Rainer Maria Rilke: Singer of Solitude

Rainer Maria Rilke: Singer of Solitude

© 2015 by Neall Calvert

“I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough

to make every minute holy.”

IKE FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN, RAINER MARIA RILKE has a permanent place in

the top ranks of German literature (though he didn’t want to

be limited by the designation “German poet”). It has been said

that his poetry turned German into a more poetic language.

LRilke arrived at my door from the bargain table of a

Vancouver used bookstore. An enigmatic-looking figure in a black-

and-white photograph peered out from a wine-coloured cover. The

book’s subtitle, “A Translation from the German and Commentary by

Robert Bly,” had caught my eye. Bly’s Iron John is a work that can

nudge open the doors of male self-esteem when they are rusted

shut.

The volume I had picked up, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke,

carried erratic markings inside in dayglow-pink highlighter so

the price was just four dollars. Months later when I picked it up

again, I noticed that on the title page someone had scrawled in

ballpoint pen, directly under the title, “Greatest Spiritual Poet

of this [Twentieth] Century.”

Born with the given names René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef

Maria, Rilke (1875–1926) is much more widely known than

Hölderlin, especially in North America. (A February 2015 Google

search on their names yielded about ten times as many hits for

Rilke.) It turns out Rilke held his predecessor in high esteem,

and his own poetry was partly an attempt to recreate what he

considered the pure, transparent language of Hölderlin. In a 1914

poem titled “To Hölderlin” [“An Hölderlin”] Rilke writes:

To you, O majestic poet, to you the compelling image,

O caster of spells, was a life, entire; . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

O wandering spirit, most wandering of all! How snugly

the others live in their heated poems and stay,

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content, in their narrow similes. . . .

. . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . No one

gave it away more sublimely, gave it back

more fully to the universe, without any need to hold on.

Thus for years that you no longer counted you played

with infinite joy, as though it were not inside you,

but lay, belonging to no one, all around

on the gentle lawns of the earth, where the godlike children had left it.

Ah, what the greatest have longed for: you built it, free of desire,

stone upon stone, until it stood. And when it collapsed,

even then you weren’t bewildered.

Why, after such an eternal life, do we still

mistrust the earthly? Instead of patiently learning from transience

the emotion for what future

slopes of the heart, in pure space?1

Rilke wrote that the infinitely intelligent force we so

casually call God (he sometimes calls it “the Nameless”) existed

3

everywhere and in everything; that there was a spiritual power in

all the things of this earth. He also believed that this force

was brought alive, literally constructed on Earth like a

cathedral, within poets and artists as they strove to create and

to become whole. He considered life to be a unity—everything was

in life itself, including death. We carry our own death within

us, he said.

A supremely dedicated poet and a brilliant lyrical writer

(lyrical: like a song; a representation of personal feeling; originally in ancient Greece it

meant to be accompanied by the lyre) whose first books of poems were

published when he was still a teenager, Rilke translated his

sometimes-difficult life journey into inspired poetry and prose.

The Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus (“Orpheus, the supreme god

of poetry, of whom all poets are but fleeting metamorphoses”2)

are considered his masterworks. Orpheus, a musician, poet and

prophet of ancient Greece, was said to have played the lyre so

sublimely that it charmed all living creatures—even stones;

rivers were said to change their courses. Rilke, during a fallow

period in his writing, came across an image in a bookshop window

4

of Orpheus playing, surrounded by animals. It revitalized him for

years thereafter.

Rilke’s celebrated Letters to a Young Poet, comprised of ten

epistles written to an aspiring nineteen-year-old poet in a

military academy, were begun when Rilke was just twenty-seven and

continued over a five-year period. Though in places

sanctimonious, they have been enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of

readers and are celebrated for what translator Stephen Mitchell

calls the “vibrant and deeply felt experience of life” that fills

them.

Rilke was the only child of an unhappy marriage. His mother,

mourning the loss of a girl child, dressed him in girl’s clothing

in his early years and would only speak to him if he answered to

a girl’s name. Like Hölderlin, he later felt ill at ease in the

world. As a young adult he would write to a friend:

. . . with the intimidation from which I suffered in my growing years

(everywhere encountering laughter and superiority, in my

awkwardness repulsed by everyone) [his soldier father

had in his youth placed him in a military academy]

5

I never had a chance to learn much of the preparatory training,

and most of the technicalities of living, which later are easy to

everyone; my awareness is full to the brim with recollections of

moments when all the people about me could do something and

knew things and acted mechanically without thinking how to go

about it, while I, embarrassed, didn’t know where to begin, wasn’t

even able to imitate them by watching.3

. . . It was a self-description I, also a male raised as a

girl, could almost have written. . . .

Rilke often led a restless, wandering existence. From the

German-speaking area of Prague where he was born he travelled to

and/or lived in Germany, Russia, France, Italy, Sweden, Spain and

finally Switzerland, seeking the places and circumstances right

for his work. Paris would become his creative centre. Sometimes

Rilke lived alone in a small room; other times he was in splendid

surroundings provided by wealthy friends or patrons. For a time

he lived at Worpswede, in northern Germany, in an artists’

colony, where he met Klara Westhoff, a sculptress who was a pupil

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of the famous French sculptor Auguste Rodin. She became his wife.

The marriage produced a child, Ruth, but lasted only one year.

Though Rilke never attained a university degree, he studied

art and literature at universities in Berlin, Prague and Munich,

and considered himself a scholar. After being hired to write a

monograph on Rodin and moving to Paris, Rilke became for six

months Rodin’s secretary, and later lectured on the man he

considered one of the greatest artists in the world. From the

master sculptor, who was at first a father figure and for a time

a friend, the young writer was grateful to learn the secret of

life for the artist: work consistently, not just when ideas

strike (“travailler, c’est vivre sans mourir”). It became Rilke’s

motto: “To work [creatively] is to live without dying”4. Ulrich

Baer, translator of an impressive book of selections from Rilke’s

letters, says: “Even if Rodin ultimately disappointed Rilke . . .

he triggered in Rilke an urgent desire to find out what it means

to commit oneself to a meaningful pursuit.”5

Writing was Rilke’s life. Besides poetry, prose works and

plays, he continually penned letters to friends and

acquaintances, sometimes dozens in a day, in which he described

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the minute details of his life, his progress or the lack of it,

and his feeling states. The same events would never be described

in the same words in another letter. Writes Baer: “For each

correspondent, Rilke varied his diction to come closer to the

honesty, the precision, and the emotional accuracy he valued

above all else in his work.”

This process helped him to remain balanced, and it emptied

Rilke’s mind for creative work. He constantly gave of himself in

words personally addressed to the recipient, and it is one set of

such letters, to a man he had never met, that became the

celebrated Letters to a Young Poet. (“. . . acknowledge to yourself

whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write.

This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night:

must I write? And if this should be affirmative . . . then build

your life according to this necessity; . . . Then draw near to

Nature.”6)

In one particular week Rilke wrote (by hand) 180 pages to

others, then copied sections containing poetic imagery into his

own workbook for later use. Many of these letters are gathered

into books; they are considered an essential part of his work,

8

and they give intimate insight into the creative process and the

creative life. One fine example is Letters Summer 1926: Pasternak,

Tsvetevaya, Rilke.7 (In a letter to Rilke late in his life, fellow

poet Marina Tsvetevaya wrote: “You are not the poet I love most .

. . You are poetry itself.”)8

To achieve the solitude for reflection and writing, Rilke

left behind his wife and child, and sent away lover after lover

after brief affairs. He had to discover over and over again that

only in aloneness could he bring forth the great ideas he knew

lay somewhere in his depths. To him it was unforgivable to

succumb to the pressures of “normal life” rather than develop as

an individual. He wrote to a friend that he found himself forever

“standing at the telescope, ascribing to every approaching woman

a bliss which was certainly never to be found with any one of

them: my own bliss, the bliss I once found in my most solitary

hours.”9

. . . This was good news for me. Rilke’s words saved me from

the grief of continuing to never get enough of what I didn’t

really want in love affairs with women. I began to travel into

the wilderness of Central British Columbia, and there, surrounded

9

only by mountains, lakes, trees and a great sky, I found my walks

becoming a meditation on the pleasures of relatedness with a few

significant people I knew. Eventually I realized beyond a doubt

what I longed for: a relationship with the kind of God that the

poet Rumi talks about in his writing—“the Beloved; the Eternal.”

I wanted “The Love Affair That Never Ends.” . . .

Although Rilke developed many personal connections, he

mostly lived alone, and in him one can discover what solitude

means:

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough

to make every minute holy.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

I want to be with those who know secret things

or else alone. . . .10

In another letter to a friend Rilke said, “As soon as life

touches me with one of its realities . . . makes demands on me, I

am disturbed. Where others feel themselves welcomed and in good

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hands, I feel as though prematurely dragged out from some hiding

place. . . .”11 Rilke said he needed “unlimited solitude, where

each day seems like a whole life . . . the space whose bounds one

cannot see, in the midst of which one stands surrounded by the

illimitable.”12

His multifaceted thoughts on solitude, found in Baer’s

remarkable The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke, are worth

hearing:

Whether you are surrounded by the singing of a lamp or the

sounds of a storm, by the breathing of the evening or the sighing of

the sea, there is a vast melody woven of a thousand voices that

never leaves you and only occasionally leaves room for your solo.

To know when you have to join in [emphasis in

original], that is the secret of your solitude, just as it is the art of

true human interaction: to let yourself take leave of the lofty words

to join in with the one shared melody.13

It happens only rarely that an individual gains a deeper and more

serious understanding of himself during a happy and fulfilling time

11

in his life; at such moments, most people dismiss the outcomes of

their preceding solitude as gloomy errors and throw themselves

into the blinding glare of happiness where they forget and deny the

contours of their inner reality.14

1 Stephen Mitchell, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, New York: Vintage International/Random House, 1989, 141. A footnote contains a paragraphfrom a letter by Rilke to Norbert von Hellingrath: “During the past few months I have been reading your edition of Hölderlin with extraordinary feeling and devotion. His influence upon me is great and generous, as only the influence of the richest and inwardly mightiest can be. . . . I cannot tell you how deeply these poems are affecting me and with what inexpressible clarity they stand before me.”

Writes Jeremy Robinson: “The fervent Hellenism of Hölderlin and the magic idealism of Novalis seem particularly aligned with Rilke's poetic sensibilities, even if he were not directly influenced by them (he certainly was by Hölderlin).” [See Endnote 29]

2 Prater, Donald. A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986, 350.

3 Rainer Maria Rilke, M. D. Herter Norton, trans., Letters to a Young Poet, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993, 113.

4 Prater, ibid., 92.

5 Baer, Ulrich, editor and translator. The Poet’s Guide to Life: The Wisdom of Rainer Maria Rilke. (New York: Modern Library/Random House, 2005), xliv.

6 Letters to a Young Poet (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), 18–19.

7 Letters Summer 1926: Pasternak, Tsvetevaya, Rilke. Eds. Yevgeny Pasternak, Yelena Pasternak, and Konstantin M. Azadovsky; Transl. Margaret Wettlin and Walter Arndt. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985).

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I consider the following to be the highest task in the relation

between two people: for one to stand guard over the other’s

solitude. If the essential nature of both indifference and the crowd

consists in the nonrecognition of solitude, then love and friendship

exist in order to continually furnish new opportunities for

solitude . . .15

8 Mitchell, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Introduction by Robert Hass, Introduction, p. xiv.

9 Prater, ibid., 409.

10 Robert Bly, Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, A Translation from the German and Commentary (New York: Harper & Row, 1981). From #7 in “A Book for the Hours of Prayer (Das Stundenbuch),” 25.

11 Prater, ibid., 116.

12 Prater, ibid., 131.

13 Baer, ibid., 84.

14 Baer, ibid., 87.

15 Baer, ibid., 85.

13

Rilke wrote these words after having experienced first-hand

the discord spoiling the atmosphere in the household of Leo

Tolstoy, whom he had visited while travelling in Russia with his

sometime muse and mistress and lifelong friend, the writer Lou

Andreas-Salomé. (She introduced Rilke to one of her intimates,

Sigmund Freud, but the poet declined psychoanalysis, thinking it

would interfere with his creative output.16 Their letters,

published in 2006, provide, according to one reviewer, “a

fascinating insight into the artistic temperament of an

influential poet, during a period when poetry still represented

the peak of the literary arts.”)17

Rilke had also found the Rodin home in France too strained

with conflict, and decided one could have a domestic life or a

secluded writing life, but not both. Without each person in the

relationship honouring the other’s requirements for solitude,

16 This may not have been a bad idea. Writer Steven Heighton says: “Onereason to be cautious about going to, say, psychotherapy is that you have to be cautious about tampering with your obsessions if they are feeding your work in a really fertile way.” “Author,” interview by Elliot Robins, Geist 64, Spring 2007 (Vancouver: The Geist Foundation), 21. <www.geist.com>

17 Ibid., 73.

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there was only unhappiness, he came to understand. In Letters to a

Young Poet he had written on solitude in relationships: “Love

consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet

each other.” It is a phrase often misinterpreted as the paean of

a misanthrope, though it seems rather the accumulated wisdom of

an accomplished student of soul retrieval.

At times Rilke’s life was climbing inner mountains, which he

declared he was prepared to do; at other times he described

himself as having gone through mountains, face to the rock, for

months. He had no qualms about constantly asking his publisher,

his friends, patrons and acquaintances to support him in his

self-imposed mission to create exalted writing—even at the risk

of his health. This they did, both financially and in terms of

residences that suited Rilke’s needs at the moment. Those homes

could be almost anywhere in Europe.

Rilke was not for everyone. Upon first meeting him, another

European writer reported that Rilke had the “blank, immobile

exterior of a blind man,” and uttered further: “I have never

known anyone with a more affecting dissociation between the

spiritual life and everyday existence.”18

15

He was not a saint. Though remaining connected to his wife

and daughter, he declined to attend his daughter’s wedding,

preferring to remain with his creative process. American John

Berryman, a much more outward-oriented and competitive poet than

the gentle, inner-questing Rilke, writes in one of his poems:

“Rilke was a jerk.”19 Those wishing to explore the many character

flaws of Rilke are directed to a 1996 Washington Post review of the

Ralph Freedman biography Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, entitled

“Devil or Angel.”20

Hermann Hesse writes in a different tone. “As a human being

[Rilke’s] fate made him humble and kindly.”21

[I]n his nature he is so very typical of what is unprotected,

homeless, uprooted, threatened . . . He prevails not because he was

18 Prater, ibid., 235.

19 Stephen Cohn, transl., Rainer Maria Rilke: Neue Gedichte/New Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997). Introduction by John Bayley, 1992, 15.

20 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/reviews/rilke.htm

21 Hesse, “Rainer Maria Rilke: 1928” in Essays, 341.

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stronger but because he was weaker than the average; it is the sick

and threatened quality of his nature that so powerfully summoned

up and strengthened the healing, incantative, magical forces in

him. . . . [H]e has become a beloved and comforting image and

model for the spiritual man and artist who does not withdraw from

suffering, who does not flee from and renounce his own time and

its fears, nor his own weaknesses and dangers but through them, a

sufferer, achieves his faith, his ability to live, his victory.22

Remarkable . . . how this poet so consistently begins with what is

simplest and as his language grows, as his mastery of form

increases, penetrates deeper and deeper into his problems! And at

each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant,

anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the

music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at

once instrument and ear.23. . .

* * *

22 Hesse, ibid.

23 Hesse, ibid., 338.

17

. . . In my own confrontation with suffering and weakness I

wondered if I, like Rilke, could simply accept my own inability

to stand up straight in the world (in any sense of the term—my

first chiropractor, after years of treatments, dubbed one of my

conditions ‘broken back syndrome’). I also experienced, like

Rilke, all but overwhelming sensitivities, and anxieties that

seemed to require near-constant solitude. Could I, like Rilke,

dedicate my life to writing and creativity, and to finding the

right conditions for carrying them out? . . .

* * *

Robert Bly’s Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke includes poems

from The Book of Pictures (Das Buch der Bilder), one of six major

collections by Rilke. Bly says,

The title [The Book of Pictures] translates as a book of images or

paintings . . . [H]e is not writing a literary book about images but

rather a painterly book in which he adopts some of the disciplines

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of painting. . . . Rilke wanted to provide readers with a book that

would be like a big room full of paintings. Here the man or woman

who resists the collective can enter and walk around; no one will

bother him or demand conversation. . . .24

A Rilke biographer says that the neo-romantic poets, of which

Rilke was one,

wrote for a small international community of people sensitive to

beauty, people who were not satisfied with the materialistic trend

of the world. . . . The poets were virtually the priests of a new

religion which was simultaneously pantheistically earthly and

indefinably unreal, a religion which held aloof from the world of

action and thereby from every form of ethics, which knew no form

of worship but only solitary ecstasy, which was deliciously unlimited

but as fugitive as sea-foam. . . . The greatest of these poets is . . .

Rainer Maria Rilke. He is the greatest, primarily on account of his

richness. . . .25

24 To be found.

19

It has been repeatedly, and rightly, pointed out that the mysterious

beauty of Rilke’s verse and of his world can be approached best if it

is realized that he constantly aimed at spiritualizing the sensory

and at clothing the spiritual in the sensory. This is one of the

characteristics of the whole neo-romantic movement with its

hovering intermediary position between heaven and earth, neither

of which it is entirely willing to enter.26

* * *

Rilke, considered a master of verse, wrote powerfully

concerning things (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”) and animals (“The

Panther”), subjects he explored deeply in poetry. (See the

Websites Page below for links to these and other poems.) In

Sonnets to Orpheus he mused, in intense images, on his

25 F. W. Van Heerikhuizen, Rainer Maria Rilke: His Life and Work, translated fromthe Dutch by Fernand G. Renier and Anne Cliff. (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1952), 33.

26 Ibid., 150.

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preoccupations: childhood, love, death, and how inanimate things,

plants and animals relate to human consciousness.

“Rilke packs a lot into the fourteen-line space of the

sonnet,” writes Jeremy Robinson. “He evokes night, space, breath,

presence, transformation, loss, suffering, sensuality (sound:

ringing like a bell; taste: wine; sight: night, and so on),

mystery, magic, personification (earth, water, wine, night),

philosophy.”27

Rilke said he next wanted to explore human beings, but the

angels intervened and so came Duino Elegies, a series of poems

exploring man’s place in the whole (“. . . simply because to live

is important, and we / are needed by all this here and

now . . .”28). The ten Elegies move from, at the beginning,

terrifying contact with the angels, and his famous opening plea

of spiritual longing27 http://www.log24.com/log06/saved/060609-Rilke.html“Rainer Maria Rilke: Life and Work,” by Jeremy Robinson [Introduction to Dancing the Orange: Selected Poems, tr. Michael Hamburger, ed. Jeremy Robinson (Kent, UK: Crescent Moon, 2001)]. A brief but all-encompassing introduction to Rilke.

28 Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Ninth Elegy. The Duino Elegies, Harry Behn, translator (Mount Vernon, NY: Peter Pauper Press, 1957), no page numbers.

21

Who, then, if I cried out, would hear me from among the angel

orders? . . .

(Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel

Ordnungen?) . . .

increasingly to celebration of their presence. In number nine he

writes:

To the Angel

praise the world but never the inexpressible, you

can never impress him with your splendid emotions;

he of the infinite knows you are new to them. Show

some simple thing that has weathered

until as a part of ourselves it lives in our hands and eyes.

Speak to him things. He’ll stand amazed . . .29

Although Rilke kept a bible with him at all times (as well

as a small bust of the Buddha), the angels he knew were from the

29 Ibid.

22

Islamic world that he encountered in Spain.30

* * *

In 1914, at midlife, Rilke felt himself at a turning point.

He wanted to stop working so hard. He realized he wanted an end

to trying to figure everything out; he wanted to live another

way.

Work of the eyes is done,

Now practise heart-work

upon those images captive within you . . .31

He also learned to stop complaining about life, instead to

speak of its glories. Four years before his end he had written,

in one of the personal and poetic dedications that always

accompanied a gift of one of his books:

30

? J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender. Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1952). Appendix IV, 159.

31 Bly, ibid., 157.

23

Oh, tell us, poet what do you do?

—I praise.

But those dark, deadly, devastating ways,

how do you bear them, suffer them?

—I praise.

And the Nameless, beyond guess or gaze,

How can you still call and conjure it?

—I praise . . .32

Rilke’s outpourings have been summed up as an “extraordinary

combination of formality, power, speed and lightness”33—one that

transformed German into a more poetic language. When one

considers that the stanzas so appreciated in English were often

rhymed in German, his accomplishment seems all that much greater.

(In Steven Mitchell’s The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, a good

starting point, English and German appear side by side.)

32 Prater, ibid., 350.

33 W. S. Merwin, back cover text, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephen Mitchell, ed. and trans. New York, Vintage International/Random House, 1989.

24

Rilke’s poems have been set to music by many composers,

including Hindemith, Shostakovitch, Viktor Ullmann, Peter

Lieberson and Frank Martin. Hindemith’s Das Marienleben (The Life of

Mary), based on a cycle of poems by Rilke, was written in 1923

and rewritten in 1948. The LP record versions of both have been

digitized and can be downloaded from the Internet.34

Austrian composer Ullmann, who also set to music a few of

Hölderlin’s poems, created, while music director at

Theresienstadt Concentration Camp in 1944, twelve pieces for

spoken voice and orchestra based on Rilke’s prose poem The Ballad of

the Life and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke (Die Weise von Liebe und Todes des Cornets

Christoph Rilke). Swiss composer Frank Martin’s 1942 composition for

orchestra and voice based on the same work was made available on

CD in 2007.35

34 Avant Garde Project: <http://www.avantgardeproject.org/agp50/index.htm>

35 MDG CD: Frank Martin: Die Weise von Liebe und Todes des Cornets Christoph Rilke (ASIN: B000Q6ZMXS), glowingly reviewed at www.sa-cd.net/showreviews/4661

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In 2001 American composer Peter Lieberson wrote for his

wife, singer Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Rilke Songs, five songs based

on Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus. The work was nominated for a Pulitzer

Prize in 2002, and a live-recording CD was produced in 2006.36

* * *

Rilke’s writing followed a similar pattern to Hölderlin’s:

he produced his greatest work near the end of his creative life.

The two authors, like trees that in brilliant autumn tones

illuminate the landscape just before their cycle is finished,

flared and were gone.

Rilke’s soul-emptying effort of completing both Sonnets to

Orpheus and Duino Elegies in just a week (Orpheus was singing within

him again; the latter had lain unfinished in his mind for ten

years) exhausted him. “My hand still trembles! . . . All in a few

days, it was an incredible storm, a hurricane in the spirit . . .

every fibre in me, every tissue, cracked. But now it exists. Is.

Amen. . . .”37 Afterward he became severely ill. Following

36 Bridge Records CD 9178: Peter Lieberson: Rilke Songs, The Six Realms, Horn Concerto, available at amazon.ca.

37 Prater, ibid., 348.

26

several years of suffering, with doctors unable to come up with a

diagnosis, he was finally discovered to have a rare form of

leukemia, of which he died in 1926.

* * *

Hermann Hesse, also a poet, writes that he would like to

join the brotherhood of poets such as Rilke, those who

do not seek to enlighten our time, or to improve it, or to instruct it,

but by revealing to it our own suffering and our own dreams we try

to open to it again and again the world of images, the world of the

soul, the world of experience. These dreams are part evil dreams of

anxiety, these images are in part cruel horror pictures—we do not

embellish them, we dare not disown them. We dare not hide the

fact that the soul of mankind is in danger and close to the abyss.

But we dare not conceal either that we believe in immortality.38

* * *

38 Hermann Hesse, “Rainer Marie Rilke: 1928” in Essays, 340.

27

It could be summarized about Hölderlin as well what has been

said of Rilke: that he “steadfastly held to his aim: through the

alchemy of the gift he felt within him, to transform to the gold

of poetic expression a personal perception of the world of man

and nature. . . .”39 Like the clouds above us, such writers

provide the water of life.

A letter to the editor in the Vancouver Sun explores the gifts

such thinkers give to society:

The term “intellectual” sticks in a lot of people’s craws. To many it

connotes aloofness, snobbishness, a high-toned attitude and looking

down with disdain on common folk.

Yet the term is legitimate: It truly means something. It refers to an

admirable ability to grasp, with the most unencumbered mind possible,

the human condition.

This might seem the foppish realm of dilettantes, except that it

profoundly matters. A free society is blind—actually doomed—without

thinkers to burrow through its presumptions. We’re blind without

philosophers, critics and interpreters, without artists, especially poets. We

39 Prater, ibid., 408.

28

need people who think just for the sake of thinking, the sake of

illustrating, the sake of clarifying.

But “just thinking” is not an occupation that’s highly regarded in

modern society. “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?” is the standard

comment.

We’re paying the price for this lack of regard. Never in the history of

the human race has there been such a shallow culture, ignoring the

information that proves the destructiveness of the course it is on. . . .40

* * *

The pages of these two essays and the poems that follow

present, I hope, a small antidote to the consuming culture that

dominates society today. It is a culture that tires many people

out at jobs that don’t relate to their inner, sacred needs, in

order to pay for a lifestyle they—as well as the Earth—cannot

afford. Contact with rich, life-giving Nature has gone, replaced

by a religion of materiality and at the same time one of endless 40

? Barry Peterson, Nanaimo, BC, Letter to the Editor, MIX Section, Vancouver Sun, March 30, 2002, H19.

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lack that keeps singing the hymn “There’s Still Not Enough to Go

Around.”

The richness inherent in each person’s inner life—as well as

in each moment as a gift from Nature—has been lost. William

Wordsworth described this condition best:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,

The winds that will be howling at all hours,

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,

For this, for everything, we are out of tune . . .41

Hölderlin conveyed similar thoughts in “The Poet’s Vocation”

(“Dichterberuf”):

41 William Wordsworth, The Essential Wordsworth, selected by Seamus Heaney (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1988).

* * *

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Too long now things divine have been cheaply used

And all the power of heaven, the kindly, spent

In trifling waste by cold and cunning

Men without thanks, who when he, the Highest,

In person tills their field for them, think they know

the daylight and the Thunderer, and indeed

Their telescope may find them all, may

Count and may name every star of heaven.

Yet will the Father cover with holy night,

That we may last on earth, our too knowing eyes.

. . . Never will our

Free-ranging power coerce his heaven.

* * *

IN LATE SUMMER OF 2011, nearing the end of a three-month camping

journey in western British Columbia, a solitary midlife vision

quest, I wanted to write a poem about the perceptions of nature

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that were growing in me. My campsite was in an old-growth forest

on Buttle Lake in the mountains of central Vancouver Island,

ninety kilometres from the nearest town. During an unusually long

stretch of dry, warm, sunny days, night after night I had

silently watched the sun set into a pristine high peak across the

lake, followed a few hours later by the moon a few peaks over.

The grand sky, the temperate air, the stillness, the silent,

self-possessed tall firs, the regularly moving spheres of light,

their absence and then the even more silent night, and then the

cycle repeating again the next day—the air was rich with life.

Something is present here, I wanted to say—something I can almost

touch . . .

Rilke had already been there. In the Ninth Duino Elegy,

considered by some (including the grudging author of the

Washington Post review mentioned above) the greatest one, he

writes:

But because truly, being here is so much;

because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world,

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which in some strange way

keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,

just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been at one with the earth,

seems beyond undoing.

Not only is there something present on this earth, there is

something that seems to require acknowledgement by human presence, that

“apparently needs us,” in Rilke’s beautiful words. Nature wants us to be

here to revel in its magnificence . . . to be “at one with the earth” . .

. to feel at home . . . to love this place . . . and to create

like a dedicated poet here.

* * *

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A FEW RILKE WEBSITES1. http://www.abuddhistlibrary.com/Buddhism/H%20-%20World%20Religions%20and%20Poetry/Poetry/Other%20Writers/Rilke/The%20Rainer%20Maria%20Rilke%20Archive_files/main.htm

“Rainer Maria Rilke Archive.” This unofficial website, established in 1998 by a Rilke fan, contains 100 selected poems, plus 100 selected quotes listed by subject, plus a bibliography and a list of Rilke’s publications. Includes the poem “The Panther.” The poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo” can be found by searching for it at the Academy of American Poets website: <http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/295>

2. <http://www.picture-poems.com/rilke/rilkelinks.html>

“Assorted Rilke Links.” Provides access to a rich collection of websites on Rilke, including poetry, commentaries, music connections and foreign-language sites.

3. http://books.google.ca/books?id=MRmu9Xy9aqkC&pg=PP6&lpg=PP6&dq=%22life+of+a+poet+rainer+maria+rilke%22&source=web&ots=1KzREz7YvH&sig=R45g-VoGlPIzXpup8ooXAAhD1J8&hl=en

Life of A Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke, by Ralph Freedman, Northwestern University Press, 1998, 640 pages. Complete book available for free download. A 1996 Washington Post review of this book, titled “Devil or Angel,” emphasizing the many not-so-pleasant aspects ofRilke’s character presented in Freedman’s tome, can be found at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/reviews/rilke.htm

4. http://www.jbeilharz.de/poetas/rilke/#top

Excerpts from the Duino Elegies, translated by John Waterfield. Contains the First, Fourth and Tenth Elegies.

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5. http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/perloff/articles/rilke.html

Marjorie Perloff article: “Reading Gass Reading Rilke.” A review of William H. Gass’s book Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. An intelligent look at how Rilke’s unique style of German (“must be a translator’s nightmare”) arrives at the eyes of English-speaking readers. Describes the setting that created the famous opening lines of the first Duino Elegy.

ENDNOTES

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