Chapter 1. Offerings to Lares (1895) Prague: Art as Emblem of Place:

(20 August 2025)

(8 021 words)

(reading time = 42 minutes)

In his second lecture on Rodin, given in 1907, Rilke had observed (addressing his audience), “it has become clear to me that it is not people about whom I have to speak but about things. Things. When I say that word (do you hear?), there is a silence; the silence that surrounds things. All movement subsides and becomes contour, and out of the past and future time something permanent is formed: space. the great calm of objects which know no urge” (Rilke, Auguste Rodin. Dover Books, 2006, p. 43). Rilke’s early collection of poetry, Offerings to Lares (1895), was a celebration of this great calm of objects. Unlike Rilke’s first volume of poetry, Life and Songs, the ninety poems in this collection took the material world for their subject, notably the monuments, celebrated spires and buildings of Prague, such as Hradčany Castle, the St Vitus cathedral, the chapel of St. Wenceslas, “to discover the life of the city itself outside the German culture in which he had been brought up” (Prater, p. 18). As a testimony of his Czech affiliation, he also paid homage in his poems to the regional poets and national personages who lived there, in “a bohemia with both a German and Czech past and present” (Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Oxford. 1986, p. 18). As has been argued, Offerings to Lares “marked the beginning of Rilke’s literary career” (Polikoff, p. 16).

The poems in Lares register a shift of poetic perspective away from the literary precocity and self-conscious self-expressivity of his first volume of poetry to an at times quasi-Realist depiction of places and people, has been typified as a “means of self-discipline” for the formative poet, the realization of a “therapeutic potential” (Jutta Heinz in Rilke Handbuch, p. 188). As with a painter (perhaps as Impressionist painter), the simplest optical imagery results from particular attention Rilke pays to visual and light effects. “Whenever he described precisely what he saw, Rilke was able to draw on his power to shape images, which was to be the strength of his maturity” (Freedman, p. 37). If this is so, then this dialectic between inner and outer, the personal and the impersonal, would be a paradigm that Rilke would move within, and further elaborate into something more complex (often accompanied by pained self-analysis – most notably in his letters), in the course of his poetic writing.

The title of the volume refers to the ancient Roman commemoration of ancestors through oblations, usually small figures of household deities (“Lares”), intended to protect home and family. In Rilke’s case, it was his “Heimat” (“homeland”), as celebrated in the final poem in the volume, “Hymn to the Homeland” (“Heimatlied”): Prague and the countryside of Bohemia. The Lares represented respect for tradition and the bonds that connect individuals within a family or nation and this is one of the major themes of the volume. If art is our subject, then this is art as a form of cultural practice, as an engagement with the enshrinement of heritage, the poems being an historicized tableau.

The volume, composed during the autumn of 1895 and published in December, is varied in its topographical and thematic material. Cityscapes (“From the Lookout”, “Vom Lugaus”, and “On the Kleinseite”, “Auf der Kleinseite”), which offer a panoramic view of the city (where we view Prague from above), are complemented by vignettes of buildings, where we see Prague from within, both in a domestic form, aristocratically elevated as “In a venerable House” (“Im alten Haus” and “A Nobleman’s House” (“Ein Edelhaus”), or in a demotic mode, “Magic” (“”Zauber”), or as ecclesiastical examples, as in “At St. Veits” (“Bei St. Veit”) and “In the Cathedral” (“Im Dom”). In other poems, individual artefacts come to the fore, such as fountains (“Am Brunnen”) and clocks (“Die alte Uhr”), although these artefacts, while rooted in place, at the same time transcend it through the intensity of their belonging to become symbols. Such buildings and artefacts are often placed in their natural environment (or even poetically allied with nature), as in “A Winter’s Morning” (“Wintermorgen”) and “Autumn Mood” (“Herbststimmung”), and landscapes are depicted that are recognizably those of Rilke’s homeland, as in Central Bohemian Landscape” (“Mittelböhmische Landschaft”).

The human subject tends to exist in the margins of these depictions: Rilke’s concern is with the culture of objects (and the objects of culture) and draws them into his viewing very much as a painter might paint a still-life. The human element, however, is not missing from Lares. It finds expression in one of three ways: in poems that deal with common life, as in “An Other Person” (“Ein Anderes”, where the son gingerly introduces his fiancée to his father); in poems of social conscience, such as “In the Hinterland of Schmikov” (“Hinter Schmikov”), describing the plight of factory workers, and in entire sections given over to historical personages and events, as in the twelve-poem series, “From the Thirty Years War” (“Aus dem Dreissigjährigen Kriege”). To which we must add Rilke’s testimonies to contemporary Czech writers such as “An Julius Zeyer” and “Jar[oslav] Vrchlicky”. It has been argued that the volume lacks “strict material organization” (Jutta Heinz in Rilke Handbuch, p. 188), and it is true that there are often abrupt movements of thematic focus and perspective (even within individual poems), where we move across different registers of response and literary style, as if the poems were “lyrical chimeras between Naturalism und Symbolism”(Jutta Heinz quoting Kohlschmidt in Rilke Handbuch, p. 190). In spite of its poly-generic diversity, however, (which is largely indeed free-floating), a general narrative structure to Rilke’s volume is nonetheless discernible, and it is one that a broad trajectory from an impersonal (Rilke would say Olympian) reconstruction of (a largely conservative) culture to a greater demotic vision that culminates in the final poem, “Song of the Homeland” (“Das Heimatlied”).

Cityscape poems (the city viewed from above and from afar) form a mini genre in Lares, as befits a volume in which bringing to view a past cultural heritage forms the dominant perspective. These are poems of a topographical nature. They have been described as providing a “guidebook in poetry” (Leppmann, p. 60), but this is unnecessarily dismissive of Rilke’s goal, which is to delineate, to recover his home city in place and time. This is the aim of the poem “At Kleinseite” (“Auf der Kleinseite“, which means in Czech, “Malá Strana”, “Little Side”, and which is on the left, west bank of the river Vitava, on the slopes just below Prague castle). The poem offers a panoramic perspective but, unlike the more famous “From the Lookout” (“Vom Lugaus”), Rilke’s focus here is both less Olympian and more domestic. “At Kleinseite”, we see directly into the particular almost private details of domestic environments, which are replete with decoration, ornamentation (particularly of roofs and steps), with flowers, statuettes of cupid, the ringing of bells (“Gebimmel”) and vases full of roses. It is a sharply observed vignette composed in three short “abba” stanzas, and almost pointillist in its clarity of detail.

“From the Lookout” (“Vom Lugaus”), within the same cityscape genre, is quite different. The title comes from a popular lookout on Laurenz Berg (now called Petřín Hill) on the outskirts of Prague. The poem conveys Rilke’s concern with material space and the cultural occupancy of the same:

I see towers roundly domed like acorns

and some thinning to a point like pears.

There lies the city, nestling gently against

her thousand brows, evening gently approaches.

She stretches her dark body wide. But look:

back there, St. Mary’s twin spires gleam to the heavens.

It is as if through those two points of feeling,

she were sucking in the violet ink of sky.

[Dort seh ich Türme, kuppig bald wie Eicheln

und jene wieder spitz wie schlanke Birnen;

dort liegt die Stadt; an ihre tausen Stirnen

schmiegt sich der Abend schon mit leisem Schmeicheln.

Wie streckt sie ihren schwarzen Leib. Ganz hinten,

sieh, St. Mariens Doppeltürme blitzen,

Ists nicht: sie saugte durch zwei Fühlerspitzen

in sich des Himmels violette Tinten]

The poem is the second in the Lares volume and includes the rare appearance of a viewing subject (“I see”). Subsequent depictions of the buildings and monuments of Prague do not move beyond an objective terrain, being firmly anchored in a neutral way within the objects described. In this poem we have a personal voice. The time is “Evening”, where twilight, on the edge of the nocturnal, casts a sepulchral shadow. This will in subsequent poems be a familiar scenario, where “evening and night are frequently interlarded and form a kind of general milieu for the texts” (Jutta Heinz in Rilke Handbuch, p. 189), texts often formed “in sepia tints” (Louth, p. 23). There is very little sunlight in the Lares volume (although it is also true that “the Prague of Larenopfer is Prague at dusk, more a state of mind than an actual environment” (Henry, p.22). Somber colours and dark tones were, however, part of the iconography of fin de siècle literature, as in Maeterlinck and Strindberg, and connoted depth, the soul. For such writers, it was not possible to be profound in the sunshine.

A number of poems in Lares form “a playful equivalent to the ornate flourishes and abrupt juxtapositions of the city’s architecture” (Louth p. 24). This is certainly the case in “From the Lookout”. The imagery of the poem is expansive. The city, which links the two manifestations of the church, “stretches her dark body far”, whilst the church itself possesses “twin towers”. St Mary’s (the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, located in the Karlov area) is personified throughout, almost in an animistic fashion. It is a living entity, perhaps suggesting the vitality of Prague, perhaps pointing to the vibrancy of the faith that it represents and promulgates. She reflects the feminized city, Rilke’s alma mater in the broadest sense of the term. The bountifulness of Rilke’s description of the church is reinforced by natural affinities, “acorns” and “pears”. Shapes provide structuring features of the composition, with the “roundly domed” towers of the church “thinning to a point”. Personification adheres both to city and church, the latter’s towers being “two points of feeling”, which necessarily for the compositional- painterly mode of the poem aim towards colour, here black and violet. In Rilke’s appropriation of his hometown, all is alive. Indeed, more than alive. With the “dark body” of the cityscape a distinct erotic note enters the poem, and this note will run as an undercurrent in other poems in the volume (becoming explicit in “At St. Veits”). (It may, however, ultimately have little to do with sexuality, belonging rather to the vitalistic drive of Rilke’s celebratory discourse).

Architecture in Lares possesses its own type of politics. Buildings stand either on the right side or the wrong side of tradition, as is clear from “In a venerable house” (“Im alten Haus”), with which the volume opens:

In the venerable house: before me in full view,

I see all of Prague in its full girth.

Deep below, the hour of dusk, advancing soundlessly, steps past.

The city blurs, as if behind a glass.

Just on high, like a helmeted giant,

the verdigris dome of St. Nicholas rises clearly above me.

III

Now flickers here and there a light

distantly in the muggy noise.

I think now that I hear in the venerable house

a voice intoning “Amen”.

[Im alten Hause: vor mir frei

seh ich ganz Prag in weiter Runde;

tief unten geht die Dammerstunde

mit lautlos leisem Schritt vorbei.

Die Stadt verschwimmt wie hinter Glas.

Nur hoch, wie ein behelmter Hüne,

ragt klar vor mir die grunspanggrüne

Turmkuppel von Sankt Nikolas.

III

Schon blinzelt da und dort ein Licht

fern auf im schwülen Stadtgebrause. –

Mir ist, daß in dem alten Hause

jetzt eine Stimme “Amen” spricht.]

“In a venerable house” is the first poem in the Lares volume. We cannot say whether the ordering of the poems is intended as a conscious sequence, or whether tangential publishing considerations (not of Rilke’s making) were the determining factor. If it is the former, then this poem provides a seminal statement of a theme that runs like a leitmotif throughout the volume: the clash of tradition and conservative values with modernity (a similar theme is broached in “A Nobleman’s House”, “Ein Edelhaus”). The Prague that Rilke nostalgically celebrates is not the Prague of the present but the Prague of the past, a perspective that produces an ambivalence in the thematic core of the volume, an ambivalence that the young Rilke did not confront. To argue that it was a “transfiguration of the past out of fear of the present” (Jutta Heinz in Rilke Handbuch, p. 188) is, however, to overstate the emotive grounds for Rilke’s rejection of modernity. The reasons were quasi ethical-aesthetic rather than psycho-emotional: distaste and indignation rather than fear.

The lyrical subject in the poem views Prague from above, almost as if it is on a platform or on elevated place, such as the lookout in the earlier poem. Down below, “tief unten”, lies modern Prague, which lacks shape or structure: it “verschwimmt wie hinter Glas”, nebulous and without cultural substance. Rilke contrasts “individualism that has grown historically with the anonymity of the present” (Jutta Heinz in Rilke Handbuch, p. 188). The poet will later return to both this theme and the structural motifs used here to support it in the seventh Elegy of the Duino Elegies, in which we read, “where a solid house once stood, / now stands erected some thought-up artifice, completely belonging to the realm of concept, as if it still stood in the brain. the spirit of the age / has produced for itself vast reservoirs / of power, formless, like the charged force / it draws out of everything. It no longer recognizes temples “. Things “once revered, / once paid homage to and worshipped” have been nullified. (In Lares, Rilke makes his animosity unpoetically explicit in “The Construction” (“Der Bau”): “the modern standardized building style (“Bauschablone”) really does not suit me at all”).

Unlike the partial gaze articulated in “From the Lookout”, the viewing subject in “In a venerable house” sees the “whole” city (“in weiter Runde”). The knowledge of the city contained in the lyrical self is total, although this wholeness is only present in terms of occasional sight and sound, both leitmotifs that largely carry the thematic weight of the poem. “Lautlos” is contrasted to “-gebrause” (“roar”), peaceful silence to vacuous noise, while the qualifying “schwülen” means refers to something muggy, oppressive (Rilke was particularly sensitive to atmosphere and ambience – as his frequent later criticisms of Paris in his letters testify).

The penultimate word of the poem is “Amen”, which comes from the Hebrew for “truth”, “certainty”, and when uttered after prayer it has the sense of “so be it”. Used in such as clipped fashion as here, however, it is highly ambiguous. Is it meant to represent an assent to what is taking place? Or is it an ironic comment on the same, the “amen” being uttered by the traditional culture embodied in the old or venerable house and given spiritual form in the shape of the church of Saint Nicolas (a Late-Gothic and Baroque church in the Old Town of Prague). Unlike the indistinct and formless new Prague, the church stands “clear” amidst its verdigris towers (significantly like a helmeted giant) over the vacuity that lies beneath and around it.

In Lares, “the interior [of buildings] inspires the lyrical voice to a depiction of the fates of their inhabitants” (Jutta Heinz in Rilke Handbuch, p. 188). Stability, the security of the past, continuity with the present, the supportive connection between immediate place and living space and character and its values, are positives that inform Offerings to Lares throughout, either in presentia or in absentia. They can be found not only in the impressive buildings of Prague’s past (secular and ecclesiastical), but also in modest homes, as “The Room with a Bay Window” (“Im Erkerstübchen”) and “In the snug” (“Im Stübchen”) testify. The latter reads:

Comforting it is, when winds howl

stealthily in the chimney piece,

to be in the snug; quite softly.

on the baroque spinning wheel,

the casement clock with the columns.

ticks on and on.

Over there, a little silhouette

and a dress lies in a window recess,

displaying a costume quaint and full of folds.

Tunes forgotten, which now await new fingers,

falter in the neglected spinet.

III

There the book of prayer is lying on the table.

Its spirit continues to refresh

young and old,

and the saying above the niche tells us

“Thy Will be Done …”

[Traut ists, wenn vertohlen heulen

im Kamine wilde Winde,

in der Stube; ganz gelinde

tickt auf dem barocken Spinde

fort die Stockuhr mit den Säulen.

Dort, die kleine Silhouette

zeigt die alte Tracht der Locken,

tief im Fenster steht ein Rocken,

und vergessne Tonen stocken

im verlassenen Spinette.

III

Immer noch liegt die Postille,

daß an ihrem Geist erfrische

jung und alt sich, auf dem Tische,

und der Spruch ob jener Nische

lautet: “Es gescheh Dein Wille … “].

For some readers, the poems in Lares “tend to the manneristic-grotesque” (Jutta Heinz quoting Kohlschmidt in Rilke Handbuch, p. 190). Texts such as “In the Snug”, however, contradict that view. Indeed, it is more accurate to say that in Lares the poet significantly diffuses Otherness, in a discourse that emphasizes the security of objects and people in the world, their comforting solidity and familiarity secured in this poem through a voice that tends towards Biedermeier integration and self-sufficiency. Der grüne Rainer.

“In the snug” might be seen as a pen portrait in the spirit of the Flemish school of artists, echoing possibly the intimate domestic interiors of Pieter de Hooch (1629-1684) and Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678). The poem begins “Traut ists”. We trust in an inner, protected realm whenever external reality threatens (here a “wilde Winde”). The snug provides a cozy place of inward-looking and inward-feeling insularity (a sense of familiarity reinforced in the German title of the poem, Stübchen”, literally “little room”, with its umlauted diminution).The room is furnished with venerable objects: a bracket clock (common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries), a silhouette (an image of a person pasted on to a board), a spinet (an early form of spinning wheel for cloth) and others. Objects dominate the scene: There are no inhabitants.

The final stanza features the most significant of all the venerable objects: the “Postille”, the devotional book (the equivalent of the family bible). Although the clock and spinet are “klein” and “alt”, and sometimes falter (“stocken”, that which is contained in the devotional book is fresh “(“Erfrische”) and never falters. It is tucked away in a corne,r but from there radiates the truth that: “es gescheh Dein Wille …” “Your Will will be done …”

The concluding sentiments echo the “Amen” of the “In a venerable house”. Is this simply a succinct way of effecting narrative closure or does it point to something else: the strain of religiosity that runs through the volume, surfacing in poems such as “The Cloister” (“Das Kloster”), “In a Street Chapel” (“Im Strassenkapellchen”) and “At the Convent of the Ursuline nuns” (“Bei der Ursulinen”), “religiosity”, because although these are recognizably religious milieux, the author seems more interested in the sentiments and the inflexion of sensibility that such sentiments bring. Orthodox religion rarely appears in any positive light in Lares. It is as if the young Rilke is wavering in his Catholic faith (or has wavered).

Religious sentiment finds its objectification, above all, in the many ecclesiastical buildings and monuments of the city, such as the cathedral of St Vitus, located within Prague castle. This was the largest and most important church in the country. The poem “At St. Veits” (“Bei St, Veit”) reads:

Gladly I stand in front of the old cathedral.

A kind of mustiness wafts around it, hinting at decay,

and every window, every pillar

still speaks in its own idiom.

Over there stands a richly ornate house,

smiling with rococo-eroticism,

and right beside it the Gothic stretches

its brittle hands out in prayers.

III

The casus rei has now become clear to me,

as an allegory from earlier times:

here the Abbé – and at his side

the lady of the roi soleil.

[Gern steh ich vor dem alten Dom;

wie Moder weht es dort, wie Fäule,

und jedes Fenster, jede Säule

spricht noch ihr eignes Idiom.

Da hockt ein reichgeschnörkelt Haus

und lächelt Rokoko-Erotik,

und hart daneben streckt die Gotik

die dürren Hände betend aus.

III

Jetzt wird mir klar der casus rei;

ein Gleichnis ists aus alten Zeiten:

der Herr Abbe hier – ihm zuseiten

die Dame des roi soleil.]

The poem has been described as “a playful piece of whimsy”, replete with “facetious multilingual rhymes”, the expression of “a self-conscious exuberance” (Louth, pp. 25 and 24). Multi-cultural Prague (“a meeting point of various ‘idioms’ “, Louth, p. 4), Czech, German and Jewish in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, can be seen in its architecture, where the Gothic rubs shoulders with the rococo (the latter’s origins being Italian). It is a practice where the visual and the poetic mutually inform and support one another, with the window being related to sight (and is possibly a symbol of knowledge). The ornate stylization of the architecture, its rococo-eroticism, is worked through the linguistic register of the text, with its exotic even risqué overtones, as evident in the Abbé with his mysterious “the lady of the roi soleil” (possibly a religious reference but certainly, even with local knowledge, an ambiguous one).

The “decay” of the building speaks not of decline but of longevity, of its weathered age, of its permanence. It has preserved its “idiom”, retaining its identity as a specifically Czech cathedral. The cathedral is abutted by quite a different type of building. one that comes not from the medieval period but from eighteenth-century Rococo (for Rilke, an early version of modernity perhaps), with which the cathedral attempts to make hieratic contact with its “brittle hands”. It offers the quiet of oblation, receiving only (superficial) smiles in return. It is an allegory that the lyrical as perceiving subject only now understands.

Seen from the outside the cathedral is impressively ascetic but colourless; seen from the inside, it is an ocular feast. The poem “In the Cathedral” (“”Im Dome”) has four stanzas. The second stanza reads:

From the surface, walled around,

hovers brightly over an angel’s head

a white silver droplet,

which has within it a light that will not die.

[Von der Decke, rundgemauert,

schwebt ob eines Engels Kopfe

hell ein weisser Silbertropfe,

darin ein ewig Lichtlein kauert.]

Where darkness dwelt outside, now comes light, both covering the religious artefacts and spreading light from a homage candle (“Lichtlein). The scene is observed without emotive or participation by the viewing subject. Indeed, once again, as with “In the Snug”, the human element is missing entirely. In place of the latter, we have objects and, above all, the colours of objects.

For the author of Lares, the cultural past belonged to buildings, as they existed to be seen from the outside or lived in from the inside and could be secular or religious. But interspersed within this spectrum are individual artefacts that, although often part of a civic function nevertheless as objects (and often aestheticized objects) exist independently of all communal use. One such object is the fountain that carries out its duties in one of the backstreets of old Prague in “Fountains” (“Brunnen”), another is “The ancient clock” (“Die alter Uhr”):

Ancient city clock, you should have

ceased to ring the hour.

They should have stripped away your old iron

and broken in pieces your last trace.

For the last time, the miser for the last time

his head rocking in obstinate defiance,

and death for the last time gawking,

would have had a final swing of the scythe.

III

Then the cock would have crowed once again,

and hear him now, though hoarser than before;

But still the miser nods, and softly death

in its majesty approaches.

[Bald hättest, alte Rathausuhr,

du nimmer dürfen Stunden weisen;

sie hätten bald in altem Eisen

versplittert deine lezte Spur.

Der Geizhals hätt zum letzten Mal

sein Haupt gewiegt in starrem Trotzen,

zum letzten Mal der Tod mit Glotzen

geschwungen seinen Sensenstahl,

III

Dann hätt der Hahn auch ausgegräht.

Und heut noch kräht er, freilich heiser;

noch nickt der Geizhals fort, und leiser

droht ihm des Todes Majestät.]

The iconography of ubi sunt prevails throughout, ranging from the sic transit motif to the grim reaper image of the central stanza. All flesh is grass. The civic clock supervises all of this, sending out as a timepiece its regular cautionary message: that the present will soon become the past and that at the end of time stands the inevitable resolution to worldly concern. This concern is represented here by the dying geriatric miser, whose supine head (presumably in his bed) is being weighed in the balance. The sense of an unsure footing in the world is formally secured by the repeated use of the subjunctive in the German text.

We have been warned: the cock in the final stanza has crowed in the past and “noch kräht er”. It is a message that the old clock would do well to listen to himself. Like so many of the objects, buildings and artefacts in medieval Prague, it is falling apart, in this case into “alten Eisen”. Its existence as a time piece is “versplittert” and near its functioning end, its “letzte Spur”. In more than one sense, tempus fugit.

It has been argued that “Rilke’s favorite landscapes are cemeteries, tombs and dark cloisters. It often seems as though he sees Prague the gloomy gaze of one possessed by death” (Polikoff quoting Demetz, p. 16). Considering the number of poems that have a social and /or historical focus that is not entirely true, but a number of poems do possess and element of “Todesromantik”. A number of poems in Lares dwell within the realm of darkness, of the forbidden, of the occult, of the macabre. “At the Wolschan Cemetery on the Night of All Souls” (“Auf dem Wolfschan am Abend des Tages von Allerseelen”) consists of two parts. The first part reads:

Scraggy branches grid the sky,

its evening pallor in pale hues,

and over graves, so richly adorned,

drifts melancholy, and candles

flicker through the drifting leaves.

In tired blue, motionless,

the moon distantly floats. The trees of life,

which caress its pristine cheeks, are black.

The fragrance from the withering roses

creeps here like the spirit of dead dreams.

[Die dürren Aste übergittern

des Himmels abendblässe Scheiben;

und über Grüfte, reich mit Flittern

geschmückt, geht Wehmut, und es zittern

die Lichte durch Blättertreiben.

Im müden Blau, im regungslosen,

schwimmt fern der Mond. Die Lebensbäume,

die seine blanke Stirne kosen,

sind schwarz. Die Duft von Welken Rosen

schleicht her wie Geister toten Träume.]

These are sepulchral tones that are repeated throughout the volume. In “Executed” (“Gerichtet”, we are introduced to a further civic artefact: a scaffold, around which “headless ghosts assemble / and wander anxiously in search of severed heads. A frightful sight!”At other times, the macabre is put into the service of sentiment, as in “Sphinx” (“Sphinx”), in which a woman, who has attempted to commit suicide (with a rifle, “the iron barrel hot”), lingers on until the final gasp, but “soon she was taken out/ the corpse and her pain. Outside there was no plaque”.

Rilke may be attempting to highlight the underworld of Prague. Here too are objects that countermand the aesthetic, indeed perhaps undermine its prevalence in the world depicted in Lares. It is also possible that Rilke may be simply exploiting a certain idiom within the Romantic agony, its rediscovery of the Gothic which informed its critique of Enlightenment rationality and its faith in human perfectibility. Here Rilke may be drawing upon “the aesthetic theory of the horrid and the terrible which had gradually developed during the course of the eighteenth-century”, a penchant for the gruesome and dark alterity (Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony. Oxford. 1980, p. 27). Such an aesthetic gave rise to a popular tradition of writing that had developed in the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century: the Gothic novel. Early examples of the genre, such as Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and M.G. Lewis’ The Monk (1796), mobilised themes and qualities of fictional fabulation that were inimical to Enlightenment thought: a belief in the supernatural, the cultivation of ambience and mood, a nostalgia for the medieval, and plots structured around enigma and mystery, in story lines that often included garish violence. Rilke will return to this equation of beauty in terror in his Duino Elegies, but the purely descriptive perspective in Lares does not permit a clear demarcation of their function.

In Lares, nature possesses its special status as an object. There are a number of purely nature poems in Lares, including “Evening” (“Abend”), “Spring” (“Fruhling”), “May Day” (“Maitag”), “Autumn Mood”(Herbststimmung”) and “In Summer””(Im Sommer”), where nature is approached and organized by the viewing self that is aware of the relevance of place and locality. There is one poem, in particular, that combines nature with a regional self-consciousness, “Central Bohemian Landscape” (“Mittelböhmische Landschaft”):

In the distance, dims the heaving forests

around their shadowy edges.

Then here and there a tree breaks into the scene,

and running fields of well-groomed grain.

In glaring light,

the potatoes sprout; then

a field of barley further down, until the fir tree

eventually frames this picture.

Beyond fresh woods, there gleams so golden-red

the cross upon the church. From out of the firs the ranger’s shack

rises and beyond it, vaults the sky,

clear and blue.

[Fern dämmert wogender Wälder

beschatteter Saum.

Dann unterbricht

nur hie und da ein Baum

die fälbe Fläche hoher Ahrenfelder.

Im hellsten Licht

keimt die Kartoffel; dann

ein wenig weiter Gerste, bis der Tann

das Bild begrenzt.

Hoch überm Jungwald glänzt

so goldig-rot ein Kirchturmkreuz herüber,

aus Fichten ragt der Hegerhütte Bau;

und darüber

wölbt sich ein Himmel, blank und blau.]

The poem has all the poised compositional techniques of a genre painting. The lines of the various elements depicted are clearly drawn and follow one another in sequence, and the resulting images are static. This is a “Bild”, an “image” or a “picture”. The landscape is broad, expansive, its wide spaces caught in descriptors such as “fern”, and “hie und da”, and expansiveness underscored by the fluid rhyming scheme, irregular line lengths and by alliteration. In spite of the frugal sparsity of the countryside, colour (as in the cityscapes and buildings of Prague) has a telling presence here too, in the “golden-red” of the church tower and in the blue (a mystical colour for the German Romantics) of the sky.

This is not, however, a picturesque but a practical world (possibly the farming area in the northeastern part of central Bohemia around Polabi). We see “Gerste” being cultivated and “Kartoffel” being harvested. Watching over these soil-dependent activities the spirit soars in the shape of the church tower, which is by now a rather formulaic conclusion, a predictable gesture to religion in the concluding lines of the poem.

As will have become clear, the early poems in Lares have an almost exclusive focus on buildings (exterior and interior), on monuments, artefacts and on nature. As the volume progresses there is a greater focus on the personal, the social and the historical, in poems such as “Land and People” (“Land und Volk”), “Superavit” and “The littel Tinker” (“Der kleine Dratenik”), poems that draw on “his considerable knowledge of Czech” (Leppmann, p. 63). For some commentators (see Jutta Heinz, Rilke Handbuch, p. 189), this problematizes the coherence of the volume, but it is quite possible that Rilke had intended the latter move as a device meant to frame, supplement or possibly relativize the former material. Prague is not just a place but an ethos (and hence the derogatory suggestion that Lares is purely a poetic guidebook, made by almost all commentators. is not apposite).

It has been claimed that “Rilke is really an outsider” (Louth, p.23) but if he is, he is an outsider who is making efforts to become an insider. Towards the conclusion of Lares, the regional sentiments of “Central Bohemian Landscape” come to be written large into a form of national adherence, in poems such as “Folk Medlodies” (“Volksweise”), “Song of the People” (“Das Volkslied”) and “Sounds of Freedom” (“Freiheitsklänge”). It has been argued that “Rilke characterized his purpose as ‘the sounding of a gentle chord of peace amid the clash of battle” (quoted in Prater, p. 18), that he celebrated “a Bohemia with both a German and Czech past and present, and which to the patriots of the ’48 had been a single fatherland”, that “he had many friends within the Czech National Movement, including the poet Zeyer” (Prater, p. 18). Rilke does indeed cite the Czech national anthem, “Kde domov muja” …” (“Where my home is”) in “Hymn to the Homeland” (“Das Heimatlied“). It was composed by Josef “Kajetan Tyl”, a leading member of the Czech Revival Movement, about whom a poem is included in Rilke’s volume. The regional geo-cultural ambit of Lares finds paradigmatic expression in the poem “Folk Melodies” (“Volksweise”):

Bohemian melodies

move me deeply,

stealing into the heart,

making it heavy.

When a child weeding potatoes

sings softly in the fields,

her tune haunts the dreams that

the dark night yields.

III

And though you may travel far,

year after year,

you will hear it again and again

as if it were near.

[Mich rührt so sehr

böhmischen Volkes Weise,

schleicht sie ins Herz sich leise,

macht sie es schwer.

Wenn ein Kind sacht

singt beim Kartoffeljäten,

klingt dir sein Lied im späten

Traum noch der Nacht.

III

Magst du auch sein

weit über Land gefahren,

fällt es dir doch nach Jahren

stets wieder ein.]

The assertive opening “me” (“mich”) stresses the immediacy of the personal. The Bohemian melodies are not the products of jingoistic propaganda (indeed, in the poem they are sung by a child – they are innocent of politics) but come from the hearts of their makers and flow gently (“leise”) into sentiment of those who hear them. These melodies reach deeply into the inner self, the subconscious, where they remain, even though the harbingers of such melodies may be distant from their homeland, from their “Heimat” (although that word is not used). Such melodies transcend time and history. They can be felt through the years, as can love of the fatherland.

The shorter line lengths and the ” abba” rhyming scheme (although this is the standard metrical form in Lares) give the poem itself the shape of a song, and also a sense of compact completion. which is further reinforced by the use of antithesis (“leise” contrasting to “schwer”, for example). The poem is one of the rare instances in Lares when music has replaced pictorial art, although the imagery of the poem carries its major themes and possesses a simple and affectionate presence.

Leppmann has drawn attention to Rilke’s “extraordinary political-apolitical ideological convictions [‘Glaubensbekenntnis’]” in Lares (Leppmann, p. 61). Leppmann’s concept appears to be contradictory, but it does capture the fluid and often unreconciled nature of Rilke’s politics (and not just in this volume). Rilke was a cultural conservative in his aesthetics who rejected cultural conservatism in his art, and who cultivated aristocratic connections while supporting the November Revolution of 1918 in Germany. Some poems in Lares, however, such as “Behind Schmikov” (“Hinter Schmikov”), come near to an at least potentially political stance:

They walk through hot evening

from the factories, these men and women, –

on their low, dumb brow

destitution is written in sweat and dirt.

Expressionless their eyes, their feet

drag slowly on the dusty street.

Fate and empty sound

follow them on their way.

[Hin gehn durch heißes Abend

aus den Fabriken Männer, Dirnen, –

auf ihre niedern, dumpfe Stirnen

schrieb sich mit Schweiß und Ruß die Not.

Die Mienen sind verstumpft; es brach

das Auge. Schwer durchschlürft die Sohle

den Weg, und Staub zieht und Gejohle

wie das Verhängnis ihnen nach.]

With just two stanzas, “Behind Schmikov” is one of the shortest poems in the volume. Smichov was an industrial district on the left bank of the Moldau, just south of “Kleinseite”. It was the site of the large Ringhoffer factory, which produced trams, motor cars and railway carriages. The word “Smichov” in Czech means “laughing”, but if this is intended as a conscious allusion it can only be meant ironically. The scene depicted in the poem undermines the very possibility of laughing.

“Behind Smichov” has been called “a kind of workers’ poem [‘Arbeiterlyrik’]” (Leppmann, p. 62). It describes men and women (“Dirnen” being used here not in the modern sense of “prostitute” but in the earlier sense of “women from the countryside”) leaving the factory (presumably after a day’s work) and their depressive demeanor. The descriptive focus is upon their faces. Their “niedern, dumpfen Stirnen” refers not to lack of intelligence but to faces that are brow-beaten through manual work. Their “Mienen sind verstrumpft” reflects a deadening of sensibility. Even when they open their eyes, the latter action is described in the German text through a passive impersonal construction (“es brach / das Auge”).

As they walk home, they are followed by filth and noise, not from the factory but from the very road that they walk on. The entire scenario seems inexorable. There is no sense of an escape from this. It is a modern type of fate, which stalks them even as they attempt to walk away from it. The starkness of the poem’s form, written with the familiar “abba” rhyming scheme, serves to secure the starkness of its themes. About the miserable predicament of the workers, more cannot be said. Key descriptors of their demeanor and actions are heavy, ponderous words, “niedern”, “dumpfe”, “schrieb”. The language treads its weary way as if in sympathy with the workers.

In the “The little Tinker” (“Der kleine Dratenik”), we move from the industrial proletariat to the (in Karl Marx’ categorization) the “Lumpenproletariat, the itinerant, personally disorganized and politically unorganized rootless worker:

There he comes, this fellow, a young one,

mouse traps, strainer on his back.

He stalks me through the streets, on the bridges:

“Please, sir, I have such Turkish hunger.

Just one Kreuzer, just a single one

for a piece of bread. ‘O milost panku!’ “

There you are – and he stammers ‘Thank You’,

but his legs pursue me as far as they can.

III

He can live no longer from peddling. –

Smells those roasts behind the doors,

yet empty are the pans he fixes:

that is why he has such ‘Turkish hunger’.

[Kommt so ein Bursche, ein junger,

Mausfallen, Siebe am Rücken,

folgt mir durch Gassen und Brücken:

“Herr, ich habe ‘türkischen Hunger’.

Nur einen Krajcar, nur einen

für ein Stück Brot, milost panku!”

Da! Und er stammelt mir Dank zu,

doch läßt nicht Ruh er die Beinen.

III

Lebt nicht nicht von bloßen Gelunger. –

Riecht an den Türen den Braten

und muß die Pfannen doch drahten –

leer: – das macht ‘türkischen Hunger’.]

“The little Tinker” is a vivid reconstruction of a street encounter with a down-at-heals tinker, a “Dratenik” in Czech. He is on the point of starvation (“Turkish hunger” being a reference to crop failures in Turkey during the Ottoman-Turkish war in Europe in the seventeenth century). Unlike the earlier factory poem, there is drama here, and the main subject, the tinker, is allowed a speaking voice (and significantly, the lyrical subject, the individual who provides the point of view, speaks almost not at all, producing the single word “Da!”). The opening words, “Kommt so” (“Comes so”, an inversion repeated in the first line of the final stanza) are in the form of a popular ditty, a ballad, a style that often introduces a story or tale, as it does here. The repetition of the phrase “Turkish hunger” in the first stanza in the final stanza gives a feeling of narrative closure to the text.

The Rilke persona did not participate in the factory scene described in “Behind Smichov”. He was an observer only. In this poem, he is involved (although reluctantly). Likewise, the tinker has a voice (unlike the workers in the preceding poem), and has a command of both German and Czech. He asks for money in the former language, and when it is passed over as a “Krajcar” (a German Kreutzer or farthing, he) gives his thanks in the latter (“milost panku” being Czech for “Dank-zu”). It is benevolent gesture, but it is difficult to attribute sympathy or compassion to the lyrical subject, who seems to act out of annoyance -hence the abrupt “Da”). Is the tinker simply an object on two legs?

In Lares, the focus upon place, buildings and artefacts seems to leave the speaking subject in the poems mute even displaced. There is, however, throughout the volume a discernible lyrical voice, one that views and organizes the external world in a certain way and is more interested in the aesthetic quality of objects than in their use value (and more interested in objects per se than in people). Nevertheless, there are poems where that subject (almost modestly) comes to expression and speaks about itself. Here the autobiographical pull of the volume becomes evident, and where it may be possible (with caution) to use the world “Rilke”. Four poems in particular are in this mode: “The dreamer” (“Der Traumer”), “The house in which I was born” (“Mein Geburtshaus”), “When I first went up to university” (“Als ich die Universität bezog”) and “From my childhood” (“Aus der Kinderzeit”). “When I first went up to university” presents us with few interpretative issues: Rilke (or his persona) tells us that he enrolled to study law, didn’t like it, changed to theology, didn’t like it either, and ended up taking courses in art history, which he did like. All of which is biographically true.

The two depictions of childhood in the other poems are more problematic. His was, as he later wrote, a “very dark childhood”. “My mother was highly nervous, slim, a woman who wanted something from life, something undefined” (Rilke quoted in Donald Prater, A Ringing Glass: The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke. Oxford. 1986, Prater, p. 5). “She dressed always in black and affected the demeanor of a grande dame … Religious observance and the ritual of the Catholic Church occupied her to the point of bigotry” (Prater, p. 4). “Every time he saw her, Rilke relived his struggle as a child to get away from her, and felt, after years of running, he still had not gotten far enough” (Prater, p. 5). He harboured the same negative feelings towards his father, whose “stiff conventionality gave little room for love” (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 6). These bitter accounts of his parents would later inform his highly charged depiction of them in his Duino Elegies.

Neither parent appear in these two vignettes of childhood. In “The house in which I was born”, the poet speaks of his “traute Heim” and playing with puppets clad in silver. He also talks of “heisse Tränen”, his firs tentative grasping of poetry and waving at a girl in a palace opposite the house. It is a mixture of fact and fantasy (there was no palace opposite Rilke’s dingy tenement home in central Prague), and there was no “traute Heim”: Rilke felt insecure throughout his childhood (“tears”, though, rings true, as does the poetry). The element of fabulation is extended in “From my childhood”. Rilke remained convinced throughout his life of his aristocratic background, a conviction that found expression in texts such as “The Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke” (“Die Weise von Liebe und Tode des Cornets Christoph Rilke”, 1899). “From my childhood” is an idealized view of that conviction, when one summer the young Rilke becomes a guest at a country residence. Here, amongst sounds of a polka, in a breeze that is “voller Licht”, he watches swans glide by on the water, as an (unspecified) Helene reads to him. It is an idyl, a pictorial act of wishful thinking, full of sound and colour.

Perhaps the two retrospective poems are simply the product of sentiment. They are complex texts, not necessarily internally but in their relationship to the lyrical subject. The Rilke persona speaks with a more authentic voice in the one “autobiographical” poem that was written out of the present, and which gives signs of a maturing idiom in his poetry. It is called “The Dreamer” (“Der Traumer”):

A dream dwelt deep within my soul.

I listened to that noble reverie:

I slept.

And fortune flew just over me,

but because I dreamt, I did not hear:

it called.

Dreams to me are like orchids. Like them, they are colourful and rich.

Both draw their force from the great root of life’s sources,

and take from them as they do their strength,

and rejoice with the vital fluid in their veins,

rejoice in every fleeting minute,

for in the next they wither and perish.

And when the spheres above softly pass over,

do you not feel then the perfumes wafting?

Dreams seem to me like orchids.

[Es war ein Traum in meiner Seele tief.

Ich horchte auf den holden Traum:

ich schlief.

Jetzt ging ein Glück vorüber, als ich schlief,

und wie ich träumte, hört ich nicht:

es rief.

Träume scheinen mir wie Orchideen. –

So wie jene sind sie bunt und reich.

Aus dem Riesenstamm der Lebenssäfte

ziehn sie just wie jene ihre Kräfte,

brüsten sich mit dem ersaugten Blute,

freuen in der flüchtigen Minute,

in der nächsten sind sie tot und bleich. –

Und wenn Welten oben leise gehen,

fühlst du’s dann nicht wie von Düften wehen?

Träume scheinen mir wie Orchideen. -]

“The Dreamer” is a self-portrait circa 1895 and is probably the most sensitive and personally nuanced poem in the volume (and with “dreams seem to me like orchids”, “Träume scheinen mir wie Orchideen”, it possesses its most memorable line). The poem enacts a process of self-enquiry, molded around the two apodictic statements: “ich schlief” and “es rief”, the former calling the subject to Lethe (forgetfulness, un-consciousness); the latter retrieving him from the same. He does not hear the call at the level of explicit understanding but, at some deeper level, it is heard.

The two phrases are assertive terms in what is a sophisticated exposition of an experiencing self, where Rilke is possibly rethinking the idiom of his first volume of poetry, Life and Songs, but without the overstated claim on a self-regarding subjectivity. The poem possesses a restrained distance to selfhood that the earlier volume lacked. It is almost as if Rilke is treating himself as a (sympathetic) object here. Where in the earlier cityscape poems and poems of civic and religious life he looked outwards, to find the aesthetic of the material world objectified, now he looks inwards. Objects draw their strength from within the “Riesenstamm der Lebenssäfte” of people, from experiences, from a vital engagement with the world. Their significance, it is implied, does not exist beyond that engagement. They are not free to live merely as reified things. Such experiences may be transitory (“prey to the “flüchtigen Minute”), but they leave a residue within us, in memories and dreams, which, like the orchids, do not seek permanence but intensity.

DELETIONS

These form leitmotifs within the volume, and support the contention that “Das “Prinzip der variiernden Wiederholung” is its major compositional principle” ((Jutta Heinz quoting Binder in Rilke Handbuch, p. 190).

Lares does indeed include tributes to contemporaries such as the poets Jaroslav Vrchlicky and Julius Zeyer.

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