’s a part of him. But she has it in her blood; you can see that. This is something she was born to. She’s ready now: “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 the old man only incidentally nods in response; it is a point of honor, his drumming, and he takes it seriously.
(July 14, 1907; SW 6, 1137 ff.)
l. 14, the large capital D: The five standing figures in Picasso’s painting seem to be arranged in the shape of a D.
l. 17, King Augustus the Strong (1670–1733): King of Poland and elector of Saxony. To entertain his guests at the dinner table, he would, with one hand, crush together a thick pewter plate.
l. 64, “Subrisio Saltat.”: “Acrobats’ smile.” During the printing of the Elegies, Rilke explained this in a note on the proof sheets:
As if it were the label on a druggist’s urn; abbreviation of Subrisio Saltat(orum). The labels on these receptacles almost always appear in abbreviated form.
(Ernst Zinn, “Mitteilungen zu R. M. Rilkes Ausgewählten Werken,” in Dichtung und Volkstum 40, p. 132)
l. 92, Madame Lamort: Madame Death.
The Sixth Elegy (Begun at Duino, February/March 1912; lines 1–31: Ronda, January/February 1913; lines 42–44: Paris, late autumn 1913; lines 32–41: Muzot, February 9, 1922)
l. 8, Like the god stepping into the swan: Cf. “Leda” (New Poems).
l. 20, Karnak: Rilke spent two months in Egypt early in 1911 and was deeply moved by
the incomprehensible temple-world of Karnak, which I saw the very first evening, and again yesterday, under a moon just beginning to wane: saw, saw, saw—my God, you pull yourself together and with all your might you try to believe your two focused eyes—and yet it begins above them, reaches out everywhere above and beyond them (only a god can cultivate such a field of vision) …
(To Clara Rilke, January 18, 1911)
In the team of galloping horses (l. 19) Rilke is referring to the battle scenes carved on the huge pillars in the Temple of Amun, which depict the pharaoh-generals in their conquering chariots.
l. 31, Samson: Judges 13:2, 24; 16:25 ff.
The Seventh Elegy (Muzot, February 7, 1922; lines 87–end: February 26, 1922)
ll. 2 ff., you would cry out as purely as a bird:
The bird is a creature that has a very special feeling of trust in the external world, as if she knew that she is one with its deepest mystery. That is why she sings in it as if she were singing within her own depths; that is why we so easily receive a birdcall into our own depths; we seem to be translating it without residue into our emotion; indeed, it can for a moment turn the whole world into inner space, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between her heart and the world’s.
(To Lou Andreas-Salomé, February 20, 1914)
l. 7, the silent lover:
Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,
the one attained from a thousand
natures …
(“Turning-point”)
l. 36, Don’t think that fate is more than the density of childhood:
What we call fate does not come to us from outside: it goes forth from within us.
(To Franz Xaver Kappus, August 12, 1904)
l. 37, how often you outdistanced the man you loved:
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Woman has something of her very own, something suffered, accomplished, perfected. Man, who always had the excuse of being busy with more important matters, and who (let us say it frankly) was not at all adequately prepared for love, has not since antiquity (except for the saints) truly entered into love. The Troubadours knew very well how little they could risk, and Dante, in whom the need became great, only skirted around love with the huge arc of his gigantically evasive poem. Everything else is, in this sense, derivative and second-rate.… You see, after this very salutary interval I am expecting man, the man of the “new heartbeat,” who for the time being is getting nowhere, to take upon himself, for the next few thousand years, his own development into the lover—a long, difficult, and, for him, completely new development. As for the woman—withdrawn into the beautiful contour she has made for herself, she will probably find the composure to wait for this slow lover of hers, without getting bored and without too much irony, and, when he arrives, to welcome him.
(To Annette Kolb, January 23, 1912)
l. 71, in your endless vision:
For the angel of the Elegies, all the towers and palaces of the past are existent because they have long been invisible, and the still-standing towers and bridges of our reality are already invisible, although still (for us) physically lasting.… All the worlds in the universe are plunging into the invisible as into their next-deeper reality; a few stars intensify immediately and pass away in the infinite consciousness of the angels—, others are entrusted to beings who slowly and laboriously transform them, in whose terrors and delights they attain their next invisible realization. We, let it be emphasized once more, we, in the sense of the Elegies, are these transformers of the earth; our entire existence, the flights and plunges of our love, everything, qualifies us for this task (beside which there is, essentially, no other).
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)
l. 73, Pillars:
… a calyx column stands there, alone, a survivor, and you can’t encompass it, so far out beyond your life does it reach; only together with the night can you somehow take it in, perceiving it with the stars, as a whole, and then for a second it becomes human—a human experience.
(To Clara Rilke, January 18, 1911)
l. 73, pylons: “The monumental gateway to an Egyptian temple, usually formed by two truncated pyramidal towers connected by a lower architectural member containing the gate.” (OED)
l. 73, the Sphinx: See note to the Tenth Elegy, ll. 73 ff., p. 333.
l. 84, a woman in love—, oh alone at night by her window: Cf. “Woman in Love” (New Poems).
l. 87, filled with departure:
I sometimes wonder whether longing can’t radiate out from someone so powerfully, like a storm, that nothing can come to him from the opposite direction. Perhaps William Blake has somewhere drawn that—?
(To Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, May 14, 1912)
The Eighth Elegy (Muzot, February 7/8, 1922)
Dedication, Rudolf Kassner: See note to “Turning-point,” p. 313.
l. 2, into the Open:
You must understand the concept of the “Open,” which I have tried to propose in this Elegy, as follows: The animal’s degree of consciousness is such that it comes into the world without at every moment setting the world over against itself (as we do). The animal is in the world; we stand in front of the world because of the peculiar turn and heightening which our consciousness has taken. So by the “Open” it is not sky or air or space that is meant; they, too, for the human being who observes and judges, are “objects” and thus “opaque” and closed. The animal or the flower presumably is all that, without accounting for itself, and therefore has before itself and above itself that indescribably open freedom which has its (extremely fleeting) equivalents for us perhaps only in the first moments of love, when we see our own vastness in the person we love, and in the ecstatic surrender to God.
(To Lev P. Struve, February 25, 1926, in Maurice Betz, Rilke in Frankreich: Erinnerungen—Briefe—Dokumente, Wien / Leipzig / Zürich: Herbert Reichner Verlag, 1937)
ll. 2 f., Only our eyes are turned / backward: In describing his experience of “reaching the other side of Nature,” Rilke uses the mirror image of this metaphor:
In general, he was able to notice how all objects yielded themselves to him more distantly and, at the same time, somehow more truly; this might have been due to his own vision, which was no longer directed forward and diluted in empty space; he was looking, as if over his shoulder, backward at Things, and their now completed existence took on a bold, sweet aftertaste, as though everything had been spiced with a trace of the blossom of parting.
(“An Experience,” 1913, SW 6, 1039)
l. 13, fountain: Here, as well as in the Ninth Elegy, l. 33, and Sonnets to Orpheus I, 8, l. 2, this is meant in its older sense of “a spring or source of water issuing from the earth and collecting in a basin, natural or artificial; also, the head-spring or source of a stream or river.” (OED)
l. 53 ff., Oh bliss of the tiny creature …:
That a multitude of creatures which come from externally exposed seeds have that as their maternal body, that vast sensitive freedom—how much at home they must feel in it all their lives; in fact they do nothing but leap for joy in their mother’s womb, like little John the Baptist; for this same space has both conceived them and brought them forth, and they never leave its security.
Until in the bird everything becomes a little more uneasy and cautious. The nest that Nature has given him is already a small maternal womb, which he only covers instead of wholly containing it. And suddenly, as if it were no longer safe enough outside, the wonderful maturing flees wholly into the darkness of the creature and emerges into the world only at a later turning-point, experiencing it as a second world and never entirely weaned from the conditions of the earlier, more intimate one.
(Rivalry between mother and world—)
(Notebook entry, February 20, 1914; SW 6, 1074 f.)
The Ninth Elegy (Lines 1–6a and 77–79: Duino, March 1912; the rest: Muzot, February 9, 1922)
l. 5, escaping from fate: Cf. Sonnets to Orpheus II, 12:
Und die verwandelte Daphne
will, seit sie lorbeern fühlt, daß du dich wandelst in Wind.
And the transfigured Daphne,
feeling herself become laurel, wants you to change into wind.
l. 7, happiness:
The reality of any joy in the world is indescribable; only in joy does creation take place (happiness, on the contrary, is only a promising, intelligible constellation of things already there); joy is a marvelous increasing of what exists, a pure addition out of nothingness. How superficially must happiness engage us, after all, if it can leave us time to think and worry about how long it will last. Joy is a moment, unobligated, timeless from the beginning, not to be held but also not to be truly lost again, since under its impact our being is changed chemically, so to speak, and does not only, as may be the case with happiness, savor and enjoy itself in a new mixture.
(To Ilse Erdmann, January 31, 1914)
ll. 9 f., the heart, which / would exist in the laurel too:
Hardly had she cried her breathless prayer
when a numbness seized her body; her soft breasts
were sealed in bark, her hair turned into leaves,
her arms into branches; her feet, which had been so quick,
plunged into earth and rooted her to the spot.
Only her shining grace was left. Apollo
still loved her; he reached out his hand to touch
the laurel trunk, and under the rough bark
could feel her heart still throbbing …
(Ovid, Metamorphoses I, 548 ff.)
ll. 32 ff., house, / bridge …:
Even for our grandparents a “house,” a “well,” a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat, was infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything was a vessel in which they found what is h
uman and added to the supply of what is human.
(To Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925)
l. 59, the rope-maker in Rome or the potter along the Nile:
I often wonder whether things unemphasized in themselves haven’t exerted the most profound influence on my development and my work: the encounter with a dog; the hours I spent in Rome watching a rope-maker, who in his craft repeated one of the oldest gestures in the world—as did the potter in a little village on the Nile; standing beside his wheel was indescribably and in a most mysterious sense fruitful for me.…
(To Alfred Schaer, February 26, 1924)
l. 77, our intimate companion, Death:
We should not be afraid that our strength is insufficient to endure any experience of death, even the closest and most terrifying. Death is not beyond our strength; it is the measuring-line at the vessel’s brim: we are full whenever we reach it—and being full means (for us) being heavy.—I am not saying that we should love death; but we should love life so generously, so without calculation and selection, that we involuntarily come to include, and to love, death too (life’s averted half); this is in fact what always happens in the great turmoils of love, which cannot be held back or defined. Only because we exclude death, when it suddenly enters our thoughts, has it become more and more of a stranger to us; and because we have kept it a stranger, it has become our enemy. It is conceivable that it is infinitely closer to us than life itself—. What do we know of it?!
Prejudiced as we are against death, we do not manage to release it from all its distorted images. It is a friend, our deepest friend, perhaps the only one who can never be misled by our attitudes and vacillations—and this, you must understand, not in the sentimental-romantic sense of life’s opposite, a denial of life: but our friend precisely when we most passionately, most vehemently, assent to being here, to living and working on earth, to Nature, to love. Life simultaneously says Yes and No. Death (I implore you to believe this!) is the true Yes-sayer. It says only Yes. In the presence of eternity.