(8 August 2025)
(11 568 words)
(Reading Time = 61 minutes)
I Introduction
The thematic focus of Lares was Bohemia and Prague but, in one poem, ‘”In Dubiis”, Rilke had written, “nothing presses on me from where the nations quarrel, / I stand on no particular side; / for justice is neither here nor there”, a declaration that has been read as meaning that “from now on he belonged to the world, not to any country” (Hendry, p. 21) It was a clarification of identity that reflected, according to some, Rilke’s endemic “ambivalence” towards his homeland (Jutta Heinz in Rilke Handbuch: 187). As he asserted in the concluding line of that poem, his ultimate allegiance was to the “aurea mediocratas”, a location of mind and body existing between particular places and countries, which lay beyond the confines of local definition. If this was so, then the Lares volume marked the first step in the poet’s increasingly determined inclination to cosmopolitanism, where he would move (literally) through ever expanding concentric circles, dwelling in a myriad of countries: (chronologically) Germany, Russia, France, Italy and Switzerland, frequently retracing his steps between these circles.
One such circle was Russia, and it would provide a creative physical and mental space that Rilke would inhabit for the duration of his life. It was made possible by his meeting (and subsequent intimate relationship) with Lou Andreas-Salomé in Munich (where Rilke had moved to from Prague) in 1897. Russian born, from a French Huguenot family of German extraction a member of the haute bourgeoisie, Andreas-Salomé had achieved notoriety as the putative fiancé of Friedrich Nietzsche, but she had also won serious intellectual acclaim (although this is not to say that any association with Nietzsche could not have been serious) as an author of works on philosophy and religion, including the essay “Jesus, the Jew” (1896). The latter had been read admiringly by Rilke and that intellectual bond, “a devout fellow-feeling” (as he described it in a letter to her of 13 May 1897), now became a personal one.
Between April 1899 and June, the couple (together with Lou’s husband, Professor Andreas, a specialist in the language of Iran) undertook a trip to Russia. It was to be a transformative experience. “The sights and sounds of Russia, its mythical peasants and icons, the infinite expanse of its land, provided the canvas on which this transformation took place. It allowed Rilke to mystify reality in a new idiom that was not to be demystified until years later in Paris and later in Muzot” (Freedman, p. 92). A priority was a visit to Tolstoy in his apartment in Moscow, “a revered figure with and against whom Rilke could define his aesthetic, his work, himself” (Freedman, p. 94). The meeting was only a partial success (Rilke was an unknown entity, and he would have the same problem when he and Lou visited Tolstoy on his estate on the second trip to Russia the following year). Rilke found, however, the greater sights, sounds and art of a (for Rilke) thoroughly spiritualised Russia overwhelming and spent much of his time in Moscow visiting the cathedrals, where art merged with religion.
In his time in Russia, Rilke seems to have been more interested in art than literature. He sought out the company of Leonid Pasternak (1862-1945, father of the later novelist, Boris), an Impressionist painter and illustrator of the novels of Tolstoy, who taught at the prestigious Moscow School of Painting, through whom Rilke was granted access to the legendary novelist at his apartment in Moscow, and the following year, during his second Russian trip, at Tolstoy’s country estate. Rilke also met the Russo-Italian sculptor, Prince Paolo Trubetskoy (1866-1938), and Anna Golubkina (1864-1927). The latter may have been a particularly decisive contact, for she had wide experience of living and working in France (where she had been the first Russian to receive the prestigious Paris Salon prize for her sculptures). She had also acted as an assistant to Auguste Rodin (1897-1899, and it is quite possible that she ignited an interest in the latter’s work for the young Rilke, who just three years later would be commissioned to write a monograph on the French master. The poet also visited Isaac Levitan (1860-1900) whose “mood landscapes” fused Impression with Neo-Realism, a style that Rilke was to encounter again in the artists of the North German Worpswede colony.
The stay in Moscow was short. In May, they travelled to Saint Petersburg, Lou’s former home. Rilke found the modern city internationalized, lacking the chthonic depth that he had expected from Russia (Prater: 52). Rilke avoided the city, immersing himself in museums and libraries, and read voraciously about traditional Russian painting, notably icon painting. It was a productive time. As he later wrote, “the study of these Russian things, I shall return to again – I would even say, return home to – from all other distractions … they are God’s innermost, most secret chamber, in which he keeps his most beautiful treasures, not lying dusty and idle, but all dedicated to that profound piety from which have come works and wonders from the beginning of time … I feel that they are the best images and names for my own feelings and confessions” (quoted in Prater, p. 53). Tensions were now becoming evident in the relationship between Rilke and Lou, and soon after they went their separate ways: Lou remained in Saint Petersburg, while Rilke left for Prague in June. Typical of their contradictory synergy, they met up again in Sopot (near Danzig) later that month, remaining until the end of July when they both returned to Berlin.
The second trip (7 May to 25 August 1900, with Lou but without her husband) was more extensive than the first. They boarded train in Berlin, then proceeded to Warsaw arriving in Moscow on 9 May. Rilke had prepared for it the trip by improving his command of the Russian language, and to the point where he was able to translate Chekov’s The Seagull. Rilke and Lou stayed in Moscow until 31 May, pursuing a demanding itinerary: “they stopped in cafés to plan each day and to share their observations … In the mornings, they visited picture galleries and museums and attended church services, where possible. In the afternoons, they wandered more or less aimlessly, poking their heads even into slums and dark alleys. In the evening, they tried to follow up social connections or went to the theatre or just talked” (Ralph Freedman, The Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke. New York. 1996. pp. 111-112).
Behind such tourism lay, however, a deeper mission: to find the spirit of Russia as “a form of lived myth” (Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back: Memoirs. New York. 1991. p. 87). It was the imposition of an ideal. As Ralph Friedman comments, “Rilke’s command of Russian art history and culture had become more solid now, but the illusion of aesthetic religiosity infused with mysticism, and his lack of interest in the social and political reality of in-de-siècle Russia, remained unaltered” (Freedman, p. 109). The first shorter Russian trip the year before had largely been completed by train. This second, longer trip would be made by road, canal and rivers. After leaving Moscow, the couple embarked on a 2, 500 miles journey crisscrossing the centre of Russia. Their itinerary led them through the south and east, first to the Ukraine (Kiev) then down the Dnieper to Kremenchug and across land through Kharkov and Voronezh to the river Volga at Saratov. When they reached St. Petersburg, Rilke contacted the art writer and collector Pavel Davidovich Ettinger (1868-1948) and, perhaps most decisive of all, the editor of the recently founded St. Peterburg based journal World of Art (Mir iskusstva), Sergei Diaghilev (1872-1929, who was later to gain fame as the director of the Ballet Russe). The journal defended the European Avant Garde in Russia, but at the same time promoted folk art and the culture of indigenous Russia. That the two modes could be simultaneously accommodated may have influenced Rilke as he formed the aesthetic behind his next volume of poetry that he was shortly to begin, The Book of Hours (which ultimately is, in effect, a modernist reading of medieval art).
When the couple returned to Moscow, they visited the district neighbouring Moscow of Tver Oblast, where they met (in a second attempt to find the quintessential Russia) the peasant poet, Spiridon Drozhzhin (1848-1930), the author of Opening Song and At the Village Assembly (both 1920), whose poem “Homeland” became feted within the national culture of Russia. “The simple poet with such close ties to the soil was the epitome of Russia and the Russian people as Rainer conceived them. ‘These days have brought us a big step nearer the heart of Russia’, he later wrote, the heart whose ‘beating marks the just rhythm for our live’ ” (quoted in Prater, p. 65).
Lou and Rilke had set out on their journey as idealists, wishing “to see a Russia wrapped up in a mystical veil” (Freedman, p. 112), and that veil was represented by one man in particular: Leon Tolstoy. They paid a visit to the famous novelist on 1 June at his rural home, Yasnaya Polyana, but it was not a success. The couple arrived uninvited and found Tolstoy prickly and unsociable (with domestic problems). This was Realism (Tolstoy’s realism). This brusque reception, however, did nothing to dent their faith in Tolstoy or dispel their faith in the country and art of a broad-hearted, spiritual Russia.
Rilke had initially wanted to write a series of monographs on Russian art (Prater, p. 61), but this was never to be achieved. Shortly afterwards, however, in 1901, he published a lengthy essay titled “Russian Art”, where he drew his earlier observations on the subject together. The essay is not only a homage to Russian art; it was also a testimony to an (idealized) view of Russian character and a celebration of “a wide land in the East, the only land in which God is combined with the earth” (SW 5, p. 494). “Russia is the only land that substantially considers the future”. Its tradional artists, the producers of the icon, knew how to create “out of the tranquil consciousness of ever-present form” (SW 5, p. 497). That consciousness and that artistic practice is alive today in Russian artists such as Victor Michailowitsch Vasnetov, whose paintings “just as much relate to the things of nature as they do to the objects of his fantasy” (SW 5, pp. 498-499).
On 5 August 1903, Rilke wrote to Lou after their breach had (at least temporarily) been suspended, where he said, “the fact that Russia is my homeland is one of the great mysterious certainties by which I live”. It was a great mystery that Rilke would work through in his next book of poetry, The Book of Hours (Das Stundenbuch). This was composed in three volumes: “The Book of Monastic Life” (“Vom moenchischen Leben”, a sequence of poems, without internal subdivisions) in September and October 1899 in in Berlin; “The Book of Pilgrimage” (“Von der Pilgerschaft”) in September 1901 in Westerwede, North Germany); and “The Book of Poverty and Death” (“Von der Armuth und vom Tode”), in April 1903 in Viareggio, on the Italian coast. The title refers to the genre of iconic manuscripts that were composed by clerical artists detailing the canonical hours, when religious devotees (monks, priests, nuns, but also lay people) could observe their prayers and salutations. Such manuscripts were graphically illuminated with images depicting not only religious observance but secular dwelling places and the countryside. The most ornate ones came to be regarded as works of art and attracted aristocratic ownership, as in the famous “Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry” (ca. 1410).
The Book of Hours is a work that draws directly on Rilke’s experiences in Russia. “The spirit of Holy Russia crops up again and again, not only in his reminiscences of Kiev, of the Cave monastery, of the Troitskaya Lavra, and the crowds of pilgrims” (Janko Lavrin, “Rilke and Russia”. The Russian Review. vol. 27, no. 2 (1968), 149-160, p. 155). Russia’s influence is also evident in the poems in a certain expansive theology of the mind, in a consciousness that “conceives of God as being in the process of ‘becoming’, a process that requires man’s participation”, in which “through the perfection of man, God, too, becomes perfect” (Lavrin, p. 154). In this process, man too “might achieve sobornost (inward spiritual fellowship)” (Lavrin, p. 151). For Rilke, Russia was a country of change and changes: its present was open to the future. As Lou later wrote to Rilke on 18 January 1923, it was a country “which was forever dying and forever renewing itself”.
This expansiveness informs the very structure of Rilke’s writing. As Ralph Freedman has observed regarding the depiction of the making of the icon, “the icon exists not by itself only by the act of producing it. The action identifies the icon’s creator with the poet seeking to reproduce the work in a verbal image”, and he adds, “the repeated alternation of painting and sculpture with narrative time becomes for Rilke a form of religious and mythical history, blurring boundaries between the visible and invisible that seemed to him to be part of the Russian cultural milieu” (Freedman, p. 101).
The first cycle of poems in the volume has the title “”The Book of Monastic Life” (“Vom moenchischen Leben”. Here “Rilke placed most of the poems in the mind and mouth of a persona, a pious monk whose voice holds the sequence together. God becomes a humanised presence, animated, close by the concrete. The entire atmosphere is permeated by the naive and pious spirit” (Freedman: 164). Although it was the ideal type of the icon maker rather than a specific artist that Rilke had in mind in constructing his actions and character in The Book of Hours), the poet was almost certainly thinking of Andrei Rublev (ca. 1360-ca. 1430), whose work was well represented in the museums of Moscow that Rilke visited on his two trips to Russia. Rublev came to fame in 1400, when he decorated icons for the Cathedral of Annunciation in the Moscow Kremlin. The first poem in the cycle reads:
I
Now descends the hour and it strikes me
with a clear, bright stroke.
My senses tremble. I feel that I can:
give shape to the malleable day.
II
Nothing was complete before my eyes found this,
all that was becoming stood still.
My looking is ripe and, like a bride,
accepts all things that are coming, as he wishes.
IIi
Nothing is too small for me, and I love it anyway
and paint it onto a gold background, and large, and
hold it on high, and do not know to
whom it loosens its soul.
I
[Da neigt sich die Stunde und rührt mich an
mit klarem, metallenem Schlag;
mir zittern die Sinne. Ich fühle: ich kann –
und ich fasse den plastischen Tag.
II
Nichts war vollendet, eh ich es erschaut,
ein jedes Werden stand still.
Meine Blicke sind reif, und wie eine Braut
kommt jedem das Ding, das er will.
III
Nichts ist mir zu klein, und ich lieb es trotzdem
und mal es auf Goldgrund und gross
und halte es hoch, und ich weiss nicht wem
löst es die Seele los … ] (1: 253)
The volume is titled “The Book of Monastic Life” (“Vom moenchischen Leben”), but we learn very little about the monastic life that surrounds the monk as he works. In the third poem in the series, “I have many brothers in soutanes” (“Ich habe viele Brüder in Soutanen”), the monk makes reference to fellow monks living in the South, but this not a gesture of fraternal recognition. He evokes them only to dismiss them. They are “humane” (“menschlich”) and belong to the light; true depth, dark depth, however, belongs to the North (“mein Gott ist dunkel”) (1: 254). Although he is part of a collective of icon making monks: (“artisans such as we: miners, apprentices, masters /and we build you” (“Werkleute sind wir: Knappen, Jünger, Meister” / und bauen dich”) (1: 268), gives advice to the novices around him (“To the young Brother” / “An den jungen Bruder”) (1: 278), and associates with fellow masters (“I was by the oldest monks” / “Ich war bei den ältesten Mönchen”) (1: 295), Rilke’s monk is essentially an “Einzelgänger”, who when he speaks uses the first-person pronoun (“I” / “Ich”) throughout, rather than the third person (“We” / Wir”), which might point to a community.
His identity (or, at least, his self-image) is polyvalent. The monk sees himself as a “pilgrim”, arriving at a new land to paint the “dark being” /” dunkles Sein” of his master” (I: 292). It is a mission that can only be carried out in the spirit of innocent non-deliberation, in order to capture the mystery of his venerated object. Painting, naturally, is his métier, and he describes his fraught task (internally and externally, in his mind and in his actions), which is to make the image of God whole again in the face of those who would deny him (and Rilke would have enjoyed writing these words): “the poets have scattered you / (a storm ripped through their stammering). I want to gather you up again / in a vessel that will make you happy” (“die Dichter haben sich verstreut / (es ging ein Sturm durch alles Stammeln), / ich aber will dich wieder sammeln / in dem Gefass, das dich erfreut”) (1: 291).
And yet, there are moments when painting is not enough, when what he is painting (or trying to paint) can only be reached through an entirely different medium: the spirit. Here all efforts at art seem redundant, a mere gloss. The monk describes the process in one memorable poem, “What if my hands err in the brushstrokes” (“Was irren meine Hände in den Pinseln?” (1: 263). However, when he feels that he has succeeded, it is “Sunday” (either a literal or metaphorical “Sonntag”) and he experiences a “rejoicing Jerusalem” / “jubelndes Jerusalem” (I: 285). As his standard practice, the monk works in isolation, an isolation that he prizes: “in this world, I am too much alone, but not alone enough” (“Ich bin auf der Welt zu allein und doch nicht allein genug”) (I: 260), and often he becomes aware of a darker self within, powering his artistic goal: “I love the dark hours of my being. / My mind deepens into them. / There I can find, as in past letters, / the days of my life, already lived, / and held like legends and understood” (“Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelheiten, / in welchen meine Sinne sich vertiefen; / in ihnen hab ich, wie in alten Briefen, / mein täglich Leben schon gelebt gefunden / und wie Legende weit und überwunden”) (I: 254). At such moments, he makes contact with a deeper aesthetic, one that is in emanates from (is perhaps coterminous with) the mystery of God: “I believe in all that has not yet been said / I wish to free my most pious feelings. / Those that no one before me has dared to wish, / will now well up within me without me intending” (“I glaube an alles noch nie Gesagte. / Ich will meine frömmsten Gefühle befrein. / Was noch keiner zu wollen wagte, / wird mir einmal unwillkürlich sein”) (1: 259). He knows that this is not a modest goal: “You see, I wish for much” (“Du siehst, ich will viel” (1: 261).
The first poem in the cycle, written in “abab” rhyme and in longer six-foot lines of dactylic metre, is “Now descends the hour and strikes me” (“Da neigt sich die Stunde und rührt mich an”. The first word, “Da”, is a highly effective rhetorical announcement, because within the narrative it signals the moment of inception for the monk, but beyond the narrative it signals the beginning of our readerly contact with that narrative: what is “descending” (“neigt”) to the monk is descending to us. The word also collapses time and place, a major theme in The Book of Hours.
The monk is experiencing a visitation of the hour (perhaps of prayer or meditation), that moment of Kairos, an acute meeting of sensibility with time, in the intensity of which he completes the act of artistic creation. The monk-artist is touched by a “bright stroke” (“metallenem Schlag”, the metal tip of his quill perhaps), and applies it to “the malleable day” (“den plastischen Tag”), shaping the world through art. The two material adjectives seem incongruous, but “plastischen” does not refer here to an industrial substance but to the quality of malleability within the made object, a quality evident in the etymology of the word in the Greek “plasseln”, “to mold”. It is a creative act coming not only from the inspiration of loosened senses (“Sinne”) but also from “Blicke” that are now mature. The “Blicke” are literally “looks”, but the word can also convert into “gaze” or even “vision”. The overarching meaning is “perspective”. As Rilke will later emphasize in his letters on Cezanne: looking transforms the world: the real is only real when seen.
The icon is not intended for a specific recipient. Its ambit is the unspecifiable ambit of God, and as such inhabits that space the intervenes between us and the infinite, what Rilke will later call the “Weltraum”. It is an indefinite space, fluid without contours, a potential, and is present from the very first word of the poem, through the non-definable “There” (“Da”). The poems in The Book of Hours suggest that it is possible for us to occupy that space through art, here through the making of an icon, which can close the vacuum and hold our small achievements “high” (“hoch”).
“I live my life in ever expanding circles” (“Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen”, the second poem in the volume) is a short poem in two stanzas, written in variable line lengths, with a largely dactylic meter and an “abab” rhyming scheme:
I
I live my life in ever expanding circles,
which move above all things.
I will perhaps not reach the final one,
but I will try to so so nonethless.
II
I circle around God, around the age-old tower.
I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still do not know whether:
I am a falcon, storm or mighty song.
I
[Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,
die sich über die Dinge ziehn.
Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen,
aber versuchen will ich ihn.
II
Ick kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm,
und ich kreise jahrtausendlang;
und ich weiss nocht nicht: bin ich Falke, ein Sturm
oder ein grosser Gesang.] (1: 253)
The tone of the poem emerges through first-person articulation, but the speaking voice is not demonstrative. On the contrary, it is an almost factual statement on the position of the lyrical subject as it circles around God. The two-stanza form imparts the quality of a syllogism (or, in musical terms, the form of a sonata), with a statement followed by its exposition or its resolution. The monk in The Book of Hours is a highly deliberative monk, whose emotions and senses are firmly contained and not dissipated through religious fervor.
“I live my life in ever expanding circles”. Time has become space, and the speaking voice will define itself here largely through spatial imagery, developing a trope introduced in the opening poem (most noticeable in the “Stunde” motif), a motif encapsulated in the epithets “age-old” (“uralt”) and “for a thousand years” (“jahrtausendlang”). In the earlier poem, space was a theme; here it is the very medium of self-realization. The monk’s life is moving in “wachsenden Ringen” (line 1) “increasing” or “expanding” circles (although “wachsend” literally means “growing”). His individual identity is fluid, born from air (represented in the text by a series of metaphors of movement). The sentiments are expansive even when the monk is postulating statis, immobility, and with “Dinge” we get the second reference to the material world sounded in the “things” (line 2) of the first poem. The monk may never reach the final circle, but that is of no matter. What he is embarked on is a journey, and it is the journey undertaken in the spirit of an eundo assequi (“in going, to learn something on the way”). It is the journey that matters, not reaching a destination. Indeed, we may go nowhere, simply return to where we have begun. As the many images of rings, circles and circling in The Book of Hours suggest, movement and stasis may, ultimately, amount to the same.
The monk circles around God (the circle being the perfect shape because it ends where it begins; or more accurately, it does not possess an ending or a beginning. This note has already been sounded in the “Ringen” of the opening line). The text now supports expansive space with expansive time (a “thousand years”). The monk concludes his self-presentation by admitting that the does now how best to categorize himself (and the theme of not-knowing will be developed further in the book): is he a falcon (because of his circling), a storm (caught in the passion of Creation), or a mighty song (the product of inspired art)?
All these possible configurations reinforce the monk’s sense of mission. It is, however, a modest sense of mission (although certainly not a modest mission). The fourth poem in the volume stresses the importance of viewing the deity but depicts him not as a mighty potentate, an angry, revengeful God (the “Vater-imago”. Braungart in Handbuch: 220), as he appears in certain Biblical scenes (Abraham and the intended sacrifice of his son, Isaac, for example, in Genesis: 22), but as the gentle, loving source of spiritual life, perhaps as Mother, or the Gnostic Sophia, rather than as Father:
I
We should not paint you as the All-Mighty,
you the dawning, shimmering one, out of which the morning would climb,
Out of our old paint box, we fetch the same paint strokes
and the same flashes of colours, with which
the saint kept you secret.
II
We make pictures of you, until they stand around you
like a thousand walls.
Then our pious hands will hide you
so that you can only be glimpsed by our open hearts.
I
[Wir dürfen dich nicht eigenmächtig malen,
du Dämmernde, aus der der Morgen stieg.
Wir holen aus den alten Farbenschalen
die gleiche Striche und die gleichen Strahlen,
mit denen dich der Heilige verschwieg.
II
Wir bauen Bilder vor dir auf wie Wände;
so dass schon tausend Mauern um die stehn.
Denn dich verhüllen unsre frommen Hände,
sooft dich unsere Herzen offen sehn.] (1: 254)
Two stanzas of unequal length with an abaab / cdcd rhyming scheme and in a combination of pentameter and hexameter lines support a further positive statement from the monk, an assertive statement that argues against assertion. We should not (may not, “dürfen nicht”) paint God as a plenipotentiary, as he has so often been depicted, particularly in The Old Testament. He is too forbearing, too understanding for such an image. He is not “eigenmächtig” (the “eigen, “own” or “self”, suggesting a failure to make contact with or to give to others). In this latter guise, he is a vengeful not a loving God (as in the God who instructs Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his son, in Genesis: 22), and the monk seeks to avoid that image in his icon. He is the “Dämmernde” one (“dawning, shimmering”, “tremulous”). The word used here as a gerund suggests a process, a becoming of being, and not a fixed entity as in the monolithic, unbending “eigenmächtig” suggests.
The monk-artists (this is a collective act, so the “Ich’ speaker of the previous poems is elided into a greater productive unit) will retrieve and use the painterly the tools of the past, an action that supports tradition and continuity, both major themes in The Book of Hours. The commune of monk-artists produces its iconic images in numbers or that they can act as a wall surrounding and protecting the deity. To reveal all would be to too much (God would just look like a king). Mystery must be preserved (because he is the “Rätselhafte”) (1: 284). Through the protective efforts of the icon makers, he will now be hidden from common view, to be seen only in or through the hearts of pious believers. Once again, as is the case throughout the volume, art (icon making) is not seen as essentially a material practice but as the medium through which the inner self can make contact with an unseen outer self, who is God.
It has now become clear that there is a structural relationship between the icon maker and God, that a dialectic is being explored along the antithetical axis of nearness and distance, inner-self and outer-self, surface appearance and depth, understanding and mystery, and that these oppositions exist within time and space, coordinates that the poems have also directly (but sometimes indirectly) addressed.
In the ninth poem in the volume the word replaces art as the medium for the monk:
I
I read it here in your very word,
in the history of your gestures,
with which your hands cupped themselves
around our becoming,
limiting, wise and warm.
You said: live loudly but die softly
and said again once more: be!
But before the first death came murder.
Then a breech opened through the circles you ripened, and a cry went up
and shattered the voices with it,
which only then had come together to speak to you,
to bear you wth them
a bridge over all chasms.
II
And what since then has come together
are but fragments
of your venerable name.
I
[Ich lese es heraus aus deinem Wort,
aus der Geschichte der Gebärden,
mit welchen deine Hände um das Werden
sich ründeten, begrenzend, warm und weise.
Du sagtest leben laut und sterben leise
und wiederholtest immer wieder: Sein.
Doch vor dem ersten Tode kam der Mord.
Da ging ein Riss durch deine reifen Kreise
und ging ein Schrein
und riss die Stimmen fort,
die ben erst sich sammelten,
um dich zu sagen,
um dich zu tragen,
alles Abgrunds Brücke –
II
Und was sie seither stammeten,
sind Stücke
deines alten Names] (1: 257)
A powerful poem, in which the lyrical becomes epic. The monk is a strong enunciating subject, who speaks with authority (even when venerating) and in a self-contained first-person voice that needs not look beyond itself and its relation to God. In this, the ninth poem in the series, he expands his purview beyond that self-containment to engage with a reality beyond himself: history and the history of the Church. The form of the poem is unusual: the initial stanza consists of fourteen lines; the second stanza of three. The lines lengths are largely hexameter and the metre dactylic, but Rilke shortens the lines in the concluding words of each stanza, almost if they are intended to provide a culminative resolution or explanation. The rhyming scheme is likewise unusual, both stanzas possessing half rhymes and sometimes no rhymes at all.
This highly inflected form reflects the discursive nature of the poem (its development of an argument or analytical point of view). God is not being invoked here for personal contact (worship), but also as a figure whose presence permeates history, “Geschichte” (and this is the only use of the word in the volume. History, in its threatening urban mode, oppresses the poet in Book III, but he finds other words for this). The opening lines describe the deity’s actions in terms that are almost human (his hands are warm and wise), and he shapes the world almost as an artist does. He brings a clear message to us (almost existential in its overtones): live loudly but die softly / and he said again once more: be! The message is expansive, although his actions are also “begrenzend”, limiting, defining, holding in check perhaps the excesses of religious ecstatic behaviour.
The poem develops into a mediation on the origins of the collective belief in God. The terms of reference are cryptic, obscure: whose “death”, whose “murder”, whose “voices” are referred to here? Is Rilke describing the crucifixion of Christ and the dismay of his disciples? As we near this fatal climax, the lines become shorter and shorter until we reach the final stanza, where one line consists of only two words. That stanza, in fact, can only be read as a critique of Christianity, which recovered from the death of Christ but only, and Rilke would make this clearer in his later poem sequence, Visions of Christ (1897), in its institutionalized form of the Church, where it stammered mere liturgical words that only captured a mere glimpse of the mystery of God.
No institution can contain God because God is manifest in all things. The twenty-third poem in the first volume reads:
I
I find you in all these things,
to whom I am good and like a brother;
like seed, you sun yourself in the small,
and in the big, you give yourself all the more.
II
That is the wondrous play of powers,
that you serve as you go through things:
growing in roots, slender in their stems
and in treetops, you achieve resurrection.
I
[Ich finde dich in allen diesen Dingen,
denen ich gut und wie ein Bruder bin;
als Samen sonnst du dich in den geringen,
und in den grossen gibst du gross dich hin.
II
Das ist das wundersame Spiel der Kräfte,
dass sie so dienend durch die Dinge gehn:
in Wurzeln wachsend, schwindend in die Schäfte
und in den Wipfeln wie ein Auferstehen.] (1: 266)
The monk addresses in assertive pantheistic terms God as master, friend and confidant, in a poem of conventional (but hence traditionally stabilizing) form, with abab cdcd rhymes, and dactylic pentameter lines. With their focus upon sun earth and seeds, the terms are virtually pagan. The influence may have been Alfred Schuler (1865-1923) and the Munich Cosmic Circle, with whom Rilke was connected prior to the writing of The Hour Books. Like the Greek god, Apollo, the monk’s god energizes, infuses the vegetation that surrounds him and through which he works to bring about regeneration.
The opening line returns us once more to the centrality of the thing-world in Rilke’s writing. Whatever religious sources of inspiration inspire the monk, he retains a firm grip on the solidity of the world. And, once again, to supplement the structural features of Rilke’s thematic exposition, there is a further dialectic played out between “small” (“gering”, literally “slight”, “negligible”) and “big” (“gross”). Nature provides the via ductus even for the ultimate ascension, treetops providing the place for the resurrection.
The monk, even in those moments of dark introspection, speaks throughout the volume with a controlled dignity and self-confidence. He is one artist talking to another artist: God. There is. however, one poem where the grave importance of his mission brings him to a self-celebration that, for some, may be close to heresy. It is the thirty-ninth poem in the volume, and it has the provocative title: “What will you do, God, when I an dead?” (“Was wirst du tun, Gott, wenn is sterbe?”):
I
What will you do, God, when I am dead?
I am your pitcher (what if I break?).
I am your drink (what if I have been spoilt?).
Am your cloth and your clothing.
Without me you lose your purpose.
II
After me, you have no house, in which
words, close and warm, will greet you.
There will fall from your tired feet
the silken sandals, that I am.
II
Your heavy cloak will slip undone.
Your glance, which I will receive on my cheek
like a warm morass,
will come, will through the day seek me out
and deposit strange stones at sunset
into your lap.
III
What will you do, God? I am afraid.
I
Was wirst du tun, Gott, wenn is sterbe?
Ich bin dein Krug (wen ich zerbreche?).
Ich bin dein Trank (wenn ich verderbe?).
Bin dein Gewand und dein Gewerbe,
mit mir verlierst du deinen Sinn
II
Nach mir hast du kein Haus, darin
dich Worte, nah und warm, begrüssen.
Es fällt von deinen müden Füssen
die Samtsandale, die ich bin.
III
Dein grosser Mantel lässt dich los.
Dein Blick, den ich mit meiner Wange
warm, wie mit einem Pfühl, empfange,
wird kommen, wird mich suchen, lange –
und legt beim Sonnenuntergange
sich fremden Steinen in den Schoss.
Was wirst du tun, Gott? Ich bin bange.] (1: 275-276)
The question-marks in the first stanza signal a process of interrogation. It seems as if the monk has usurped the position of speech of the All-Mighty. Without the presence of the monk and his icon making art form, God would lose his “Sinn (being stripped of food, drink and clothing in the process). “Sinn” conventionally translated as “sense” or “meaning”, but the word possesses a more outwards directed connotation than is conveyed by the two words, a direction more evident in its verbal form “sinnen” (which is something closer to the French word “raison”). Indeed, what the monk here is saying is that without him and his art, God would lose his “raison d’être”, his purpose (although as Wolfgang Braungart points out, “this God is a construction that the subject needs in order to be at all a subject”. Handbuch: 221). Ultimately, the poem is the culmination of the perspectivist aesthetic that the Monk has adhered to throughout: the principle of esse est percipi.
It is a presumptuous attitude, and that attitude informs the very grammar of the text. In the first stanza the first-person pronoun (both in its nominative and dative case) dominates the sentence structure. The frequent use of the familiar second person pronoun (“dich”), which is found throughout the volume in addressing God, likewise communicates a certain superior disposition. This changes in the second stanza, but the stanza ends with the most determined use of that case: ” that I am” (“die ich bin”). The deity is personified throughout: he is tired, homeless, without clothing, even footwear, and is, in a lengthy process (‘lange”), seeking out the monk.
Is what is being conveyed her a positive image of a caring monk seeking an affectionate rapprochement, a reciprocated communion, with his creator? Or is it describing a man who has spent so much of his life aggrandizing God that he has come to see the latter not only as his equivalent but as his superior, for without the icons, the spiritual realm would, for the common viewer, not exist. The poem concludes with an enigmatic act of an unspecified other laying stones in the lap of the monk. Is this tribute or mockery?
The sense of self-assurance and confidence of a place in the world exhibited by the mock in the first volume of The Book of Hours was not carried forward into the second volume, “The Book of Pilgrimage” (“Von der Pilgerschaft”). It is possible that the strong voice of the monk emerged out of Rilke’s conviction in his own poetic mission, a conviction two years later that is beginning to waver during a recurrent periodic phase of self-doubt. The opening poem of that book reads:
I
You are not surprised at the force of the storm –
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the avenues flowing. And you know:
he from whom they flee is the one
you move towards. All your senses
sing to him, as you stand by the window.
II
The summer weeks stood still.
Blood rose in the trees.
Now you think that it wants to sink
into the all of everything.
You thought that you could trust the power
when you grasped the fruit.
But now it has become a mystery again
and you are once more a mere guest.
III
Summer was like your house. You knew
where everything stood. Now you must
leave it and go into your heart, as you
go out into the flatlands. Now begins your
immense loneliness. The days become dumb,
and the wind takes the world from your senses
like withered leaves.
IV
Through the barren branches, you can see
the sky looking down. It is all you have.
Be earth now, and evening song
and land lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
that has ripened into a reality,
So that He, from whom the word came,
when He grasps you, can feel you.]
I
[Dich wundert nicht des Sturmes Wucht, –
du hast ihn wachsen sehn; –
die Bäume flüchten. Ihre Flucht
schafft schreitende Alleen.
Da weisst du, der vor dem sie fliehn
ist der, zu dem du gehst,
und deine Sinne singen ihn,
wenn du am Fenster stehst.
II
Des Sommers Wochen standen still,
es stieg der Bäume Blue;
jetzt fühlst du, dass es fallen will
in den der Alles tut.
Du glaubest schon erkannt die Kraft,
als du die Frucht erfasst,
jeztzt wird sie wieder rätselhaft,
und du bist wieder Gast.
III
Der Sommer war so wie dein Haus,
darin weisst du alles stehn –
jetzt muss du in dein Herz hinaus
wie in die Ebene gehn.
Die grosse Einsamkeit beginnt,
die Tage werden taub,
aus eine Sinnen nimmt der Wind
die Welt wie welkes Laub.
IV
Durch ihre Leeren Zweige sieht
der Himmel, den du hast;
sei Erde jetzt und Abendlied
und Land, darauf er passt.
Demütig sei jetzt wie ein Ding,
zu Wirklichkeit gereift, –
dass Der, von dem die Kunds ging,
dich fühlt, wenn er dich greift.] (1: 305-306)
Rilke wrote the second part of his Book of Hours, the thirty-four poems of the “Book of Pilgrimages”, in Westerwede (a small village near Bremen in north Germany) in September 1902, in the midst of an unhappy marriage and anxiety about his artistic and financial future. The opening poem sets the tone for the entire volume. This is a darker book than the preceding volume, its sombre quality evident both in its themes, the pained position of speech of the lyrical self and the colour symbolism. Compared to the first volume, “The Book of Monastic Life”, these poems are long and sometimes convoluted. As one commentator has noted, “the relationship with God is difficult and one that the poems have to work their way towards. They are generally more tentative and feel precarious” (Charlie Lough. Rilke: The Life of the Work. Oxford UP. 2020. p. 68). The confidant self-presentation of the icon-making monk in the first volume of the Book of Hours gives way in this second volume to a poetic voice vulnerable and self-doubting, a state of mind that it attempts to overcome by means religious and artistic. In this poem, “the poetic persona consistently looks to God to restore a unity and presence it has lost. In this first poem, the poet views the storm from a distance and, in the recurrent motif that lends the poem its title, expresses his desire to move forward towards the force he recognises as somehow redemptive – a force, however, external to him, one he does not possess or control” (Polikoff p. 257).
Notes of non-attainment determine its emotional ambit. “I have been shattered to pieces”, we learn in the second poem, “I was stranger to myself”. Indeed, “the poems in the second book remain within a rhythm of constative, assertive and insistingly questioning sentences”. God is invoked both spectator and judge. “The polarity between the poetic subject and God is a product of this entire series. This polarity is poetically productive exactly because it is never closed and can never fulfil itself” (Wolfgang Braungart in Rilke Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung. Metzler. 2004. p. 224).
The poem is composed of four octaves of largely iambic pentamer lines (although each stanza includes a shorter tetrameter line), and its sentence structure is, in its involuted form (enjambments and subordinating clauses), quite unlike that of any poems in the first volume. The very space that the poem occupies at the beginning of the volume signifies that a new idiom is being breached. The monk spoke in short, assertive apodictic tones. In this poem, the language is truncated, the syntax involved, the argument complex and sometimes obscure, and the lyrical subject speaks with a complexity that we have not before encountered.
Thematically, the poem adumbrates a transition from summer to winter, that transition inscribed in the surrounding nature, the countryside but most notably trees. The initial stanza of the first poem possesses sentiments that are clearly autobiographical. The sparse landscape, the broad avenues flanked by trees all speak of Rilke’s dwelling in Westerwede and the flat and bleak country that surrounded it. As he wrote in a further poem, “in this village stands the house at the end / just as solitary as the final house in the world. / The street that skirts the small village goes its own way out into the night” (“In diesem Dorfe steht das letzte Haus / so einsam wie das letzte Haus der Welt. / Die Strasse, die das kleine Dorf nicht hält, / geht langsam weiter in die Nacht hinaus” (1: 323). The poem might be read in pictorial terms as a study in “nature morte”.
Out of this bleak environment, the poet draws a small number of nature images that suggest hope, a path to the future. Linking earth and sky, trees were a recurring feature in Rilke’s iconography, being elevated to the “trees of life” in the fourth Duino Elegy. In the present poem, they have a natural rather than symbolic function to perform (although they are not devoid of post-arboreal significance). Rilke’s persona looks through their branches, following a storm, towards the sky, but he can only do so at a distance from a window in his house.
This act of perception merges into the major theme of the poem: knowledge (“know”/ “weiss” and “senses” / “Sinnen”). This is not just knowledge of the external world but knowledge of oneself, of changes that have taken place within. What was once familiar has now become “mysterious” /”rätselhaft”, a sad state that ushers in the weighty loneliness of the speaking subject. But this must be accepted. The poem constitutes an existential exposition of the self as it is now (“jetzt” is a repeated adverb), but it does so in tones that are accepting, stoical, as particularly evident in the self-address of the final stanza: “Be earth now, and evening song.” (“sei Erde jetzt und Abendlied”). In place of anger and resistance, attempt humility. You know from whom you are fleeing. The poem is not about God or a monk. It is about Rilke (at a critical point in his life).
There are indeed poems in this second volume, such as “I am praying again, Awesome one” (“Ich bete wieder, du Erlauchter”), “I am the same one still who was kneeling” (“Ich bin derselbe noch, der kniete” and “You are the Harvest” (“Du bist der Erbe”) (1: 306, 307, 314), that are explicitly addressed to the deity. Other poems, however, involve an unspecified Other, although they make use of the same tone of supplication and devotion, and outline the same subject-object relationship between the speaker and the one spoken of. “His caring is a nightmare to us” (“Und seine Sorgfalt ist uns wie ein Alb”) is one such poem:
I
His caring is a nightmare to us,
and his voice a stone.
We would like to heed his words,
but we only half hear them.
The great drama between us
makes too much noise
for us to understand each other.
We watch his lips moving,
out of which syllables come that are soon forgotten.
We are much further from him than far,
even if we are endlessly bound by love.
Only when we see he is bound to die on this star,
do we see that he had ever lived on this star.
II
That is our father. And I should call I – I call you father?
That would separate you from me a thousand times.
You are my son. I will know you as
one knows his only beloved child
even when he has become a man, an aged man.
I
[Und seine Sorgfalt ist uns wie ein Alb,
und seine Stimme ist uns wie ein Stein,-
wir möchten seiner Rede hörig sein,
aber wir hören seine Worte halb.
Das grosse Drama zwischen ihm und uns
lärmt viel zu laut, einander zu verstehen,
wir sehen nur die Formen seines Munds,
aus denen Silben fallen, die vergehn.
So sind wir noch viewl ferner ihm als fern,
wenn auch die Liebe uns noch weit verwebt;
erst wenn er sterbe muss auf diesem Stern,
sehn wir, dass er auf diesem Stern gelebt.
II
Das ist der Vater uns. Und ich – ich soll
dich Vater nennen?
Das hiese tausendmal mich von dir trennen,
Du bist mein Sohn. Ich werde dich erkennen,
wie man sein einzigliebes Kind erkennt, auch dann,
wenn es ein Mann geworden ist, ein alter Mann.] (1: 312)
The poem is a sensitive portrayal (a domestic tableau) of the response of a family (“we”, “us” is a rare use of the third person pronoun in The Book of Hours) to an elderly, indeed dying father. We have moved in this poem from art to the highly charged realm of the personal (to a “drama”, in effect), in which the lack of communication between the “us” and the “him” is in stark terms highlighted. The tone is matter of fact, almost prosaic. Language fails in this world. Words uttered are soon forgotten. Death alone is the sole reminder of his presence.
In the second shorter stanza, the domestic seems to elide into the sacerdotal. If the first stanza painted an homogeneous picture, the second one presents us with a radical ambivalence. Formally original (it includes a triple rhyme with”-ennen”), the stanza centers on the ambiguity around the word “father”. The previous collective “us” now gives way to a highly individualised “I”. The pivotal question is (pivotal in the sense that if it cannot be answered the stanza and, with it, the poem cannot be understood): who is the “father” in the first two lines? One standard translation (Barrows and Macey, New York 1966) resolves matters by putting the second mention of “father” into the upper case, as “Father”. In this reading, we have unambiguously moved into a religious realm, where the death of one father is replaced (nullified, even) by the eternal life of a second Father. If this is the case, then the question: “I – I should call you father?” in lines 1-2 problematise that equation. It seems equally probable that the “I” in these lines is the son who will continue to recognise (“erkennen”) his impending diseased father, as he would recognise his “only beloved son”, both as a child and as an old man. It is a tension of interpretation that the poet does not resolve.
The second volume of The Book of Hours contains a drift towards the secular and away from the purely sacred. This is evident in its perhaps most famous poem, “Extinguish my eyes: I can still see you” (“Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehn”). This was written not in a celebration of God but as a testimony to Lou A-S (although there were times when Rilke confused, and perhaps fused, the attributes of these two objects of veneration). By 1902, however, the amorous relationship with Lou was over. It was too much: too much contact between two highly strung individuals. “Lou was the essential prop to his existence” (Prater, p. 67), but she could not handle Rilke’s bouts of extreme emotions, “the rage of his inner problematic”, his “explosions of feelings that turned into monsters, the monstrous” (Looking Back, pp. 90 and 89). Before their breach, Rilke captured the intensity of their relationship in this one remarkable and remarkably visceral poem:
Extinguish my eyes: I can still see you.
Block up my ears: I can still hear you,
and without feet, I can still walk to you,
and even with a mouth, I can still implore you.
Break off my arms, I will still hold you
with my heart as if it were a hand,
hold my heart in check, and my brow will still beat,
and throw a fire into my brow,
so, I will continue to bear you in my blood.
[Lösch mir die Augen aus: ich kann dich sehn,
wirf mir die Ohren zu: ich kann dich hören,
und ohne Füsse kann ich zu die gehn,
und ohne Mund noch kann ich dich beschwören.
Brich mir die Arme ab, ich fasse dich
mit meinem Herzen wie mit einer Hand,
halt mir das Herz zu, und mein Hirn wird schlagen,
und wirfft du in mein Hirn den Brand,
so werd ich dich auf meinem Blute tragen.]
With a stark, almost confronting series of imperatives, the poem returns to the apodictic address of the monk in the first volume. Written in single stanza of largely dactylic hexameters and in an abab cdcd rhyming scheme, the poem is an extended conceit in the manner of the Metaphysical poets. Here, a physical negative is turned into a spiritual positive. Even if the loved one should hold his heart in check, his brow will continue to beat (“Hirn” is literally “brow” but here is a poetic circumlocution for “brain” or “mind”). The space between the physical and the spiritual (or emotional) is formally achieved in the text by reversals (quasi chiasmi), by the caesuras in the first two lines and by adroit punctuation throughout.
Even with the loss of its bodily parts, the “I” of the poem retains its strength, something further confirmed by the syllogistic conclusion, where “Blute”/ “blood” acts as a metaphor for “instinct”. Such is the power of love, some might say; such is the power of the ego is an alternative reading (and Rilke will explore the complex psychic, perhaps devious relationship between the two in his Duino Elegies). The physicality of the imagery suggests intimate contact but that stops on this side of the erotic. Certainly, a loved-one is being addressed in this poem, but the loved-one is not God.
In keeping with his approach in the first two volumes of The Book of Hours, Rilke began the third volume, “The Book of Poverty and Death” (“Von der Armuth und vom Tode”), with a poem that sets the mood and thematic range for the remaining cycle. The first stanza reads:
Perhaps I am going through massive mountains
with hard veins and, like the ore, alone,
and have come down so deep that I can see no end
and nothing in the distance:
everything is pressing in on me, and everything
closing in on me has turned to stone.
[Vielleicht, dass ich durch schwere Berge gehe
in harten Adern, wie ein Erz allein;
und bin so tief, dass ich kein Ende sehe
und keine Ferne: alles wiurde Nähe,
und alle Nähe wurde Stein.]
The lines possess the quality of a bad dream: entrapment, impassibility, claustrophobia, no possibility of egress. These forms will return again in the poems of this volume, whose focus moves from the monk’s cell (that persona is no more), through the natural landscape of volume two (however “morte”) to finally reach here urban nightmare, where the mammoth cities are “lost and rotting” (they are “Verlorene und Aufgelöste”, decrepit in shape and morals, a theme that Rilke will return to in the Duino Elegies). In such cities, the poor and outcast live without a life in the present or a life in the future, and the poet depicts their fate in poems such as “For, Lord, the big cities are lost”, “Denn, Herr, die grossen Städte sind Verlorene”, “The Cities only want” (“Die Städte wollen nur”), and “And your poor ones suffer under this” (“Und deine Armen leiden unter diesen”). That poem reads:
I
And your poor ones suffer under this.
and are weighed down with all that they look upon,
and glow red but are freezing as if in the crisis of a fever,
and are burdened with total dirt,
and wander, evicted from every place of dwelling,
like distant dead around in the night,
and into the sun spit out filth,
from every encounter with the mouths of fallen women,
screamed at by passing vehicles and bright lights.
[Und deine Armen leiden unter diesen
und sind von allem, was sie schauen, schwer
und glühen frierend wie in Fieberkrisen
und gehn, aus jeder Wohnung ausgewiesen,
wie fremde Tote in der Nacht umher;
und sind beladen mit dem ganzen Schmutze
und wie in Sonne Faulendes bespien, –
von jedem Zufall, von der Dirnen Putze,
von Wagen und Laternen angeschrien”] (1: 364)
In one extended octave, Rilke paints a scene of degradation. As with the other city poems, the subject of his discourse is the poor. They have no permanent abode, evicted from their dwellings, they are destined to wander like ghosts through the city burdened with the filth of their lives (and perhaps literal filth), but even in their wanderings they are the targets of glaring abuse: they will not avoid their fate. This is something that Rilke had witnessed during his time in Paris after arriving there in 1902. The shock of the new, the misery of an urban environment that Rilke had not encountered before in Prague or Munich, the two cities in which he had previously lived. These cities had retained their dignity as cultural centers and had not gone through the dispiriting ingress of modernity. Not so (in Rilke’s eyes) Paris. “People come here, then, to live? I should rather have thought that they came here to die”, are the first words of Rilke’s semi-autobiographical narrative, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, written in Paris 1905-1910). Malte becomes aware of Paris (“the heaviest of all cities on my heart”, Letters 1892-1910, p, 95) through sight, sound and smell. These modes of experience are all evident in Rilke’s poem as a form of inverted aesthetic, in the red glow of the fever-ridden bodies of the poor, in the odorous dirt of themselves and their surroundings, in the streetlight that illuminates their ghostlike movements. All of these have parallels in the work of Honoré Daumier (1808-1879), whose paintings and lithographs of Paris likewise were clad in colors grim, dark and sombre, colors that mirror the “shadows” (“Schatten” (1: 345) in Rilke’s poems.
“And your poor ones suffer under this” is just one of a number of poems that take the city, its poor and destitute, sick and dying, for its subject matter. In these poems, which form a mini subgenre in the volume, the speaking subject avails itself of a certain Old Testament tone, caustic, prophetic, castigating, and evoking God as a witness (perhaps to encourage his wrath and intervention). All who inhabit this world experience a form of spiritual death, which is (as we can read in the margins of these poems) on the edge of a literal extinction, their impending physical demise indicated in this poem by the unnatural combination of warmth and cold in their bodies. Indeed, standing numerically at the center of the volume are three poems on a subject that Rilke had only treated tangentially so far: death. Now it comes into a full focus that is succinct, reserved. The final stanza of “There live people, bloodless and pale (“Da leben Menschen, weisserblühte, blasse”) reads:
Death is here. Not the one whose greetings
wondrously touched you gently in childhood, –
that little death as we understood it then.
This actual death hangs in verdant green and is without sweetness,
like a fruit lying within you, that won’t come out.
[Dort ist der Tod. Nicht jener, dessen Grüsse
sie in der Kindheit wundersam gestreift, –
der kleine Tod, wie man ihn dort begreift;
ihr eigener hängt grün und ohne Süsse
wie ein Frucht in ihnen, die nicht reist.]
What follows in the pages of the text are two short poems (succinct tercets in sometimes irregular iambic pentameter lines). They are shortest in The Book of Hours, and their brevity supports a compact message, one that does not require further elaboration. The first reads:
Oh, Lord, give to each of us our own death,
a dying, out of which each life proceeds,
In it is love, our meaning and our need.
[O Herr, gib jedem seinen eignen Tod,
das Sterben, das aus jenem Leben geht,
darin er Liebe, Sinn und Not.]
And there follows the even more terse conclusion, almost an epilogue:
For we are only the rind and the leave.
The great death that each of us has within,
that is the fruit around which all else turns.
[Denn wir sind nur die Schale und das Blatt.
Der grosse Tod, den jeder in such hat,
das ist die Frucht, um die sich alles dreht.]
A view of death as a possibility for the living (inscribed in the first poem in the paradox of a “dying out of which each life proceeds”) is a theme that Rilke will fully develop in his Malte Notebook. Read together, the poems posit two types of death: a little, superficial (although still permanent) death, which is not of our making but comes from without, is random, unexpected, and a death that lies, grows within, not in medical terms but as form of disposition. The only true death (“true” in the sense that it completes rather than negates the self) is our “own” death, a death that is recognized, accepted (and the overtones are) even welcomed. Martin Heidegger would draw the same distinction between a death that we do not want and the death that we do (typified here as a “fruit”), between a death that respects us and one that does not, in his Being and Time (1927). As with other themes worked through in The Book of Hours (the necessity but intractability of love, the primacy of perception, the Golem threat of the city, and art and the aesthetic as forming experiences), Rilke’s treatment of death will feed into and be expanded in his Duino Elegies.
The title of this final volume of The Book of Hours is “The Book of Poverty and Death” and those two dark angels hover over the majority of its poems. However, in its penultimate poem, poverty and destitution receive a different treatment, where they are no longer seen as abject material states but as the conditions of spirituality. In these final pages, the lyrical subject will absorb the monk, not necessarily thematically but in terms of his ethos of redemption and will use his painterly perspective as a medium. As a viewing subject, he may be gone, but this does not mean that art, as an aesthetic is no more. On the contrary, the poem is structured through observed detail, where the spiritually uplifting and the picturesque combine. What was angular and assertive has now become a placid (but artistically generative) gaze (“Blick” as it was earlier called).
The final full-length poem (it is followed by a brief coda),”Oh, where is he, who from his possessions” (“O wo ist der, der aus Besitz”), is in nine stanzas of varying length, which possess an abcd rhyming scheme augmented by a non-rhymed final line. It is a highly composed picture in words. In the opening six stanzas, small flowers bedeck the edges of the meadows, light comes from a deep source within, the saint’s cell glows with cheerfulness, when he sings all goes silent around him , songs that come from his red lips and sink softly onto the flowering meadows, and the saint is received by the “dearest ones” (“Liebevollen”), who in their bliss close like roses, “and full of the nights of love was their hair” (“und voller Liebesnächte was ihr Haar”). It is a pastoral fantasy (a fairy tale in the German mode of the Märchen, where death can also be evident), and the poem concludes with images that constitute a utopia of plenitude, of a wholeness and depth of spirituality that perhaps is intended to take back the grim sterility of the earlier city poems:
VII
And the high and lowly received him
To the many animals, cherubim came
to say that their women folk were bringing fruit, –
and there were butterflies of particular beauty,
for all things knew him
and drew bountifulness from him.
VIII
And when he died, passed away quietly without a name,
he was divided up: his seed flowed
in streams, in the trees did his seed sing
and they watched him placidly from the flowers.
He lay and sang, And when the Sisters came,
they wept for their dear man.
VII
[Und ihn empfing das Grosse und Geringe.
Zu vielen Tieren kamen Cherubim
zu sagen, dass ihr Weibchen Früchte bringe, –
und waren wunderschöne Schmetterlinge:
denn ihn erkannten alle Dinge
und hatten Fruchtbarkeit aus ihm.
VIII
Und als er starb, so leicht wie ohne Namen,
da war er ausgeteilt: sein Samen rann
in Bächen, in den Bäumen drang sein Samen
und sah ihn ruhig aus den Blumen an.
Er lag und sang. Und als die Schwestern kamen,
da weinten sie um ihren lieben Mann.] (1: 365-366)
The poem is a vignette, a picture in words of a heroic (but selfless) soul who chooses to shed his worldly self so that he might attain the Innocence of the animals. Greeted by the great and lowly alike (almost in the form of spiritual royalty, he transcends the social order). His abolition of self charts a threnody of self-purification, a “peregrinatio vitae”. He chooses the death of the old self to allow a new self to be born. Even in death he can sing, a mystery that adheres to his entire demeanor. He lives, even, in death beyond naming.
Eyes and voice provide the medium for the saint’s actions and for those who are with him. The poem is replete with bright sound and colour, as if to undo the earlier darkness of the preceding poems. Nature, in his presence, is utopia of plenitude, and te saint stands out against its background very much as he would have on a stain-glassed church mural: shining from the external light.
St. Francis is an archetype of fertility, spiritual but also physical, and the latter takes him beyond (and, indeed, entirely problematizes) conventional Christian beliefs, and there is a lack of reference to God or religion (as Braumgart observes, most of the poems in The Hourbook are “poems on the edge of Christianity”. Handbuch: 220). With the line his “seed flowed”, the iconography of the poem enters the realm of the pagan. The reference to seed has been read as suggesting “the sexual potency” (Louth: 78) of St. Francis, but this is a sexual potency without sex, its reproductivity being absorbed into a pantheistic tableau of trees, flowers and streams. As such, Francis is a figure who owes much to the demi-god Orpheus whose death made possible the regeneration of nature (and as with the death of Linos in the first Duino Elegy, there is clearly a gesture here to the primitive ritual of the blood sacrifice at harvest time).
In its over-determined bucolic stylization, it is a poem that for some may border on kitsch, and yet the poem gives voice to number of themes that not only look back to the earlier volumes of The Book of Hours but anticipate Rilke’s later work: the cross-over of realms of (ir)reality, the refusal of naming (the presence of the not-said), theme of transformation (in terms of the human subject: the fluidity of the parameters of selfhood and the unmaking of the same) and the process of transformation through mythological allusion (as a literary mode, both of which provided the defining contours of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus); and the dead living into the present (a spiritualist tenet fully evident in the Elegies and in his earlier “in memoriam” poems). We are here in this poem at the beginning of such themes. The time that frames The Hour Book is as yet to come.
DELETIONS
Russo-Japanese war, “our war” to Lou.
The two Russian trips left a lasting impression on Rilke’s writing.
Three of the Stories about God (1904) deal with Russian and Ukranian theme: “How Treason came to Russia”, How old Timofei died singing”, and The Song of Justice”.
Rilke wrote six poems in Russian and sent them to Lou (Lavrin, p.153).
“Rilke’s consciousness was still torn between pantheism, on the one hand, and Gnosticism, on
But the only allusion to the deity is in teh final two lines of the poem, when God, as “he’/ “Er”) is put into the upper case. This was not a practice followed in the first book, where God was only addressed, as a familiar. in the lower case.the other” (Lavrin, p154).
The initial stanza, written in dactylic meter of largely pentameter lines, whose abab rhyming scheme is interlarded with non-rhymed endings.
Lou had come to a final decision (although this would be purely a temporary final decision): his relationship with her, his unhealthy dependency, must cease. in 1900, she left him. He must find his own route into the future. He must find his freedom.
This is an effect formally achieved in the text by reversals (quasi chiasmi), which is supported by an anaphoric structure (particularly in the first two lines, but throughout in the repetition of simple words (such as “can” / “kann” and to or for “me”/ “mir”).
Rilke, Duino Elegies Comparing Translations Martin Travers 