(8 August 2025)
(8 298 words)
(44 minutes reading time)
On 28 August 1902, Rilke received a commission from the art historian, Professor Richard Muther, the editor of a series of monographs on modern artists called Die Kunst (Art), to write a book on the French sculptor, Auguste Rodin. The invitation came at a critical point in Rilke’s career and personal life. It meant moving to Paris and separating from his wife, Clara, and daughter, Ruth. The separation was made with mutual agreement. Like her husband, Clara was a practicing artist (sculptor), and the pressures of family life in rural Westerwede did not support her or his respective vocations. As he had written to Julie Weinmann on 25 June, “we have promised each other to live for our work, as a bachelor of limited means, as before”. Looking back from 13 November 1903 in a letter to Andreas-Salomé, Rilke speculated on what had gone wrong: “I had a house, a wife, a child, had something real and undeniable, believed that this would make me more visible, more tangible, more factual. But, Lou, Westerwede existed, it was real, for I built the house myself and made everything in it. And yet, it was really outside me. I was not part of it and was not taken up with it”.
In 1902, Rodin was reaching the height of his fame. Although Rilke only knew his work through photographs in books, he was completely won over by what he saw. As he wrote to Arthur Holitscher 0n 31 July 1902, “I am utterly absorbed in Rodin”. “I have the feeling that, quite apart from his art, he is a synthesis of greatness and power, a future century”. For Rilke, “Rodin had acted as a signpost to all the Arts in this confused age” (First Rodin lecture, p. 41). In spite of the achievement of the second Book of Hours, Westerwede had been no place for artistic growth. For that he had to rub against the harder grain of the city. As if in the spirit of the monk in that volume, the pilgrimage continued. A final decision was taken. In August, Rilke went to live in Paris. Rodin was to build on Rilke’s experience of Worpswede but, at the same time, transform it. According to Antje Bussgen, “Rilke’s involvement with Rodin and his art had a double aspect of existential and poetic self-clarification, which was a defining feature of Rilke’s engagement with the pictorial arts” (Rilke Handbuch, p. 140).
On 28 August, on his arrival in Paris, Rilke moved into an apartment on 11 rue Toulilier, near Le Jardin du Luxembourg. On 1 September, he paid his first visit to Rodin in the latter’s workshop in the Rue de l’Université. The visit had been arranged on 1 August, when Rilke had written a (rather ingratiating) letter to the sculptor, explaining that had been commissioned to write a book on “the master”. “He liked him at once: the impressive features, themselves like a sculpture, the youthful impression of his words, the laughter ‘like that of a child with a present, half embarrassed, half delighted’ “(Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 90). Rilke was impressed by the “ordering spirit” (Ralph Freedman, Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. New York. 1996, p. 168) of Rodin’s work and was enthralled to find that same spirit embodied in the man himself. As he wrote to Clara, “he was kind and gentle. And it seemed to me that I had always known him; that I was only seeing him again. I found him smaller than expected, and yet powerful, kindly and noble”. (Rilke, Letters 1892-1910, p.77). “We spoke of many things”, he wrote to Clara in the same letter, “then he went on working and begged me to inspect everything in the studio”. ” ‘The hand is there’, he said, and made with his own so powerful a gesture of holding and shaping that one seemed to see things growing out of it”. Unlike his alienating encounter with Tolstoy in Russia two years earlier, Rilke was made to feel at home by Rodin, encouraged to enter into personal conversations (although, at this stage, Rilke’s poor spoken French was an obstacle), and was invited to join Rodin and family at mealtimes.
The following day, the poet visited Rodin in his home in Meudon, a short train journey from the center of Paris. Rodin’s home was also a pavilion housing his works. Rilke was overwhelmed by ” ‘all the dazzling white figures looking out through high glass doors like the denizens of an aquarium’ “. Marbles, plaster casts, cases with splendid fragments of “The Gate of Hell’, a veritable army of works, row upon row of studies, arms, legs, torsos, scarcely one finished … These riches, this infinite continuous creation … This purity and vehemence of expression, this inexhaustibility” (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 90).
Rilke visited Meudon often. During these visits, he paid great attention to Rodin’s way of working and what it produced. As he later wrote, “his art was not based upon any great idea but upon the conscientious realization of something small, upon something capable of achievement, upon a matter of technique”. (First Rodin lecture, p. 7). And in a later letter to Andreas-Salomé of 8 August 1903, we read, “what he gazes at and surrounds with his gazing is always for him the only thing, the present thing, the one world in which everything happens”. Rilke saw in Rodin a perfection of form, “its sacred being-stone that distinguishes it”, as he wrote in one of his diaries, “from fleeting forms and errant gestures” (Rilke, Schmargendorf diary 16 September 1900), adding “and this is one of the most superb qualities of Rodin’s sculptures – that they always remain within this untransgressable magic circle”. A personal rapport was established, and Rilke felt able to talk to the Master (whose motto was “travailler, toujours travailler”) about his life. On one occasion, Rilke asked, “what was your life like?” Rodin replied, “good”. “Did you have any enemies?” “None that could keep me from my work”. “And fame?” “It made work a duty”. “And your friends?”. They expected work from me”. “And women?” “I learned to admire them in the course of my work” (quoted in Rachel Corbett, You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin. Norton. 2017, pp. 96-97).
Above all, in their walks around Meudon, Rilke could observe how Rodin’s eye could magnify even the smallest of objects. At one point, they encounter a snail. As Rilke wrote (presumably paraphrasing Rodin) to Clara on 5 September, “things are infallible here. This little snail recalls the greatest works of Greek art. It has the same simplicity, the same smoothness, the same inner radiance, the same cheerful and festive sort of surface. And herein things are infallible. They contain laws in their purest form”. It represented, as Antje Bussgen notes, a process of “simple-seeing” (Rilke Handbuch, p. 140) that underscored Rodin’s (unformulated) aesthetics, as it will come to underscore Rilke’s.
Personal affinity soon became an aesthetic influence. Rodin’s insistence on structured form in his sculptures acted for Rilke as a model for a new type of poem, the “Dinggedicht”, “a poem in which the obtrusive interferences of an authorial self and all subjective, accidental occasions have been replaced by an inwardly tensile, self-contained sculptural presence, delimited by strong contours but filled with an utmost of interacting of visual and visible reality” (Edward Snow, Introduction to Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters. Translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. Norton. 2006. p. xiv). One of the most memorable of Rilke’s “Dinggedichte” is the poem “The Panther”, subtitled “In Jardin des Plantes”, written between 1902 and 1903 in Paris and published it in New Poems (Neue Gedichte) in 1907. The “Jardin des Plantes” (“Garden of Plants”, just south of the river Seine in the centre of Paris) included a small zoo, in which a panther was caged, and which Rilke saw during his many visits to the Garden:
His gaze has become so weary from his pacing along the bars
that it can no longer retain anything.
It seems to him that there are a thousand bars,
and behind them a thousand more, and behind them no world.
II
His soft gait, flexed in strong steps,
which turn around in the tiniest of circles,
is like a dance of strength around a centre,
in which a mighty will lies dazed.
III
Only now and then does the curtain
lift silently from his eyes. An image goes in,
goes into the limbs of his tensed stillness –
and, within his heart, ceases to be.
I
Sein Blick ist von Vorübergehen der Stäbe
so müd geworden, dass er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäben keine Welt.
II
Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein grosser Wille steht.
III
Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf -. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille –
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.]
.
“The Panther” is a study in entrapment and the repression of perception. The repetition of the “thousand bars” suggests the closed finality of the panther’s plight, in a routine exercise that has deadened its visual sensibility and hence its opportunity for freedom. As they turn in the smallest of circles, the panther’s movements are like “a dance of power around a centre”. The focus is on place and space and the placement of selfhood through immersion in the moment. Rilke’s description of the dignity and gravitas of the panther has two possible extratextual sources. Its actions are reminiscent of the concept of “grace” (“Grazie”) found in Heinrich von Kleist’s essay “On the Marionette theater” (1810). Like the puppet, the panther is free from rational self-consciousness and introspection and, in spite of its containment, still possesses a “will”. One further influence may lie in Rilke’s contact with Rodin. As he wrote to Clara in September 1902, regarding Rodin’s model for a tiger, “the representation of the prowling stride is intensified to the highest degree, the powerful downward tread of the broad paws, and simultaneously that caution in which all strength is wrapped, that noiselessness”. Deprived of exteriority, the panther succours itself on interiority and the immediate sense of place, a “centre”. The poem both structurally and thematically thrives on this tension between the fact of stasis and the will to kinesis.
The Panther” is a vignette of a discourse formed around tropes of authenticity / inauthenticity, freedom / restraint (although they do not necessarily exclude one another), the exercise of will and the failure of the will to impose itself in the world, self-consciousness and the abolition of the same. These tropes are explored in the most economical way through a precision of poetic structure. The poem begins where it ends, with “sein” (“His” in the first line; “being” in the final line), and moves to the centre of its problematic and then away from it, with “circle” being a term in the exact middle of the text. The poem opens with a failed externalisation of perception and ends with a failed internalisation of the same.
Rilke’s initial contact with Rodin ended in July 1903, and both went their separate ways: Rilke on a characteristic peripatetic tour that included Italy and Scandanavia; Rodin remained in Paris. But they were soon to resume their relationship, for during this period Rilke’s first essay on Rodin, written between mid-November and mid-December 1902, had appeared to be published in early 1903. In the essay (sometimes described as a lecture, and the first of two), Rilke had emphasized Rodin’s break with conventional standards of academic beauty. “The plastic art of the time was still that of the model, the pose, and the allegory” (Rilke, Auguste Rodin. Dover Books p. 11). By contrast, Rodin developed his own form of realism, not one that attempted to provide an accurate description of the external world, but one that saw more deeply into the expressive reality of the human subject, producing sculptures of the same where there was “no symmetry in the face, no repetition, no part empty, uncommunicative or neutral”. As Rilke attests, “one is amazed by ever-changing profiles, not one of which is accidental, uncertain or indefinite” (p. 11). Above all, Rodin had transformed our understanding of the depicted body, and Rilke described that transformation in terms that merge Rodin with Freud. “It has become a different body. If it were now uncovered, it would probably reveal a thousand forms of expression for all that was new and nameless in its development, and for all those ancient secrets which, emerging from the Unconscious, like strange river gods, lift their dripping heads from out of the wild current of the blood” (p. 5).
Rilke’s essay appeared to much acclaim. Rodin could not read German, but he could read acclaim. On 9 July 1905, he wrote to the poet on inviting him to come to Paris and stay at his home in Meudon. Rilke wrote back on 6 September accepting the invitation in tones of idiolatry and homage. On 12 September, Rilke arrived back in Paris, and three days later travelled to Meudon. As he wrote to Clara soon after, “he greeted me, recognising me with exploring eyes, contented and quiet, and like an eastern god enthroned, moved only within his sublime repose and pleasure” (Letters 1892-1910, p. 191). They bonded like father and son. Rodin was addressed in the same reverential tones that Rilke had used for Lou: the former was the real father; the latter was the real mother. Rodin was advisor, guide and idol. They talked together in Meuron (in Rilke’s broken French), and they eat together en famille (a family whose members Rodin never introduces), and they walked together around Versailles: “and then he shows one everything: a distance, a motion, a flower, and everything he evokes is so beautiful, so understood, so startled and young” (Letters 1892-1910, p. 192).
Rilke took from his shared environment with Rodin not just an ethic and an aesthetic (work and more work, and let the eye never wander from objects and their structure), but also quite specific instances of tangible forms and objects within that environment. On one occasion, we hear, “soon after supper, I retire and am in my little house [Rodin has since Rilke’s last visit built a number of cottages around his estate intended for long-term guests] by eight-thirty at the latest. Then the wide blossoming starry night is before me, and below, in front of the window, the gravel walk goes up a little hill on which, in fantastic silence, an effigy of Buddha rests, radiating with quiet reserve the inexpressible self-containedness of his gesture beneath all skies of day and night. C’est le centre du monde.” (Letters 1892-1910, p. 194).
The New Poems contains three poems on Buddha. One from 1907 (“Buddha in Glory”) reads:
I
Centre of all centres, core of cores,
almond, self-enclosed and growing sweet –
all this up to the stars is your fruit-flesh. I greet you.
II
You feel how nothing clings to you:
in the infinite is your shell
and there your potent juice lies and presses out.
And beyond it a radiance gives it succour.
III
And far above, your suns
rotate, complete and glowing.
But in you something has begun
that will outlast these glowing suns.
I
[Mitte aller Mitte, Kern der Kerne,
Mandel, die sich einschliesst und versuesst, –
diese Alles bis an alle Sterne
ist dein Fruchtfleisch: Sei gegruesst.
II
Sich, du fuehlst, wie nichts mehr an dir haengt;
im Unendlichen ist deine Schale,
und dort steht der starke Saft und draengt.
Und von aussen hilft ihm ein Gestrahle.
III
denn ganz oben werden deine Sonnen
voll und glueend umgedreht
Doch in dir isch schon begonnen,
was die Sonnen uebersteht.]
This is a poem in which the world as text has become the text as art. It is structured through the spatial motifs, the place of objects in a thingly world, that defined the “Dinggedicht”. In particular, there is a focus on what we might call “integritas”, seen in leit motifs such as “centre”. “core”, “self-enclosed”. This is the essential state of the Buddha, and from it radiates out (quite literally, “ein Gestrahle”) a matrix of themes, which are both spatial and temporal, reflecting potency and “succour”. As the final stanza indicates, Buddha is both of this world but transcends it.
Rilke, through an elaborate process of wishful thinking and embellishment, a process that sometimes bordered on mystification, found in the world what he wanted to find in the world. But reality intervened. His intimate association with Rodin did not last. Two weeks after his arrival in late September 1905, Rilke had been invited by Rodin to be his secretary, in order to deal with a growing body of correspondence. Rilke was flattered and accepted, but he had not considered the consequences of this engagement and the impact it would have on his writing. The two men, in fact, had approached the arrangement with entirely different expectations: Rodin wanting Rilke to remain domiciled in Meuron, working on his duties as secretary. Rilke, who had penciled only in two hours a day for such duties, believed that he could achieve some distance from the same. Both men were to be disappointed. The growing fame that encouraged Rodin to bring Rilke to Meuron also took the poet elsewhere, on lecturing trips beyond France: on 21 October and 3 November, speaking in Dresden and Prague but also spending time in Cologne and Leipzig. Rilke returned to Paris. After enjoying Christmas in Worpswede and Oberneuland with Clara and Ruth, Rilke went back to Paris but soon embarked on a second lecture tour to Elberfeld (on 25 February 2006), Prague (15-19 March) and Berlin (20-30 March). He returned to Paris on 2 April.
It had all been too much for the self-regarding and “demanding taskmaster” Rodin (Prater p. 130). On 10 May 1906, the frequently absent Rilke was dismissed from his office of secretary and ejected from Meudon. The official reason was that he had behaved improperly in dealing with certain correspondences, which had been intended for Rodin but to which Rilke had replied without consultation. The real reason, however, lay more in the fact that Rilke was a practising poet, not a secretary, and felt he had a right to determine his own life and career. It is, perhaps, an irony that the subject of his lectures abroad had been: the life and work of Gustave Rodin. On 12 May 1906, Rilke moved into an apartment in Paris, 29 rue Cassette. As he wrote to Clara on 10 May, “I am packing up and moving out of my little house, out into the old freedom, with all its cares and possibilities … I am full of expectation and light of heart”. The sources of this self-confidence lay not only in the fact that 1905 saw the appearance of a major publication: The Book of Hours in December, whose three volumes had been written over a period of six years, the crucial years being 1898, 1902 and 1904. They were now brought together, revised, given a collective title and offered to the public. Waiting in the wings were two other projects: the second edition of The Book of Images, and the final editing of The Lay of Cornet Christoph Rilke, both of which involved towards the end of 1905 negotiations with Axel Juncker. The expanded second edition includes eighty-one to the forty-five poems in the first edition. Rilke thought of the two versions as forming “a characteristic unity”, but he also felt, as he wrote to his publisher at Christmas 1905 that there was an “abolition of aesthetic pretension” in the new volume, He had achieved “a consciously simpler, even colloquial language” (Jutta Heintz in Rilke Handbuch, p. 290).
Rilke may have taken his leave of Rodin in disappointment (and even a certain mystification about the latter’s motives for the dismissal), but he did not leave with resentment. Already within a few months, he was writing his second lecture on Rodin (published in 1907), in which he pursued the same laudatory trajectory of the first lecture. After a lengthy introduction in which, Rilke celebrates “the blessed mystery of things” and the existence of such things in the silence of space: “Things. When I say that that word (do you hear?) there is silence, the silence which surrounds things. All movement subsides and becomes contour. And out of past and future time something permanent is formed: space, the great calm of objects which knows no urge” (Second Rodin lecture, p. 43). There are affinities between Rodin and Rilke here. As Charlie Louth notes, “ostensibly this is a preliminary to talking about statues but in fact Rilke is already talking about poetry, and more specifically about the possibility of making the quietness that surrounds words audible” (Louth, Rilke: The Life of the Work. Oxford. 2020, p. 115).
Rilke goes on to advance Rodin as the creator of things, human and inanimate, transfigured (both literally and metaphorically) through his art. And he lists individual sculptures (with his own cryptic but enlightening gloss on each), “that man with the broken nose, unforgettable as a suddenly raised fist; that youth, whose upward stretching is as near to you as your own awakening; that walking figure, which stands like a new word for the action of walking in the vocabulary of your feeling; and the man sitting, thinking with his whole body, withdrawing into himself; and the burgher with the key, like some great receptacle containing only pain”(Rilke, Auguste Rodin, second lecture, pp. 46-47). All descriptions would have been recognizable to his audience (the last two, for example, referring to “The Thinker” and the “Burghers of Calais”
Rilke attempts to enter into the creative mind of Rodin, his technique but also his thinking, the disposition behind and within that technique: “for there is no representation here, no intention, no trace of a name [referring perhaps to the universal anonymity of many of Rodin’s sculptures” [their “Namenlosigkeit”. Rilke Handbuch, p. 141)]. And withal what is not here? Is there any attitude of holding or of letting go or of no longer being able to hold, of bending and stretching and contracting, of falling or flying ever seen or imagined, which is not found here? And if they ever occurred, they were lost; for they were so fleeting and fine, had so little reference to oneself, that it was not possible to give them a meaning. Now for the first time, seen unexpectedly in these sheets [Rodin’s sketches] the meaning becomes clear; the utmost we know of love suffering, and bliss and woe, breathes from these sheets, we know not why” (Second Rodin lecture, p. 52).
The mercurial Rodin could not sustain his animosity towards Rilke for long. Perhaps balancing the achievement of the second lecture against Rilke’s failings as a secretary (and inspired by French reviews of the former), the rapport was reestablished, but without the earlier affection or intimacy. Writing to Clara on 26 June 1907, Rilke explained that his relationship with the master was a strained one: “it pains me not to be able simply to go out to see a few things again and Rodin himself”. Rilke, however, still felt able to write to Rodin and discuss his work. On 29 December 1908, we read: “I am managing more and more to make use of that long patience that you taught me by your tenacious example; that patience which, disproportionate to everyday life, which seems to bid us make haste, puts us in touch with all that surpasses us. Now indeed I feel that all my efforts would be in vain without it. In writing poetry, one is always aided and even carried away by the rhythm of external things, for the lyric cadence is that of nature: of the waves, of the waters, of the wind, of the night”. Rodin was given to radical mood swings. Rilke went to visit him in August 1913 but (as Donald Prater relates), “Rodin had shown an abrupt change of humour, as unexpected as his dismissal of Rilke eight years earlier, not only withdrawing his permission to use the photographs of his work but apparently bent on breaking their relationship for good” (Prater, p. 228). This may or may not have happened, but there was one event that would relativize the vacillating relationship between the two artists: Rodin’s death on 17 November 1917. As Prater relates, “he did not know what effect this would have had on him in normal circumstances [Rilke has been conscripted in the midst of World War One], he wrote to Clara, perhaps it would have come like a reconciliation: ‘now, I feel mostly a bewildering confusion, that behind the unnatural, fearful wall of war these figures we knew in their purity should disappear from view, who knows wither – [the Belgium poet and friend of Rilke Emile] Verhaeren, Rodin, the friends great in wisdom. All I can feel is that when the frightful smoke blows away, they will no longer be there, will no longer be able to support those whose task it will be to restore the world’ ” (quoted in Prater, p. 287).
At one point in the second Rodin lecture, Rilke talks of his many walks with Rodin where he “gazed with particular gratitude” (p. 62) (practical moments perhaps in “Sehen-lernen”. Rilke Handbuch, p. 141). Learning to see. As he wrote elsewhere, “gazing is such a wonderful thing, of which we still know so little; with it we are turned completely outward but just when we are most so, things seem to be going on in us that have waited longingly unobserved, and while they, untouched and curiously anonymous, achieve themselves in us without us, – their meaning is growing up in the objects outside” (letter to Clara Rilke 8 March 1907).
In October 1907, Rilke visited on an almost daily basis a retrospective exhibition of the paintings of Paul Cézanne (who had died the previous year). A second formative presence had been found. If Rodin showed Rilke the complex materiality of the thing world, it was Cézanne who showed him its immateriality (stone becomes paint). As with Rilke’s absorption of Rodin, Cézanne will be read out of an individual and subtly inflected optic that combines the viewer (Rilke) with the viewed (Cézanne). Rilke had already inherited the desire “to achieve the conviction and substantiality of things, a reality intensified and potentiated to the point of indestructibility” from Rodin (Rilke, Letters on Cézanne. Edited by Clara Rilke. Translated from the German by Joel Agee. Vintage Books. 1991. p. 34). Cézanne, however, was able to impart an enigmatic but enlightening insubstantiality to this thinginess, “where the minutest component has been tested on the scales of an infinitely responsive consciousness” (Letters on Cézanne, p. 65). As with Van Gogh (whom Rilke had also just discovered) “his love for all things is directed at the nameless, and that is why he himself concealed it. He does not show it; he has it” (Letters on Cézanne, p. 21).
Rilke’s work bore testimony to this aesthetic appropriation in two ways: through a series of letters that he wrote to Clara throughout October, and through the poetry of the New Poems, on which he was working at the time. To be sure, the influence is not as pointed as it was with Rodin: there is no (implicit) theory of the “Dinggedicht” that will allow us to establish direct liaisons. Rather, we must talk of affinities, analogies, parallels, a certain convergence of sensibility, where the visual is spread across objects rather than directly exploiting them. And Rilke does not seem intimidated as he often was by the force of personality that comes through in Rodin’s work, where, as Paula Becker pointed out, the poet “was gradually diminishing to a rather tiny flame” (quoted in The Modersohn-Becker Correspondence. Translated Ulrich Baer. London. 2024, p.14). Cézanne does not have a personality and for the simple reason: it has gone, absorbed, by that which is depicted. All of Rodin’s work shout out “made by Rodin”. There is no shouting in Cézanne. And if we are looking at the texture of Rilke’s writing (what takes place on the page in words), it is Cézanne rather than Rodin (and the theory of the Thing) who is the greater presence.
The first letter to Clara was penned on 6 October 1907. Rilke had just visited the Salon d’Automne, an annual exhibition held in the Grand Palais, a building constructed on the Champs-Élysées for the 1900 World’s Fair. At first the tones are muted, factual even: Cézanne is just one artist represented amongst many. At this stage, he is merely “valid, moving, important” (Letters, p. 27), trite clichés that give no indication of the depth of understanding that is to come. It is not until Rilke enters the room dedicated solely to Cézanne, the following day, that his perception is sharpened: “here, all reality is on his side: in this dense quilted blue of his, in his red and shadowless green and the reddish black of the wine bottles. And the humbleness of all his objects’ (p. 29).
Rilke’s initial words on Cézanne concern the latter’s use of colour, and this focus is followed throughout his letters. As he writes to Clara on 13 October, the painter’s colours assume a totality of effect, “as if these colours could heal one of indecision, once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness; this educates you” (p. 50). Cézanne’s use of colour “keeps reality in equilibrium” (p. 80). Regarding Cézanne’s painting of a red armchair, Rilke notes, “for if one says, this is a red armchair (and it is the first and ultimate red armchair ever painted): it is true but only because it contains within itself an experienced sum of colour which, whatever it may be, reinforces and confirms this red” (pp. 80-81). Rilke returned repeatedly to the gallery specifically to look at colours. He wrote on 22 of the month, “the Salon is closing today, and already, as I am leaving it for the last time, I want to go back and look up a violet, a green, or certain blue tones which I believe that I should have seen better, more unforgettably” (p. 79).
It is both the absolute nature of colour and the relations that colours enter into that occupied Cézanne. As Rilke observes, In Cézanne’s idiom, “everything is right, is valid, participates, contributes its sound in the unity of bright correspondence” (p. 46). It is an idiom founded on a “humble objectivity” (p. 85). He “so incorruptibly reduced a reality to its colour content that it resumed a new existence in a beyond of colour, without any previous memories. It is a limitless objectivity refusing any kind of meddling in an alien unity” (p. 65). Cézanne took his subject matter wherever reality impinged itself upon him. “His artistic perception had to overcome itself to the point of realising that even something horrible, something that seems no more than disgusting, is, and shares the truth of its being with everything else that exists” (p. 67).
This was not, however, a new form of Realism or Naturalism purged by colour. The “real” objects hat Cézanne depicts are formed through a distance from materiality, and this distance is reflected in the dispersal of forms on the canvas, and the discontinuities and ambiguities of things depicted, even in monumental shapes such as the mountains of Montage Sainte-Victoire in Provence. As Günter Seubold explains, “for the viewer that means that the boundaries of the plains of colour dissolve, that contours vibrate and fluctuate, that the flat surfaces pulsate, and so the eye is compelled to wander; that the plans [Cézanne’s sections of bold brushwork] with cold colours are juxtaposed to the plans with warm colours and with these tones the plans lose their corresponding spatial values, so that the viewer is compelled to spring between foreground and background, and furthermore follow through this arrangement of colour the division of light and shade” (Seubold, “Der Pfad ins Selbe: Zur Cézanne-Interpretation von Martin Heidegger”, in Philosophisches Jahrbuch, 1987, 64-78, page 65, p.70). Such a perspective can be read in philosophical terms. As Julian Young observes, “the salient feature of Cézanne’s late works is their progressively and ever more marked ‘dematerialisation’ of objects”, and he adds (relating this to Heidegger’s philosophy), “for it is in this transition that we experience the happening, the ‘Ereignis’ or ‘worlding’ of world through the gradual presence of presencing” (Young, Heidegger’s Philosophy of Art, Cambridge UP, 2001, pp. 70 and 156).
Rilke’s letters on Cézanne speak of an empathy that borders on identification. Writing to Clara in on 18 October, Rilke queried “how far [he] had developed in the direction corresponding to the immense progress Cézanne had achieved in his paintings” and he continues in the same letter to identify “the turning in these paintings which [he] recognised because he had just reached it in [his] own work, or had at least come close to it somehow” (pp. 63-64). In November, Rilke visited his hometown, Prague, in order to give a series of lectures. He found the city a place of “incomprehensibility and confusion”. His impression of Cézanne’s aesthetic was still so strong and alive in his mind that he engaged with the city in terms of the influence of the former: the memory of the city “would have to either have passed away with my childhood, or my childhood would have to have flowed away from it later, leaving it behind, real among all the rest of reality, something to see and objectively tell, like a thing in Cézanne, incomprehensible for all I care, but tangible” (p. 93).
During this period, Rilke was working on the first part of his New Poems (Neue Gedichte), which he completed in July 1907. The second part was begun soon after and completed in August 1908. As has been observed, “for the texts of both volumes of the New Poems the contact with the viewed thing is constitutive. The dominating contact with objects no longer allows the immediate articulation of the self and the explicit emergence of feeling and the foundation of moods as they appeared in the prominent form of prayer in the Book of Hours“. The poems in both volumes can best be described as “experiences of objects translated into poetic structures” (Wolfgang Müller in Rilke Handbuch, p. 298). This is true, but the objects that Rilke translated in this process were not simply phenomenal (material things, such as roses) but cultural. J.F. Hendry likens “the world” of the New Poems to “a museum”. “Entering, we see the statues of Apollo, Artemis, Leda and the swan, Venus. Thanatos leads Alcestis to her fate, and she, happy in her sacrifice, casts a last look on Admetus. Here are Orpheus, Hermes and Eurydice, and a study of the Buddha at Meudon. There are figures from the Old and New Testaments: Eliah in the desert, Absalom, St. Sebastian, Joshua, Elijah, the prodigal son, a pietà, Christ on the Mount of Olives and on the Cross. And there are animals: flamingoes, gazelles, a black cat, a snake and a panther. Human beings, such as a Spanish dancer and a courtesan” (Hendry, The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rilke. Carnacet.1983. pp. 66-67).
The second volume was written at the same time as Rilke was viewing the paintings of Cézanne, but we should not assume a direct influence of the latter on the former. The tone, theme and general style of the second part of the New Poems carries over much of the substance of the first, and it quite possible that drafts of some of the poems in the second volume were already present while Rilke was writing the first. It is also possible that Rilke’s appropriation of Cezanne’s paintings may have been, so to speak, a self-standing moment in the development of his aesthetic discourse, quite separate from his writing of New Poems II. There is no prima facie case for seeing an overlap between the two.
And yet, there are points of convergence. Alan Bownes has identified the main features of Cezanne’s aesthetic as “the utilization of discontinuities and alignments”, “a concern with perception”, “using parallel layers of stratified space”, “combining several viewpoints”, in paintings where “ambiguities and uncertainties are everywhere” (Bownes, Modern European Art. Thames and Hudson. 1971, pp. 31, 33, 34, 36). These features are often thematized in Rilke’s New Poems, but even when they are not, they frequently inform the texture (particularly the syntactic texture) of the poems or make themselves felt in the juxtaposition of discordant images. In New Poems II, there are poems that noticeably diverge from the idiom of New Poems I and give evidence that this divergence is connected with Rilke’s discovery of the paintings of Cézanne. There is, for example, a greater use of colour motifs in a number of them such as “The Flamingos” and “Pink Hydrangea”. For the former, Rilke returned to the “Jardin des Plantes” for inspiration. He had been here before with another animal poem, “The Panther”, but now the structural motifs of that poem, the hard will of the entrapped panther standing on its fixed canter, has given way to a riot of colour that is a vehicle for the self-realization of the flamingos (although significantly the birds are never named in the text: they are present simply through the impressionist effect of their colour):
I
As in the mirror images painted by Fragonard,
their red and white hues show themselves with the muted expression
that someone could convey when talking of his mistress,
and say: she lay there soft with sleep.
II
Then they rise into the green, and lightly sway on their long
pink stems, side by side, in full bloom, as in a garden bed,
seducing (more seductively than Phryne) themselves.
III
until, necks curling, they sink their large pale eyes
into the softness of their down, in which
black and the red of fruit hide themselves.
IV
Then quite suddenly, envy shrieks through the aviary.
They, however, lie stretched out, in utter surprise, and one
by one, stride into the imaginary.
I
[In Spiegelbildern wie von Fragonard
ist doch von ihrem Weiss und ihrer Roete,
nicht mehr gegeben, als dir einer boete,
wenn er von seiner Freundin sagt: sie war
II
noch sanft von Schlaf. Denn steigen sie ins Gruene
und stehn, auf rosa Stielen leicht gedreht,
beisammen, bluehend, wie in einem Beet,
verfuehren sie verfuerender als Phryne
III
sich selber; bis sie ihres Auges Bleiche
hinhalsend bergen in der eigenen Weiche,
in welcher Sxhwrz und Fruchtrot versteckt.
IV
Auf einmal kreischt ein Neid durch die Voliere;
sie aber haben sich erstaunt gestreckt
und schreiten einzeln insImaginaere.]
On 12 October 1907, Rilke wrote to Clara: with Cézanne “at first, colour was something per se; later he takes it somehow, personally, as no human being has yet taken colour, only to make the thing with it”. From the very first line, “as in the mirror images painted by Fragonard”, we are in the poem with painting and a painter, in this case with Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806), who was noted for his delicate prints and etchings. In the second line, the “colours” are in the German original put in the upper case as “Weiss”, “Röte” (and we should note its plural formation), and “Grüne”. They are so strong that they almost eclipse the flamingos (or, perhaps, more accurately, the flamingos are their colours).
The floral and plant imagery continue, their shaping presence in the text sustained throughout by an undercurrent of eroticism. The very bodies of the flamingoes speak of plenitude (“red of fruit”). The animals seem possessed of, what we might call, an active passivity, with their “curling necks” and “stretched out” frames. Other birds can only envy this integrated disposition. The final line suggests that when the flamingoes do eventually move, they move into the realm of the transcendent, into “the Imaginary” (“Imaginäre’), where the birds have taken to flight. “Imaginäre” is a word rare in Rilke’s vocabulary, suggesting perhaps the penetration of reality by the creative mind. The word has its origins in the Latin “imago”, “image”, suggesting that we have returned to the painting motif with which the poem opened. Reality has remained in the grip of art throughout.
It has been argued, “many of the Neue Gedichte come with a feeling of something solved, as an insight is reached or a connection is made; the poems discover within themselves, as they encounter the world, a faculty of response, an achieved sense of having measured up to something or countered a negativity” (Louth, Rilke: The Life of the Work. p. 138). Immersion in a rose is an example of such completion. In a letter to Mary Gneisenau of 15 December 1906, the poet, writing from Capri, explained that he had just received a gift of a yellow rose. It was an occasion to expiate on roses in general and what they meant to him: “there is a deep repose in it; it lies on the very bottom of everything that is contained in it of movement, of memory, coming and going, of swiftly ascending longing, flows away over it, up above, and touches it no more”.
In August 1907, Rilke wrote the poem “Rose Interior” (“Das Rosen-Innere”):
Where is the exterior
to this interior?
And upon what wound does one lay
such linen for healing?
what skies
are reflected within the inland lake
of these open roses, free of care.
See how they lie so loosely
in the great looseness round them,
as though a trembling hand could ever shake them.
They are barely self-contained. Many
allow themselves to fill
to overflowing, and then stream
out from inner spaces
into the days that close
fuller and fuller, until
the entire summer becomes
a room, a room in a dream.
[Wo ist zu diesem Innen
ein Aussen? Auf welches Weh
legt man solches Linen/
Welche Himmel spiegeln sich darinnen
in dem Binnensee
dieser offenen Rosen,
dieser sorglosen, sieh:
wie sie lose im Losen
liegen, als koennte nie
eine zitternde Hand sie verschuetten.
Sie koennen sich selber kaum
halten; viele liessen
sich ueberfuellen undfliesseueber von Innenraum
in die Tage, die immer
voller und voller sich schliessen,
bis der ganze Sommer ein Zimmer
wird, ein Zimmer in einem Traum.]
The rose occupied a privileged place in Rilke’s iconography. It was so important that he chose it as part of the inscription on his tombstone: “oh rose, pure puzzlement, desire / to be no one’s sleep beneath so many / eyelids” (“Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust / Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel / Lidern”. As Ulrich Baer comments, “it is a beautiful, peaceful expression, in which so much of Rilke’s work seems to find its way back to its origins” (Baer, The Rilke Alphabet. New York. 2014, pp. 146-147).
There are two rose poems in New Poems I, and one in New Poems II. We must be careful about making absolute distinctions between them. The two earlier rose poems thematically foreground, as in “The Window Rose” (“Die Fensterrose”), as do all of Rilke’s rose poems, the poise and integrity of the rose, almost in a totemistic fashion, celebrating its “Stille” (“silence” but also connoting “equanimity”), a silence that draws all to itself with “its huge eye”. That poem ends with a pathetic fallacy, with the rose “wrenching the heart towards God” (because it lies in the window box of a cathedral).
The rose in New Poems II, as in “Rose Interior”, emerges in the text as a quite different rose. The rose begins in pain (which is what “Weh” in the German original means, but the standard translation “wound” is indeed more appropriate), but as the poem develops that pain is nullified and transmuted in increasingly graduated step. Images of an open rose reflects a sunny disposition (“free from care”), an equanimity (“lie so loosely”) and, above all, a plenitude of being (“full to overflowing”). This descending accumulatio reaches its climax in the final lines, where epithets of repletion transport the rose to an “entire summer” that now luxuriates in a rose-filled room.
The rose is this poem seems more closely observed and has no fate beyond itself, the very first lines pointing to a collapsing of its inner and outer dimensions: its center belongs both within it and beyond it. Like an object in a Cezanne painting, it is attached to the world but in its true reality it occupies a shadowy space beyond it. Its self-sufficiency is formally established through reflexive pronouns (most notably in the German original through “sich” formations). The poem culminates with the rose taking from its inner space(“Innenraum”) to expand into the fullness of summer, of which it is the primal mover. The shorter line lengths give the text an immediacy that approximates to the act of the viewing of a painting.
Visual motifs are equally prevalent in New Poems II. In a letter of 29 May 1906, Rilke told of a recent visit to the Louvre. Standing in front of its greatest masterpieces, he “felt like a young dog with his nose pressed into a little bit of the past”. The poem “The Dog” is about “looking”, about perception of the Image world, and about belonging or not belonging to this world:
I
Up above is the image of the world,
constantly renewed through looking and is invariably true.
Only sometimes, a thing approaches secretly
to stand beside him when he nudges through
II
this image, even as far beneath and different
as he is; neither excluded but not admitted,
unsure, he offers up his reality
to the image, which he has forgotten,
III
only to begin to press his face
into it again, almost beseechingly,
near to understanding and accepting –
yet renouncing: for there, he could not be.
I
[Da oben wird das Bild von einer Welt
aus Blicken immerfort erneut und gilt.
Nur manchmal, heimlich, kommt ein Ding und
sich neben ihn, wenn er durch diese Bild stellt
II
sich draengt, ganz unten, anders, wie er ist;
nicht ausgestoosen und nicht eingereiht,
und wie im Zweifel seine Wirklichkeit
weggebend an das Bild, das er vergisst,
II
um dennoch immer wieder sein Gesicht
hinzuhalten, fast mit einem Flehen,
beinah begreifend, nah am Einverstehen
und doch verzichtend: denn er waere nicht.]
Unlike the panther, the dog can see. Indeed, the poem in one sense is about the complexity of seeing, a complexity brought about by a certain placement in the world. Space, therefore, takes its place alongside seeing as a major theme. The shorter line lengths suggest a fractured visibility, whilst the fact that the poem consists of a single stanza indicates a certain pressure coming from without, the insistence of the external world upon the internal.
Rilke’s conceit of the poet as the viewing dog might be extended into a reading of the poem that views it as an allegory upon the artistic grasp of the world and the obstacles that attend that grasp. In a letter to Rosa Schobloch on 24 September 1908, Rilke had talked of the problems confronting the artist facing an uncaring and supercilious public. “You cannot possibly know how hard everything tries to interrupt, divert and hinder the artistic worker from going into himself; how everything condemns him when he wants to tend and to round out his inmost world, so that one day it may be able to hold in balance and, as it were, to set on a par with itself the whole external universe”.
If “The Dog” is an allegory of reading and viewing, and of the artistic process, what do the individual lexical items convert into? The poem seems to be inscribing a power relationship between viewer and viewed. Someone or something is looking down on the lyrical subject (and, for that reason, the initial words of the text, “Da oben”, should perhaps best be translated as “up above” rather than the standard “up there”). The “image” (“Bild”) of the first line seems to represent a dominant (domineering) discourse, standing over and beyond the dog (as artist). It possesses something sinister, evident in its constant renewal of itself and the fact that it is always (regarded? as) true. It is only shifted from this dominance by “a thing” (“Ding”), which allows (but only “in secret”, “heimlich”, because it takes place beyond the scrutiny of the “image”) the dog-artist to achieve a certain realization, transformation (“anders” in the German original) of selfhood. Here the dog-artist occupies a medial space between acceptance and rejection, a state of ambiguous being that involves a sacrifice of its reality (but this matters little). The cycle of rapprochement and distantiation begins again, perversely with a “beseeching”, as the dog-artist comes near to understanding and accepting what is (although the German “Einverstehen” also means “consent” and “agreement”). This is a state that the dog-artist ultimately renounces, for to accept it would not allow it to be. The poem ultimately charts a dialectic of passivity and activity, of acceptance and refusal, both located within a fluctuating consciousness, a psychology of displacement that is aware of its predicament but at the same time accepts it. It is a mysterious and ambivalent disposition, a portrait of the artist facing a public whose demands it rejects but for whom it has learnt to welcome, as if in fraternal anticipation of Franz Kafka’s hunger artist, alienation from all and self-realization through pained existence
Rilke, Duino Elegies Comparing Translations Martin Travers 