Chapter 5. La Vita Nuova: Italy and Italian Art (1897-1925)

(29 August 2025)

(10 573 words)

(Time to read = 56 minutes)

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Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed with his benefactor, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis at her family castle in Duino on the Italian Adriatic coast near Trieste. Rilke had intended simply to collaborate on a translation of Dante’s La Vita Nuovo, but his stay with the princess soon led to the initiation of an entirely different project: the Duino Elegies. This would indeed be a new life for Rilke, a work that would take him more than a decade to complete but would ultimately be recognised as one of his greatest poetic achievements.

This was not Rilke’s first visit to Italy. His “new life” had begun in 1898 when, under the encouragement of Lou Andreas-Salomé, he had undertaken a trip to Florence to study Renaissance art. We know little about the immediate inspiration for this trip other than that the Renaissance had long been a passionate interest of Lou, and Rilke had made great use of his first visit to Italy (Venice largely in April 1897), writing a number of poems that appeared in his collection, Advent (1897). Rilke researched his visit to Florence assiduously. As he wrote to Frieda von Bülow on 13 August of that year, “we are reading in the most various books on Italian Renaissance art and seeking an opportunity to get an independent a judgement as possible on this interesting period. From the early golden age of Florence, we want to push forward by degrees to the Caracci [the brothers Caracci (1555-1691)]. As a matter of fact, I am especially fascinated by one Florentine master of the quattrocento – Sandro Botticelli”. “His Madonnas with their weary sadness, their great eyes asking for release and fulfillment, those women who dread growing old without a holy youth, stand at the heart of the longing of our time”. An art-historical genre had acquired intellectual appropriation and an existentialist timbre.

Rilke enrolled at Munich university at the start of the academic year in 1898 to study art history and to learn Italian, and in February he started to plan his trip. It was decided that he should keep a diary, not to record his daily activities (too personal and irrelevant for Lou), but as a way of registering what he was learning about art, in general, and to convey his appreciation of Renaissance art. Prior to his departure, Rilke traveled to Prague in March to give a lecture on “The Modern Lyric”. He remained in Prague for three weeks before setting out for Florence on 4 April, “trembling with expectations” of a city where “spring had become eternal in name and deed” (Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 44).

When Rilke arrived in Florence, he opened his diary on 15 April with a homily to Lou in the form of a poem. Its first two stanzas read:

I

From our winter-shaped terrain,

I’ve been cast far out, into spring;

as I hesitate at its edge,

the new land lays itself out lustrously

into my wavering hands.

II

And I take the beautiful gift,

want to mould it quietly,

unfold all its colours

and hold it, full of shyness,

up towards YOU.”

I

[Aus unserm winterlichen Gelände

bin ich fern in den Frühling verbannt’

wie ich age an seinem Rand,

legt sich mir leuchtend das neue Land

in die zweifelnde Hände.

II

Und ich nehme das schöne Geschenk,

wie es still gestalten,

all seine Fraben entfalten

und es – lächelnd und ungelenk –

DIR entgegenhalten.]

(Rilke, Diaries of a Young Poet. English translation by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. Norton.1997, p. 4).

The diary was written for Lou (and, as he noted, he was writing it on the first anniversary of their meeting in Munich in May the year before). He warned her in advance not “to expect some traveler’s handbook, some complete collection, omitting nothing and arranged in strict chronological sequence” (p. 8), and he made it clear that he wanted to avoid not only the conventional structure of the diary but also the jargon of art appreciation that daily contact with art works might encourage (p. 15).

Rilke rented rooms in a boarding house on the Lugarno Serristori, just a mile from the Ponte Vecchio. On arrival, he immediately went out into the streets and piazza of Florence. He found himself overwhelmed by what he saw around him, in, for example, the Loggia dei Lannzi in the Piazza della Signoria: sculptures by Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) and Orcagna (the sobriquet of Andrea di Cione di Arcangelo, 1308-1368), with their “bright images” and “their lovely, victorious movement and proud elan”. Rilke’s mind went to the creators of these monuments, who had now become more than “empty names” culled from art history books. In particular, he was taken by the work of Orcagna, and he felt come over him “the clarity of a man and the deep, faithful seriousness of someone who dwells in solitude”. “This was how the first Renaissance man initiated me into the mystery of his time” (p. 9).

A further deepening of experience later took place when “a dark empty square opened to me unexpectedly, a narrower St. Mark’s Square, without the bright festiveness of the latter’s basilica”. He was overcome by his initial impressions. “I felt at first so confused and thought I was drowning in the breaking waves of some foreign splendour”. His immersion in this culture produced an all-absorbing empathy: “I have entered into the very midst of it. I sense, as it were, the rhythm of a deeper breathing, compared to which mine is a tapping of children’s feet, and I become strangely free and fearful”. Rilke’s encounter with the statues in St. Marks, took on a almost surreal dimension. Midway in his walk, he looked toward his destination on the other side of the square and saw the statues seemingly coming towards him: “as my eye coasted back along the arcades, there was a movement: out of the dark a line of bright figures emerged, as if they wanted to approach someone. I looked around but there was no one else there – can their welcome be meant for me? Suddenly I feel it clearly. And with a shy awkwardness I, the small, the nameless, the unworthy one, hasten toward them, and pass devoutly and gratefully from one to the next, blessed by each” (p. 10).

Rilke’s acts of aesthetic appreciation were part of a consistent refashioning of self and sensibility, undertaken for the eyes of Lou. On 17 May, he described to her how he approached the great beauty of masters such as Raphael. “A longer contemplation [in term of time spent in front] of their works would be superfluous; devout absorption can make many a beautiful aspect more intense and deeply felt, but there is no sensation so strong that it will project beyond the ripeness of that first enjoyment”. Rilke was not alone in his travels around Florentine art. There were others too, whom Rilke sought to avoid: tourists. The latter, as he tells us in the same letter, have a philistine fear of the unpleasant in art, of the sad or the tragic”. On the basis of a rejection of their “guidebook” mentality, Rilke began to elaborate (as in this letter) his own theory of art and art appreciation. He found in art “a path towards freedom”, “the means by which singular, solitary individuals fulfill themselves” and countenanced the modern artist absorbing not only the work of the great artists of the past but also their store of inner values. The latter must be internalised: “how completely like the best amongst us they were. Their longings live on in us. And our longings will, when we are used up, remain active in others, until they fulfill themselves in whomever are the last ones. Only these will be a beginning. We are presentiments and dreams” (Rainer Maria Rilke, Diaries of a Young Poet, p. 20).

Midway through his diary (from 17 May), Rilke abandoned the guidebook mode entirely in favour of a narrative that sought to distil meaning from broader areas of experience (experiences related through an at times morally inflected aesthetic sensibility). At one point, we are told (and he is here addressing a readership beyond Lou) that “you shall not hold anything holier than the maternal. Every pain that you inflict on a hope-sick women trembles in advance through ten generations, and every sadness of which you become guilty in her eye spreads its terrible shadows over a hundred timid futures”. Not just human nature but verdant nature is also subject to an at times perhaps over-subtle generalising gaze: “summer requires fearlessness. Spring can be fearful. for its blossoms, fear is like a home. But fruit requires a calm and heavy sun. Everything must be like a reception: broad gates and secure, sinewy bridges” (p. 41 / 77).

Such aphorisms were formulated without a context and were without dates in his diary. They were obiter dicta, sententia, true for all time. Sometimes, they emerged out of the viewing of a work of art, and here, confronting a particular painting, their angular depth lost the challenging obscurity that they possessed in the abstract. One afternoon in May, Rilke undertook a trip to the “bleeding mountain” of Pietra Santa, eighty miles east of Florence. Its Palazzo houses a painting of the “weary Madonna” of Vittore Carpaccio, which Rilke found “mysterious in form and colour”. He responded to the painting with incisive insight, and produced a reading that moves between the particular and the universal, as it interprets an artwork where “the mysterious does not conceal itself in deep and heavy darkness but reveals itself brightly and majestically” in the form of the Madonna. He subjects her to an emotional scrutiny: “she feels immeasurable wealth inside herself, but when she tries to give freely from it, she cannot lift a trace of its fullness out of her soul. She remains poor because she is not able to consecrate anyone as an accessory to her treasures, and solitary because she does not succeed in building a bridge out form herself. And so these human creatures go through the world without ever touching it, carrying inside themselves the mute stars of which they are able to tell no one”.

Rilke’s words constitute a painting in themselves, a sombre depiction of the tragedy of the dark self-sufficiency of the Madonna. In a characteristic fashion, Rilke is able, in the mode of a spiritualised psychologism, to generalise such insights: “all these Madonnas feel their woundedness like a guilt. They cannot forget that they gave birth without suffering, just as they cannot forget that they conceived without passion. There is a shame about them that they did not with their own mighty effort life the smiling salvation out of themselves, that they became mothers without the daring of a mother” (p, 55).

Rilke left Florence on 6 July, returning, via Viareggio, Sopot and Prague, to Berlin later that month. In Viareggio, he formally closed his diary with the following words: “here at the edge of a cooler seas, I bring to an end this book, which I have disowned three times, for much fear and poverty lie back between then [its commencement in April] and now”. Both the diary and Lou now find their way into a final artistic vision: “And yet all of this had to come, and I am like this not because it came but because it happened now, at a moment when I wished nothing more than to bring You so much festiveness [‘Feierlichkeit’], unspoiled and holy, and surround You with it as with a dark niche that receives its statue” (p. 74).

Apart from a brief visit to Arco, Torbole and Riva in March 1901, Rilke would not see Italy again until 1903. In that intervening period, Russia (1899-1900), northern Germany (1900-1901) and Paris (1902-1903) will all draw Rilke to them, and Rilke will find art in them all. It is not until March 1903 that Rilke will seek out Italy once again, in the hope of finding perhaps inspiration but certainly distance from an environment that was stifling both body and soul: Paris. Between March and April 1903, he visited the coastal town of Viareggio in Tuscany.

His stay will be a short but a decisive one, for here, in the course of just over a week (between 13 and 20 April), he will complete the final volume in his Book of Hours, begun in 1899. He was fleeing Paris, “the heaviest of all cities on my heart” (Letters 1892-1910, p. 95). As he wrote on 27 March, “when anxious and uneasy and bad thoughts come, I go to the sea, and the sea drowns them out with its great wide sounds, cleanses me with its noise, and imposes a rhythm upon everything in me that is bewildered and confused. And much is so, I feel that I must build my powers anew from the ground up, but I feel too that his difficult thing is possible here, if I have patience and faith”.

The tenor of the new book, even its very title, “The Book of Poverty and Death” (“Das Buch von der Armut and dem Tode”), reflects the physical and mental pressures (and the obsessions) of Rilke’s travails in the French capital. He can now transfer those travails into writing, freeing the mind on the basis of a rejuvenated body. However, whilst Viareggio as a place of recovery may have provided a supportive creative environment for Rilke, in itself it did not provide a thematic contribution to his writing, expect for the two opening poems of this volume, “Perhaps I go through heavy mountains” (“Vielleicht, daß ich durch schwere Berge gehe”) and “You, mountain, that remained there in amidst of all the other mountains -” (“Du Berg, der blieb da die Gebirge kamen -“), which effectively act as a prelude or a mise en scene for what follows them. The two poems take up (on a literal level) the rugged local terrain around Viareggio, and Rilke’s travelling through it, as they exploit (on a metaphorical level) that terrain as a signifier of the challenging journey that Rilke must undertake. The first stanza of the second poem reads:

You, mountain, that remained there in amidst of all the other mountains –

slope down, offering no shelter, with a peak that has no name,

eternal snow in which the stars fall lame,

bearers of those valleys of cyclamen,

out of which comes every perfume of the earth.

You, mouth and minaret of every mountain

(from which no call to prayer has yet sounded).

[ Du Berg, der bleibe da die Gebirge kamen, –

Hang ohne Hütten, Gipfel ohne Namen,

ewiger Schnee, in dem die Sterne lahmen,

und Träger jener Tale der Cyclamen,

aus denen all er Duft der Erde geht;

du, aller Berge Mund und Minaret

(von dem noch nie die Abendruf erschallte).] (i: 343).

The poem proceeds to position the lyrical subject within this inhospitable terrain, one that, it asks itself, will provide a route out of and beyond the present torment of the fear, “the deep fear of the over-swollen cities” (“die tiefe Angst der übergroßen Städten”), in which he has, for reasons unfathomable, been placed.

Viareggio was not a “Kulturstadt” in the way that Florence was and Rome, for Rilke, was soon to become. Instead of art “one’s gaze is riveted on the object, interwoven with nature” (Letters, 1892-1910, p. 105). The sentient eye, aestheticized through a telling absorption of nature, soon translates into text. It becomes the medium for aesthetic statement. Thus, in the midst of his poetry writing, Rilke ventures out into the environs: “here it is again, a day full of unrest and violence. Storm against storm over the sea, Fugitive light. Night in the wood. And the great noise over all. I was in the wood all morning and, after four or five glaring days, the darkness that lives there was pleasing to the senses, and the coolness and the almost sharp wind. You [Clara] must imagine this wood as very, very tall-trunked, dark, straight pine trunks and high overhead their spreading branches. The ground all dark with needles and covered with very tall prickly bushes that are all full with yellow blossoms, blossoms upon blossom. And today, this yellow shone in the cool, almost nightlike dusk and swayed and nodded, and the wood was lit from below and very lonely. I walked”.

In this anthropomorphised nature, the human and the natural merge to indistinction. We cannot know whether it was Rilke or the wood that was lonely. The reader is not even granted the heuristic modicum of a pathetic fallacy.

Rilke returned to Paris on 1 May. Nothing had changed. Paris is bigger than Rilke. Indeed, so much bigger that it is Rilke. As he wrote to Lou on 8 August, like Paris “there is nothing real about me; and I divide again and again and flow apart”. Rilke is beset by the terror of a Bosch-like vision of degraded humanity, “Oh, what kind of world is this!”, he despairingly exclaims in a letter to Lou (18 July). “Pieces, pieces of people, parts of animals, leftovers of thing that have been, and everything still agitated, as though driven about helter-skelter in an eerie wind, carried and carrying, falling and over taking each other as they fall”. The aesthetic sensibility necessary to describe this world is too finely tuned. Rilke decides to leave Paris, once again, and after a short visit in August-September to Venice, Florence, Fiesole, he attempts to make peace with himself in the rural and familial retreat of Worpswede. But he has simply gone from a hell that was too much to a heaven that is too little. As so often a more radical change of cultural location was required. As he listened to the express trains to Hamburg pass by at the top of the garden at Oberneuland, he knew that he must travel. Clara had received a grant to study and work in Rome, and Rilke went with her, leaving in September, where they lived (independently) for nine months. As he wrote to Lou on 11 August, “Rome is imminent, the great summoning Rome that is still only a name to us, but soon to be a thing made of a hundred things, a great shattered vessel out of which much past has trickled into the ground. Rome is the ruin we want to build up again. Not the way she once may have been, but we shall be as seekers of the inner future in that past, in which was included much of the eternal”. And he adds (in a characteristically visualist mode), “I shall first learn to live entirely for looking and for the receiving of many things”.

Rome, however, exists in the present (although in Rilke’s mind Rome may overlook the present for the sake of a past that will be its future). He and Clara arrived on 10 September and rented an apartment near the centre of the city.

Rome might have been a change of place, but Rilke had brought Paris with him, as he struggled against the dirt, the heat and the tourist presence. “Rilke felt again the disquiet engendered by the very transplantation he craved” (Freedman p. 202). Rilke also had to give up his high hopes of encountering antiquity and settle for the Baroque. They spend days walking around the cultural centre of the city, in an attempt to find their vision of Rome. As he wrote to Arthur Holitscher on 5 November, “we have been in Tre Fontane, we have stood before the Tartarughe Fountain and seen in the churches the beautiful mosaics you love. To us, too, the Borghese Gardens were a familiar place of refuge, right from the beginning – and we had need of a retreat, as the museums especially, with their many wretched statues, made us feel desolate and, so to speak, tore hope and home from our bodies. Perhaps that will change, but I am coming to feel that the Romans excelled in painting but produced quite second rate, superficial sculptures”.

He continued to experience depressingly sterile days. The Muse had not returned. As he wrote to Andreas-Salomé on 3 November, “I am unhappy with myself because I am unable to work on a daily basis. I am exhausted although not ill, but deep in anxiety. When, Lou, will this pitiable life reverse itself and become productive; when will it grow beyond incompetence, lethargy and cheerlessness?” And he added, ten days later, “I am again the discarded stone which lies there so pointlessly that the grass of idleness has time to grow tall over it”. And yet he knew what must be done: “And so this perpetually is the one task before me, which I forever fail to begin, and which nevertheless must be begun: the task of finding the road, the possibility of daily reality”.

Rilke continued to live until mid-November in his apartment in the centrally located Via del Campidoglio, before moving to a small cottage in the suburbs of the city made available by a benefactor, the wealthy Alsatian painter and sculptor, Alfred Wilhelm Strohl (1847-1927), who had founded in the suburbs of Rome the “Villa Strohl” (adding the suffix “fern” to its name to indicate that he thought of the property as a place of seclusion). In its elaborately ornamented gardens, he built a number of small studio one room cottages intended for artists temporarily visiting Rome. Clara had already been granted one such cottage, and Rilke was able to occupy a second on 1 December. He is pleased to be there. As he wrote to Lou the following month (14 January 1904) “I am in my little garden house”. “Now everything has its place in this simple room, dwells and lives and lets day and night come and go as they please; and outside, where so much rain has fallen, there is a spring afternoon, the hours of a spring that may be gone by tomorrow, but which now seems to exist from eternity”.

Rilke looks outwards, and likes what he sees, and then makes the mistake of looking inwards. Writing but a week later to Lou, we read, “I know that all of this grounds life, grounds my life. It is just that I am separated from this good ground by a murky surface and a restless depth. It is simply that I do not know how to hold myself without churning up my water and cannot find the place where the ground remains steady beneath the current, like a picture is beneath the safehold of a glass”.

The cottage, however, cannot keep put the greater presence of Rome itself: a baggy monster, whose legendary cultural status and grandiose imperialist history attracts wave upon egregious wave of intrusive tourists (many, Rilke points out more than once, speaking loud German). As Prater notes (quoting Rilke), “this was not the Italy of Tuscany, where ‘Botticelli, the Robbias, the white of marble and the blue of the skies, the gardens, villas, roses, bells and unknown girls that had spoken once so directly to him’ ” (Prater, 103).

He must find that Tuscany that lies within, and to do this he rarely leaves his cottage, where he slowly rediscovers the will to write. The cottage represents a still point of preserved interiority. As he explained to Lou on 21 January: “its two windows are tall. I can see the park rising and widening and also much sky and thus also much night. In front of one is my desk, and the writing stand, where I spend most of my time, is placed in the middle of the room where the views from both windows can be enjoyed”. Writing and looking are inextricably enjoined. Rilke started to produce poetry again, composing texts that would eventually be published as New Poems (Neue Gedichte), and in February, he began writing The Notebook [or Notebooks] of Malte Laurid Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurid Brigge).

Certainly, the first poetic steps were tentative. Only three poems were written (Rilke tries to convince himself that living an idyl will help him write (but it is only two years later in the much-hated, non-idyllic Paris that most of the New Poems will appear). The poems were “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”, “Courtesans Graves” and “The Birth of Venus”. With its linkage of art, sexuality and death, the first poem contains significant symbolic weight, broaching a theme that will inform the majestic Sonnets to Orpheus almost twenty years later.

The poem consists of thirteen unrhymed stanzas, with lines of variable meter. Rilke had seen a copy of the bas relief depicting Orpheus, Eurydice and Hermes in Paris, and now he encountered it again Rome (in the Villa Albani). Rilke’s poem disrupts the narrative of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice as it was classically understood by Ovid (see Metamorphoses, Book X: lines 1-85). Here Eurydice has given herself over to the magic of the lyre and to the god who played it and was for that consigned to Hades. Orpheus sought to retrieve her, leading her out but obeying the stipulation of the gods that he should not look back to see if she was following. He looks back, and this act should have spelt the end of her life. In Rilke’s account, however, Eurydice gains, not loses by this fatal glance. By escaping back into death, she escapes back into freedom.

The first stanza outlines the static pose of the three figures, their delineated shapes representing the “unearthly mine of souls” (“der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk”) that was Hades. The individual dramatis personae are introduced in the stanzas that follow: “the slender man cloaked in blue” (“der schlanke Mann im blaunen Mantel”), who is Orpheus (stanza 4) and Hermes, “the god of passage and the portent message” (“Gott des Ganges und der weiten Botschaft”), in stanza 5, finally (stanza 6) Eurydice, and it is she who occupies the remaining sections of the poem. She had followed Orpheus seduced by his playing of the lyre, but now she is full of “a great death” (“grosse Tod”, described with all the ambiguity that “great” possesses). This should mean the end of her life, but it does not:

VIII

This was for her a second maidenhood.

She was untouchable, her hymen, like the budding flowers

at dusk, was closed, her hands were so unused to the rite

of marriage that even the touch of the softly stepping god

distressed her as if it were a pressing act of intimatacy.

IX

She was no longer the blond wife

who echoed often in the poet’s songs,

no longer the wide bed’s scent and island,

and that man’s property no longer.

X

She was already loosened like long hair and

relinquished like the falling rain,

and laid out like a measureless store of goods.

XI

She was already root.

XII

And when the god stopped her

abruptly with anguished words,

after having turned around –

she did not take them in,

but said softly: who?

[VII

Sie war in einem neuen Mädchentum

und unberühbar; ihr Geschlecht war zu

wie eine innige Blume gegen Abend,

und ihre Hände waren der Vermählung

so sehr entwöhnt, daß selbst des leichten Gottes

unendlich leise, leitend Berührung

sie kränkte wie zu sehr Vertraulichkeit.

VIII

Sie war schon nicht mehr diese blonde Frau,

die in des Dichters Liedern manchmal anklang,

nicht mehr des breiten Bettes Duft und Eiland

und jenes Mannes Eigentum nicht mehr.

IX

Sie war schon aufgelöst wie langes Haar

und hingegeben wie gefallner Regen

und ausgeteilt wie hundertfächer Vorrat.

X

Sie war schon Wurzel.

XI

Und als plötzlich jäh

der Gott sich anhielt und mit Schmerz im Ausruf

die Worte sprach: Er hat sich umgewendet -,

begriff sie nichts und sagte leise: Wer?] (i: 542-55)

Even on the edge of death, it is possible to retain freedom. Orpheus can no longer hope to possess Eurydice, losing an erotic dominance that Eurydice escapes. Here, art and sexuality have combined as power, a power that lies not only in the erotic but (to adopt a discursive mode) in the master narrative in which Eurydice, in the conventional legend, is trapped. Contrary to traditional readings, Eurydice finds a new life by remaining in Hades. This is indicated not only thematically but also formally by, for example, the adroit use of temporal markers such as “schon” / “already” (used in stanzas 8 and 9), the second use of which being all the more effective with its linkage to “root” / “Wurzel” and the fact that it is granted a single stand-alone line. The past usurps the present.

Ralph Freedman draws attention to the poem’s “complex juxtapositions of style and meaning”, its unique form “derived from painters, sculptors and the French Symbolist poets” (Freedman, p. 207). This is an array of influences that is, perhaps, too loosely adumbrated. It is true, nonetheless, that compared to the other poems that Rilke wrote containing a Roman referent, “Roman Sarcophagi” (Römische Sarkophage”), “Roman Fountains” (“Römische Fontäne”) and “Roman Graves” (“Römische Gräber), “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes” possesses a unique density of figurative language. This allows it to transcend its ekphrastic parameters, something evident not just in the re-writing of the legend but in the poem’s breadth of stylistic register and visualist focus, a focus that sees the physical elements of the scene, clothing, faces, bodily gestures, sights and smells come to life (a life that is won out of the theme of death).

The poem also possesses a self-referential dimension. Certain of its images seem to look back to Rilke’s earlier poetry, such as “the raining sky above a landscape” (“Regenhimmel über eine Landschaft”, in stanza 2) or (in stanza 6) the “wood, and valley and road and hamlet, field and river” energised by Orpheus (“Wald und Tal / und Weg und Ortschaft Feld und Fluss”), all of which are reminiscent of Rilke’s Worpswede studies. The recurrent trope of the path and the journey, where “god’s wings are beating at his ankles” (“flügelschlagend an den Füßgelenken” (stanza 5) might have its source in the efforts of the restless monk in The Book of Hours to reach his deity. There is, however, one particular image that seems to point to a retrieval from the past. In stanza 9, Eurydice is referred to as the “blond wife” (“blonde Frau”). This is an unusual colour descriptor, not found in the classical renditions of the legend, such as that by Ovid. Is it possible that this is a recall of Rilke’s amorous constructions of Paula Becker, “the blond painter”? Could her rejection of the personal advances of the poet be present here, at least as a sub text? Eurydice, too, cannot (indeed, as the poem makes it quite clear in stanza 9, will not) follow the artist-god (“she was no longer the fair-haired girl / who sometimes sounded in the poet’s songs” / “sie war schon nicht mehr diese blonde Frau /die in des Dichters Liedern manchmal anklang”). Orpheus (like Rilke) has become a person of the past. The simple “who?” / “wer?” that concludes stanza 12 (which is not a question but a statement and which is Italicised to emphasise that its quizzicality is purely rhetorical) relativizes the position of power that was once exercised by Orpheus in his relationship with Eurydice and resolves the matter about who is the leader and who is the led.

In a letter written from Rome to Lou on 12 May, Rilke complained that “in the work that I accomplished during the month of February, there may have been a certain overexertion. I made an effort back then, in connection with my new book, to write down and give form to many things from my difficult Paris impressions, and occasionally I would feel, while I was doing this, a stab of pain in my soul”. The new book would later be called The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, although the initial name of the eponymous hero was initially “Larsen”). According to an earlier diary entry, Rilke began writing on 8 February and immediately fell into major problems regarding its narrative organisation and mode of character presentation. At this stage in the genesis of the work, Rilke could not free himself from inherited novelistic models (perhaps that was the stab in his soul). He also seemed unsure of his genre (novel or memoir?). In Rome, he began his text twice before reaching a third definitive version after returning to Paris in 1905. The book was published by the Insel Verlag in 1910. The internal struggle for literary clarification and purpose was reflected in the different versions of the opening lines written in Rome. The first version begins:

I thought, initially, that his face would been entirely unforgettable. However, I feel now that I can’t really describe it. his hands too were strange, but I am not able to talk about them. The way he was, his voice and the entirely unexpected and gentle motions that he made – all of that is now beyond my recall, as he himself is. It is possible that my knowledge of these impressions (which were the quite firm) will come back to me at some time in later years, when I have become more at ease and more patient.

[Zuerst glaubte ich sein Gesicht würde das unvergeßlichste sein; aber ich fühle, daß ich es nicht beschreiben kann. Auch seine Hände waren seltsam, aber ich kann nicht von ihnen reden. Sein Wesen, seine Stimme und die Art gewisser unerwarteter und leiser Bewegungen – alles das ist mir vergangen, wie er selbst vergangen ist. Es kann sein daß mir das Wissen von diesen Eindrücken (die sehr stark waren) einmal zurückkommt in späteren Jahren, wenn ich ruhiger geworden bin und geduldiger.] (vi: 949).

The opening of the second version reads:

On an Autumn evening in one of the years just past, Malte Laurids Brigge visited, quite unexpectedly, one of the few acquaintances that he had in Paris. It was a heavy, rainy evening, whose light was getting dimmer and dimmer. It was chilly, even though one could not actually say where this cold came from, for the atmosphere was dark and muggy. So, it was pleasant to move the two armchairs up close to the open fire.

[An einem Herbstabende eines dieser letzten Jahre besuchte Malte Laurids Brigge, ziemlich unerwartet, einen von den wenigen Bekannten, die er in Paris besaß. Es war ein schwerer, feuchter, gleichsam beständig fallender Abend; man fröstelte, ohne daß man eigentlich zu sagen vermochte, wo diese Kälte war; denn die Luft war dunkel und lau. So war es angenehm die beiden Lehstühle an das Kaminfeuer zu rücken.] (vi: 950).

The lines of the first version are narrated in the first person, which also will provide the speaking voice of the final version. The text speaks of the ineffability of personality and of the failure of memory and language to reproduce that personality (both major themes in the final version of Malte), but it does so with a narrative voice that seems entirely clear about itself, its goals and its subject matter, and which posits a time in the future when doubts and hesitations will be elided by a more mature self. The affected vulnerability of the final words of the first version, cultivating the guise of the unreliable narrator is a literary convention that does nothing to undermine its reliability. The world that surrounds it seems secure and predictable (even the grammar of the passage reflects this), where time moves forward in the mode of a consequential narrative.

Both versions strain after a Realist mise en scène: an autobiographical mode in the first version and a domestic interior in the second. The first version is written in the present tense to heighten to impart a sense of immediacy. The second version uses the preterit tense, the standard tense of the nineteenth century salon novel: the comfort of the world is that it is securely in the past. The third person voice chosen in the second version only serves to sustain this note of security and rootedness in the world. A similar sense of comfort is supplied by the framing of the narrative through seasonal context (and the cosy playing off of warmth against cold), and by the adoption of a storyteller pose (“we are now comfortable, reader, so we will begin”).

The final version of the Malte book radically dismantles these techniques. It begins:

So, people come here, then, to live? I would rather have thought that they come here to die. I have been out, and I saw invalids. I saw a man staggering and falling to the ground. People gathered around him, so I was spared having to look further. I saw a pregnant woman. She was pushing herself along beside a high, warm wall, now and the groping it as if to assure herself it was still there. Yes, it was still there. And behind it? I looked at my map of the city: a maternity hospital. Good. They will deliver her.

[So, also hierher kommen die Leute, um zu leben, ich würde eher meinen, es stürbe sich hier. Ich bin ausgewesen. Ich habe gesehen: Hospitäler. Ich habe einen Menschen gesehen, welcher schwankte und umsank. Die Leute versammelten sich um ihn, das ersparte mir den Rest. Ich habe eine schwangere Frau gesehen. Sie schob sich schwer an einer hohen, warmen Mauer entlang, nach der sie manchmal tastete, wie um sich zu überzeugen, ob sie noch da sei. Ja, sie war noch da. Dahinter? Ich suchte auf meinem Plan: Maison d’Accouchement. Gut. Man wird sie entbinden.] (vi: 709)

A process of narrative renewal (and a distantiation from the earlier narratives) is evident from the very first word, “So”. Unlike the preparatory sentiments that characterised the first two versions, this version begins in medias res, interpolating the reader immediately into the text (indeed, compelling the reader to think back into or, at least accept an analeptic pre-narrative, the “so” referring to a prevailing established point of view). The opening as a whole makes use of such single words, abrupt (almost non-grammatical) interjections such as “yes” / “ja” and “good” / “gut”. Such words gesture to the fact that it is not so much the events that are taking place that is of importance (the plight of the poor, sick and outcast were staple in the works of late nineteenth century French fiction from de Sue to Zola), but the attitude (and, ultimately, the specific inflexion of the sensibility or consciousness of the narrator who is registering these events. This is a consciousness that is formed and re-formed in terms of character as the narrative develops. As with Rilke’s Eurydice poem, the text is energised through tactile imagery, the result of a consistently visualist mode (“seeing” / “sehen” is a repeated term). It is this elaboration of perspective that makes Malte a work of Modernism rather than Naturalism. And the distancing effects of the earlier framing devices are removed, allowing the reader to experience Brigge’s torment pur sang, a technique that is supported by employing a narrative voice in the first-person (but without the self-conscious mannerism of the first version), which also secures the autobiographical pull of the text.

In Rome, Rilke had chosen (and found) isolation as his modus vivendi, but his reputation was expanding in broader circles beyond this isolation in including Scandanavia countries. Here Rilke had attracted a supporter, and an active advocate of his work in Ellen Key, a Swedish social reformer and educationalist who had been moved by his Stories of God and had written to him in 1902 to express her admiration. Frequent correspondence ensued.

As Rilke’s growing fatigue with Rome increased, Key was now to play a major role in securing for him an alternative domicile in Scandanavia. As he confided to Andreas-Salomé in a letter of 12 May 1904, the brisk clarity of the North, he believed, would cure the sultry apathy of the South: ”the fact is that more northerly and sombre countries have since taught my senses to appreciate what is simple and understated so that they now feel all this shrillness and the strong, schematic, uninflected quality of Italian things as a relapse into picture-book instruction”. For as he told Lou in the same letter, his only goal was “to persist with my art and to put all my trust only in it”. To go forward, he must learn from the past, from, for example, “the Gothic period, with its myriad and unforgettable accomplishments in architecture and the visual arts, must also have possessed and created a sculptural language, in which words were like statues and lines the rows of pillars”. These are terms that would later feed into his aesthetic of the “Dinggedicht”.

Thanks to the good services of Ellen Key, Rilke was offered hospitality for six months in a manor house in Skåne, in southern Sweden, the home of the artist Ernst Norlind and Hanna Larsson. Here amongst “a nature of, sea, plains and sky”, Rilke could return to his interrupted work (including “my new book [Malte], whose tightly woven prose is”, as he tells Lou on 13 May, “a schooling for me”) in solitude and, as he pointedly notes to her later that month, with “no social obligations”. Rilke left for Sweden in early June, arriving there two weeks later. The natural environment was coldly bucolic, sparse but atmospheric (perhaps a reminder of Worpswede). In a letter to Clara on 24 July, he wrote, “I am building at the invisible, at the most invisible, at some foundation: no that is too much, but I am breaking ground for something that is to be erected there sometime” (Letters 1892-1910, pp. 170-171).

These were brave words, but the truth was that Rilke found himself once more adrift in a period of depressing unproductivity. The peripatetic restlessness continued, with deferred happiness and the desperate seeking of the “place”, the place where he might finally feel at home. Scandanavia was not a success. Rilke spent one final week in Copenhagen, before leaving in December 1904, never to return. Now followed an extended period of wandering, as Rilke followed his inclinations and responded on an ad hoc basis to offers of accommodation from various well-meaning sources. In September 1905, he arrived back in Paris. Encouraged by Rilke’s growing reputation in France, Rodin had invited him to come to Meudon and act as his secretary. The return was not a success, and Rilke left after a few short months. He rented an apartment in the centrally located rue cassette but effectively he was homeless, once again and, as he told Clara in a letter of 25 May 1906, his work on the Malte book had irredeemably faltered.

Rilke resumed his monadic lifestyle, staying with an increasing cohort of often aristocratic well-wishers. Between September and October 2006, he stayed at Schloss Friedelhausen in Hessen, where he met Alice Faehnrich, the sister of countess Schwerin, one of long-standing benefactors, she invited him to spend some time at her villa (“Discopoli”) on the isle of Capri. Rile accepted and took up residence in Capri in December and stayed until May of the following year.

Before reaching Capri, he had paid short visits to Naples and Sorrento, both locations he greeted with painterly words. “There is a bay”, he wrote to Clara from Naples at the end of November, “with now and then little silhouettes of oarsman against it in such beautiful restraint of movement and just what makes a living creature of a boat -, sailing ships in the distance. Then there is the bend towards Posilipo, whose whole rim is as if just flung out, and to the left the protruding castle, as if in a cloak, and placed against the sun like one of Rembrandt’s figures against the light”. I Sorrento, the following day, his pictorial gaze became more technical. He walks along a wall-lined lane: ” above the walls, towards the sky many orange trees at their greatest bearing, heavy their colours pieced together like stained-glass windows”. Proceeding further and catches sight of a castle in the distance which, even in the reddish mist of a dying day, looks like a large rock. Rilke had seen this play between light and solid object before: “Mount Valerien (opposite Meudon) could often give this impression towards evening, or also early in the day. Then even the houses of Meudon could recede or stand out like that on the opposite slopes. That is due to the plans [the broad palate strokes that Rodin used]”. Nature is a pre-text for art.

Before arriving at a new destination, Rilke typically would have a precise image of what that place should be and should contain. There were spatial layers to this preconceived image: a broad vista of beauty in a pleasing, stimulating natural environment (sometimes adjacent to a cultured civic context); a nobility and refinement of dwelling; and an inner sanctum of peace and tranquility for him alone. Capri did and did not meet Rilke’s expectations. He was disappointed on more than one score. As he wrote to Karl von der Heydt on 11 December, “what people have made out of this beautiful island is close to hideous”, he asserts in despairing tones, all disport themselves “in the direction of pleasure, relaxation, enjoyment”, to that ubiquitous villain of peripatetic modernity: tourism. Rilke’s takes his observations further. Perhaps this second-rate heaven is largely an Italian thing: “but in all seriousness, isn’t even Dante evidence for it, whose Paradise is filled with such helplessly heaped up bliss, with no graduations in light, formless, full of repetition, made of smiling angel-pure perplexity, as it were, of not-knowing, of not-being-able-to-know, of pure, blissful mendacity”. And he concludes: “Capri – is a monstrosity”. So much for the vaunted culture of classical Italy (but Rilke tells us that here, as elsewhere, the majority of tourists were German).

Rilke retreated to his villa. It was a location whose impressive aesthetics he fully internalised: “with walls about me, but with God and the saints within me, with very beautiful pictures and furnishing within me, with courts around which moves a dance of pillars, with fruit orchards, vineyards”. He took refuge in his own personal inner sanctum. “The room I live in is quite separate, in a little house by itself, some fifty steps from the villa proper”, as he tells Karl von der Heydt on 11 December, “my room is simple and very congenial and already has a natural attachment to me for which I am very grateful”. He spent the evenings in convivial company of Alice Faehnrich, friends and family, but devoted the days to his “inner life”.

Rilke told others (and told himself) that he was there to write, but his occupancy, here as with all his temporary domiciles, was as much therapeutic and material as literary. Put simply: for the impecunious Rilke life was cheaper when was able to live as something else’s guest. There were people to look after his needs: food, laundry, entertainment. He was on holiday, and his often-ailing body was slowly able to recover from his continuous medical complaints. Further illness was rare. No further work was done on the Malte Notebook, but he produced a small number of poems while he was on Capri. Of these poems, the most significant are a series of four titled “Improvisations from a Winter in Capri”. None possess individual titles, because all are informed by the same single ingress into the same troubled soul. The opening stanza of the first poem reads:

Day by day, you stand steeply before my heart,

mountain range, rocks,

wilderness, paths that are mere diversions. God, into whom I climb alone

and fall and lose myself … day by day

to keep turning again in yeasyterday’s

forever past.

Sometimes the wind seizes me at the crossraods,

hurls me towards the beginning of a path,

or it drinks me in the silence of the path.

But your indefatigable will pulls the paths together,

like a moment of chemistry,

until they too, like those old

unstoppable grooves, vanish

into the terror of the abys …

[Täglich stehst du steil vor dem Herzen,

Gebirge, Gestein,

Wildnis, Un-Weg. Gott, in dem ich allein

steig und falle und irre …, täglich in mein

gestern Gegangenes wieder hinein

kreisend.

Weisend greift mich manchmal am Kreuzweg der Wind,

wirft mich hin, wo ein Pfad beginnt,

oder es trinkt mich ein Weg im Stillen.

Aber dein unbewältigter Willen

zieht die Pfade zusamm wie Alaun,

bis sie, als alte haltlose Rillen,

sich verlieren ins Abgrundsgraun ….] (ii: 11).

Rilke was subject to periodic bouts of depression and self-belittling (and they continued irrespective of the achievements of his publications). In December 1906, Rilke wrote to his benefactors, Elizabeth and Karl von der Heydt, words that included a “my inner life really has been dislocated for months, I notice, and being alone provides primarily only a kind of psychic plaster cast, in which something is healing”. The poem dramatizes this plight. Being forced to face the unsurmountable, seeking a way, finding wayward paths, ambling up and down but still going in the wrong direction, and all the time realising (as he puts it in a letter from the same month to Clara) that “the hostile thing is not life, but myself, me myself, and with me all the rest”. There is something of a Kierkegaardian view of selfhood in these sentiments, an imponderable and painful self-consciousness. where identity relates to itself in relation to a failed consciousness that is being viewed by a complete consciousness (but one that is only hypothetical and which exists, at the very most, in the margins). 

Something of this convoluted mixture of pain, self-pity and self-recrimination, and the fruitless attempts involved in escaping it, is conveyed in the poem, particularly through its form. Written in single thirteen lines stanza (although both thematically and formally a break seems signalled after line 6) with a novel abbbc /ddeefef rhyming scheme, it possesses no recognisable metre or agreement of line lengths. Such a complex inflection often suggests in Rilke’s prosody the articulation of an argument or analysis, and this is the case here. The apodictic first line forms a self-address. Although some readers have seen the “you” / “du” as an invocation of God (Louth: 251), it is equally possible that the “you” is a layer of his selfhood, an alteriority, representing the eternal confusion within him that is, at the same time, allied to a self that attempts to escape that confusion (the matter is made clearer in the final stanza: “my darkness, my darkness, here I stand with you” / “mein Dunkel, mein Dunkel, da steh ich mit dir”). It is an attempt that must overcome obstacles: mountains, rocks and the paths, which lead nowhere but simply return him (in a mock parallel perhaps with Nietzsche’s Eternal Return) to where he started. There is not even the past, a “Vergangenheit”, that he can retreat to, but a”Gegangenes”, that which has gone forever but which, nonetheless, constitutes the sole point of reference in this drama of attenuated selfhood. Even when he thinks he may be making progress, it is (line 7) purely the wind blowing him: he remains the object not the subject of his manoeuvring.

Ant yet, all is not loss (or so it appears), for the poem speaks of an indefatigable will (“dein unbewältigter Willen”) which, as in an act of chemistry (“Alaun”), is capable of drawing the various paths together. These positive lines, however, are short (and the sentiments short lived), for the paths are beset by the grooves of the past (and it is as if feet and wheels are stuck in them). The grooves are “haltlos”, cannot be stopped and give no direction, losing themselves (and leading the lyrical subject) not just into the abyss but into an abyss of terror (“Abgrundsgraun ….,). And as the ellipsis that rounds off the concluding line suggests, this is an abyss that knows no ground or end.

Throughout his stay in Capri, Rilke’s mind returned to his unfinished Malte book and “the well-nigh exhausting task” of coming to terms with the material presence of Paris, because that alone, as he wrote to Tora Holmstrom on 19 March 1907, “transforms, heightens and develops one continually”. On 31 May 1907, Rilke returned to Paris and to 29. Rilke had chosen Capri as a place where he could physically recover, but recovery in his writing will only take place in Paris, where the debilitating introspection expressed in his Capril poems will have no place. Italy and art must wait. Rilke returned to that country but once in the following years, to Venice in 1908, but it was not art but love – with xxx – that takes him there. Matters changed on 22 October 1911.

Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed with his benefactor, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, in her castle in Duino on the Adriatic Sea near Trieste, ostensibly to collaborate on a translation of Dante’s La Vita Nuova and to complete the thirteen-poem cycle The Life of Mary (Marienleben) begun in 1900. Whilst he was walking in the midst of a storm one afternoon along the sea cliffs outside the castle, he heard a voice coming from nowhere: “who, if I should cry, would hear me then from amongst the angelic / orders?” (“Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel/ Ordnungen?”). “He suddenly stopped, listening. ‘What is that?’, he whispered under his voice … what is it; what is next” (“was kommt”)?’ ” (Materialen I 50).   Around the cry and the angels, around the hope for transcendence and the recognition of the impossibility of the same, Rilke built a cycle of ten Elegies. The first was completed on 21 January, and the second between the end of January and the beginning of February. The third was begun at Duino in that month but not finished until the end of 1913 in Paris.

It may, however, not simply been nature, in the form of the storm outside the rocky cliffs of the caste, that provided the inspiration, but the castle itself, the culture, art within that castle. Duino was a fitting location for such inspiration. The record left by the princess delineates in memorable detail Rilke’s immediate living environment in the castle and his enthusiastic response to it. It is the most detailed account we have of Rilke in a domestic interior. Rilke and the princess would compare their translations of Dante in her private room, whose walls “were covered with fine old Genoese material, but it almost disappeared under a profusion of prints, water-colours and pastels”, “There was a fine etching by Whistler, a splendid drawing of centaurs by Tiepolo, and above them a wonderful head that had been detached from a fresco in one of the villas on the Brenta. It was the head of a nymph, very much in the manner of Veronese, looking sid3ways over her shoulder with large eyes which fascinated Rilke” (The Poet and the Princess, pp. 29-30). Rilke was taken with the idea of moving into a cottage beside the castle. “He said that it would be easy to bring the few indispensable bits of furniture over from the castle and otherwise he needed nothing, nothing at all, neither water nor a servant nor a kitchen. He was simply obsessed by the idea of living in a sacred grove with its statues, its dreams and mysteries” (The Poet and the Princess, p. 32). Indeed, the bond between the unique personality of the castle and its inhabitants became so strong that Rilke seemed to live on two levels: a physical and a spiritual. In the room that he finally decided upon there was a table, over which (as the princess recalls) “there was a portrait of me when I was four or five years old, which Rilke insisted on keeping there; he said that we had long conversations with each other, every evening (“The Poet and the Princess, p. 33).

Rilke signed the correspondence written in Duino, “Nebresina, Austrian Littoral”. Indeed, Duino was a different version of Italy, a place sculpted from Italian, Austrian and Slavonic influences, it was a combination of cultural presences. In the mind of the solitary Rilke (as his “conversations” with the princess amidst her precious artefacts suggests) art, the depicted image, had become a medium to another world, one in which categories of reality merge. Duino was an inner world, which gave rise to soul searching, where Rilke looked deep into himself: “I spend the entire day crawling around in the jungle of my life”, he writes in terms that anticipate the atavistic imagery of the third Elegy, “and scream like a savage …” (Materialen I, 44). This is a journey into his soul, “a digging up of the entire earth of my being” (Materialen I: 77).

After these plunges into murky selfhood, what Rilke required was a brighter outer world, in an Italy that was unambiguously Italy. In March 1912, he travelled to Venice and lived for two months in a villa owned by the princess in the Palazzo Valmarana, San Vino. Here, Rilke’s contact with Italy and with its art took a different form: what now came to the fore is the art of life. His appreciation of fine art and of his surroundings, buildings and architecture, interiors, did not abate, but when he visited Italy (and this is almost exclusively to Venice) is for a therapy of his self his goal was to engage with people, from a certain social and culutural class. His departure from Duino led to several visits to that city of variable length between 1912 and 1914. In touch with the aristocratic circles of the city, “most of Rilke’s days in Venice were indistinguishable from the lives of his society companions, devoted to elegant leisure”. Writing (except for letters) seems to have been left behind. “For the present, his life became one social performance” (Freedman, pp. 344 and 343). leaving his poetry behind, he eased himself into this community. As he wrote to the princess (who had generously made her Venetian Villa, the Palazzo Valmarana in San Vio, available to Rilke) on 12 July, ” I don’t want to cut through everything and break out, but am just waiting, going along, letting it happen to me, and what comes along takes on the role of a habit and has the dimensions of a dream”. A habit it had certainly become, and Rilke was its victim. He remained in Venice because he could not leave it. As he later explained to Lou (19 December 1912), “until into the autumn, I was in Venice upheld by kind friendly relationships yet, in reality, staying day to day, from week to week, because I didn’t know where else to go”.

One member of this select social group, in particular, won Rilke’s attention: the famous actress, Eleonora Duse, whom he had briefly met six years earlier and with whom there now developed “a close relationship with endless complications” (Freedman, p. 344). They enjoy mutual visits. As he explained to the princess in the same letter, “Duse, my having been at her house, she at mine, that too is like a mirage in the air over-stimulated by clarity – you can imagine; we were like two characters coming on in an old mystery [play], spoke, as if charged by a legend, each his gentle part”. Rilke captures her presence in language that elides the literal and the metaphorical. “And her smile indeed, surely one of the most famous ever smiled, a smile that needs no space, that retracts nothing, conceals nothing, is transparent as a song, and yet so full of added being that one is tempted to stand up when it enters”. The liberating conditions of art seem here to have been absorbed into personality, where the observer and the observed share a common theatrical discourse and a thespian removal or displacement of self into a higher abstraction of animation. We have no need of Renaissance art (although Rilke’s locality is at its centre). Art has become internalised.

Further travels in or around Italy become impossible after 1914. Rilke was stranded in Germany and then had to make his way after the war to Switzerland where, much to the benefit of his writing, Rilke’s nomadic wanderings ceased. There was, however, one final visit made, in the midst of his declining health, to Venice between June and July 1920. The trip came at a crucial juncture in Rilke’s life, in a period in which he had become acutely aware of his homelessness. As he wrote on 21 January 1920, “within the last five years, there has not been a single point that I can hold on to, not one, the precipice has been so steep for me that that I cannot find a root at its edge; also there is over it neither air nor nature nor sky, nothing but a dense mist of doom”. “My heart has stopped like a clock, the pendulum has somewhere bumped against the hand of misery and stood still” (Letters 1910-1926, pp, 214-215).

In June, he arrived at his destination and discovered both Venice and his past. The problem for Rilke was not that he could not relate to the Venice of old, as he had encountered it in his many visits between 1897 and 1914 but, on the contrary, that he could relate to it all too easily. Nothing had changed. But for a sensibility that has lived with the imperative of change, this was a problem: “it is hard to be seven years further along”, he wrote on 25 June, “older, more worn, without having those proofs of inner transformation that, in the last analysis, are what being alive means”.

And yet, Rilke was able to bring into focus an immediate present that was not hampered by his musings on the reversibility or irreversibility of time, by bringing his aesthetic focus to bear on what was worthy of his critical attention, such as the Giudecca Gardens, a monastery garden of the church of the Santissimo Redentore, which overlooks the lagoon near the centre of Vencie. No matter that he had first encountered them almost a quarter of a century earlier, the gardens were here and now as Rilke’s gaze was here and now, and what he saw inspired him, ” the high trees, only a few at the border, and a garden interieur of grapevine walks, little stone-framed pools, turf parterres, pomegranate bushes on which the blossoms blaze, and in the fluctuation of the vine-leaves’ shifting shadow the towering mallow stalks, hedges and an old wall in whose niches stand weatherbeaten stone figures”. And art finally joins nature. “The beautiful old trees of the background build up into the translucent sky, and above them, pale in pink and gray, the wall and the cupola of the Redentore!”. (Letters, 1910-1926, pp, 271 and 218).

DELETIONS

Rilke’s last letter to Lou of 13 December 1926 begins with the Russian word Dorogaya and ends Proshchai, dorogaya moya (“farewell, my dear”). Rilke speaks Russian on his death bed, but the country he chooses to visit before his death is Italy.