(29 August 2025)
(8 009 words)
(Reading time = 42 minutes)
The second trip to Russia that Rilke and Andreas-Salomé undertook lasted for several weeks, going from July to September 1900. It took them over a vast stretch of the country. They visited (a revered but inhospitable) Tolstoy at his rural home in Koslovka on the Volga, before embarking on a thousand mile trek, via railway, road and river, to Tila and Kiev, and then to Kasan and Saratov, staying in peasant accommodation, after which they returned to Moscow. Shortly after they arrived there, they paid a visit to the neighbouring district of Tver Oblast, where they met (in a second attempt to find the quintessential Russian) the peasant poet, Spiridon Drozhzhin. They reached their final destination, Saint Petersburg, in late July.
The journey was demanding. It was too much: too much contact with places and people and too much contact between two highly strung individuals. In particular, Lou 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). She fled and remained away for almost an entire month, staying with her relations in Finland. She refused to return to Saint Peterburg in spite of Rilke’s increasingly desperate (and puerile) letters of entreaty (the first, now unfortunately lost, she described as “almost depraved on account of [its] presumption and arrogance” (Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters, translated by Edward Snow and Michael Winkler. Norton. 1975. p. 31). Lou, however, had come to a final decision (although this would be purely a temporary final decision): his relationship with her must cease: it had become an unhealthy dependency.
On their return to Germany in August, the two parted company. Later that month, Rilke travelled to Worpswede near Bremen, accepting a long-standing invitation from his artist friend, Heinrich Vogeler, whom he had known since 1898 when he had first met him in Florence in his sojourn to discover the Florentine art of the Renaissance. Vogeler had been commissioned by the Insel Verlag to provide illustrations for Rilke’s forthcoming book, About the Beloved God and Other Things (Vom lieben Gott und Anderes: An Große für Kinder), and had sought the advice of the author before completing his task. Vogeler lived in an artists’ colony (founded in 1889), built into an austere windswept plain of peat bogs (the so-called “Teufelsmoor”), heather and slow-moving water courses. Its ambient light was thin and hazy, the perfect medium for ethereal nature studies. As Rilke was later to write, “the peculiar colour-filled light of this high sky does not differentiate but embodies everything that rises up in it and rests in it with the same kindness” (Rilke, Worpswede, p. 40). It was in such a landscape that the artistic eye could seek out “the birch-tree, the moorland cottages, the stretches of heath, the people, the evenings and the days, of which no two are alike, and in which no two hours could be exchanged one with another” (Rilke, Worpswede. Insel Verlag. 1987. pp. 40 and 42).
The poet had briefly visited Worpswede two years earlier at Christmas 1898 but now he stayed for six weeks, living in Vogeler’s art-deco house, the “Barkenhoff”. Rilke participated in the eco-centred “alternative” counterculture world of the colony with its “moonlit dancing, and weekly concerts and poetry readings and nude bathing [probably without Rilke]” (Jill Lloyd, Introduction to The Modersohn / Becker Correspondence. Translated by Ulrich Baer. Eris. 2024, p. 10). He gave poetry readings and immersed himself in the quasi-medieval aura of the Jugendstil art that was produced there by Vogeler and by his colleagues, Fritz Mackensen (1866-1953), Otto Modersohn (1865-1943) and Fritz Overbeck (1869-1909). Within a short week, Rilke found himself in an hermetic community of personal and artistic affinities, a community that in its intimacy the solitary Rilke had not encountered before. The community consisted of a larger group of aspiring artists and an inner circle of more established artists around Vogeler. With the former, Rilke had difficulty coming to terms and felt at times to be an outsider. As he wrote on 4 September, “granted there are a few people here I would enjoy having by my side so that I could say something to them; but they are like isolated fragments in this welter. I shake hands with some, with others not. I smile and I don’t smile, rouse myself and stiffen”. Rilke, however, quickly established a bond with the inner circle, a bond that became so firm that by the end of his stay, he felt fully integrated into the community. When a fellow artist wished to join this inner group, he was indignant. An harmonious group, Rilke wrote on 2 October, “should never be lifted out of its tonic element, for when that happens, it will be open to all sounds and accidents”. “For a circle of friends that has closed its ranks is a sanctuary”.
Rilke, nevertheless, preserved throughout his time in Worpswede his solitary self-image as a serious poet and a felt deeply a sense for his future development. “Why am I suddenly writing so much?”, he asked himself in a diary entry for 3 November, “because I once again: begin. Today, suddenly – ‘today’ is a beginning, a one beginning of what? A one before what?” He had already posed himself this question in an earlier diary entry: “begin to what? I begin – full stop. I have already begun a thousand lives this way. I feel that a whole generation must arrive to complete all these lives, for they cannot linger” (3 November 1899). As he later wrote (this time in the form of a poem): “everything that is felt: in plastic shapes and actions / becomes infinitely large and light. / I’ll not rest until I’ve reached that one goal: / to find images for my transformation” (diary entry 27 September 1900).
Transformation, beginning again, beginning anew, was not simply a process of the renewal of an inner selfhood or the path to be taken by a poet in the making. The imperative of transformation also came to possess at Worpswede an outer-facing dimension, a developing capacity of the experiencing self made possible through “looking”, “seeing”, “viewing”, “gazing” (the words he uses in his diary). This was a perception of the beyond, what is out there, the self in that beyond, people, the natural world and people in and (by metaphoric extension) as the natural world. As he related in his entry for the 13 September, “there are so many days here, none like the other. And yet all differences are like confirmations of one great similarity among the days, which may be no more than this that I receive them with all with the same gratefulness … But one does in fact learn to see something new here” And a little later, we read, “I am gradually beginning to comprehend this life that passes through large eyes into eternally waiting souls … In how poor a sense do we actually see compared with these people! How richly these people must journey. And when once they truly arrive at themselves after this blissful apprenticeship-time, what a wonderful language they must possess, what images for everything experienced! Then they must confide themselves the way landscapes do, as with clouds, winds, things going down …” Rilke has now learnt to see objects and attempts, as if viewing the ideal sculpture, “to set down [in his looking] a milieu with such precision that the objects’ boundaries will constitute the figure’s contour.” (29 September). All was relevant to him as a poet. As he had already written, “everything that has truly been seen must become a poem” (1 September).
In Worpswede, Rilke developed his own painterly eye, an ability to grasp aesthetic detail in the physical world, wherein sight converted itself into writing in his diary (whose entries were not cast in daily form but rather as short but inclusive retrospective essays), and in which Rilke produced pen portraits of precise colour and mood, as in the entry for 6 September, where he found himself returning home late across the Worpswede heath:
Beneath the vast skies, the darkening colourful fields lie flat. – wide hilly waves of rustling heather, bordering them stubble-fields and newly mown buckwheat, which with its stalk-red and the yellow of its leaves is like richest silk. And the way that all this lies there, so close and strong and real that one cannot possibly ignore it or forget it. Every moment something is held up into the vivifying air; a tree, a house, a slowly turning mill, a man with black shoulders, a large cow or a hard-edged, jagged goat that walks into the sky. There are no conversations in which the landscape does not take part, from all sides and with a hundred voices.
Narrated in the first person, to underpin the sense of its immediacy as a lived experience (of colour), the picture is painted in almost pointillist detail (which at one point borders on the surreal). In a later nature study, we are told that “the water [of a canal], which like a delicate piece of weaving bore heavy colours as if playing some game” (21 September). So too here, animate and animate converge as if in an animistic symbiosis. The approach, however, is not pantheistic. Unlike The Book of Hours, God does not make an appearance in Rilke’s Worpswede nature studies: the terms of reference are decidedly pagan. There was, certainly, a church in Worpswede, the Baroque Church of Zion (it was painted by Fritz Overbeck in 1909), but neither Rilke, nor any of the other resident artists, seem to have frequented it or even recognised its existence.
The pagan landscape of Worpswede knew and celebrated life, but it was also contained with it (as befits a pagan landscape) darker forces, those that were far from the light. As he walked the land, Rilke made conatc with such forces in the ground, in the form of the graves of diseased criminals, executed for their crimes, their bodies (as Rilke noted in an entry for 9 September) “perfectly preserved. For a thousand years their outlines had expressed fear and terror without disintegrating”. In the margins of the shining text that is Worpswede the uncanny waits, as in the following experience of Clara Westhoff, who leaves her house one evening and wanders onto a field:
Twilight was settling in. I see: children running, and something dark, stooping, herding them before it into the house. This dark something interests me. It’s night now, I realise, and the chestnut trees are clam. The dark thing suddenly draws something out of itself and changes shape. There is still a high-arched back, but now the head is visible, and it thrusts out towards me and observes me, apparently just as interested as I am. I can feel its looking at me. And from the dark formlessness a bone-thin arm stretches out and manages to reach me, even though I am still quite far away – and as it hand holds me, it says ” you dun know me and I dun know you in the dark”. It is a moment of pure terror and it lasts until Clara discovers that this is an old woman who is, like her, lost on the moor.
Rilke often described this world as a fairytale “Märchen” (Diaries, p. 201). But like the classic German Märchen (those of Tieck, for example), its fairytale quality contained within it a darker, irrational dimension, where the other world emerges from nowhere to shake our security and sense of placement. In his entry for 9 September, Rilke describes a walk he has taken one evening on a narrow path beside a canal. He sees a dark figure moving towards him on the same path. For a few brief moments, the scene hovers between reality and dark unreality. The mood is sepulchral. Death is walking towards him. The uncanny figures of his later Malte Notebook (written in Paris) are already part of Rilke’s optic:
Death in the moor. How easy it must be to meet him here. He needn’t possess some particular garb or gait. A man need only approach, dark the way they all are, tall, hard-shouldered, with heavy-hanging hands for grasping. One has been watching him approach on the narrow footpath beside the black canal for a good while. He walks and walks. And one ponders even when he is still far away. How shall I make room for him? On the left the moor is so close that the path that runs hard by its edges ripples and behind one’s steps sends little waves over the wilted grass-clumps along the trail. It would be possible, of course, to press against the nearest birch and let him pass by … but one calculates all these escapes in vain. It will happen otherwise. On a slippery bridge, the width of one board, beneath which an endless canal trembles from some wind, one will come face-to-face with him. There is no struggle, for he is blind and walks on and on as if no one were there.
Et in arcadia ego. These visitations of the sepulchral may exist behind Rilke’s appropriation of the beauty he found in Worpswede (they may even be one of its causes, its precondition: beauty as the beginning of a terror that we can barely understand) an appropriation that he can identify in the painter, Heinrich Vogeler, who talks of “its sunrises and autumn evenings, of the light on the snow and the darkness over the deep land in November”. “Of old oak and young birches. Of the eternal wind. Of Spring with its meadows out of which countless tulips rise, yellow and bright red. Of the house that roses embrace ever more tightly, of the trees in bloom, of a tall fir and a yellow oriole that flew over it”.
But the artist, in Rilke’s aesthetic does not just see nature; in one sense, the artist is nature (Vogeler is what he sees). For Rilke, nature merged with art not only in its verdant manifestations but also in people lived there. Thus, Rilke could write a poem, “xxx dated 9 September) describing Paula Becker, in imagery in which the natural and the human have become one. The text consists of two poems. The first reads:
The reddest roses never showed so red
as on that evening that was cloaked in rain.
I thought so long about your softest hair …
The reddest roses never showed so red.
These are not simply metaphors. Paula is the roses. The poem continues:
The slender birch trunks never stood so white
as on that evening that was dark with rain.
And then I saw your hands, their perfect shapes …
The slender birch trunks never stood so white.
The floral merges with the human in the form of a bucolic eroticism.
[xxx]
Rilke experienced Worpswede on two levels: on an aesthetic and on a personal level. The personal involved not only his participation in the community but in his close association with two of its female members: the artist, Paula Becker (1876-1907) and the sculptor, Clara Westhoff (1878-1954), both of whom “had come to Worpswede to attend live-drawing classes alongside other women who were excluded from state-run art academies” (Jill Lloyd in The Modersohn-Becker / Rilke Correspondence. Translated by Ulrich Baer. With an Introduction by Jill Lloyd. Eris. London. 2024, p. 9). Rilke idealised their femininity. One evening both come to visit him:
I opened the door to my room, which was growing cool and dark blue like a grotto. I pushed open my window, and then they came to join the miracle and leaned out brightly into the moonlit night, which developed their laughter-hot cheeks in cold. And suddenly they all became so poignant in their gazing. Half fully aware, i.e. as painters, half intuitively, i.e. as girls. Initially, the mood seized them, the single note of this misty nighty night with its almost full moon over the three poplar trees. This mood of faintly tarnished silver robbed them of their defenses and forced them into the dark, yearning-filled life of girls.
Rilke had befriended both Paula and Clara, but it was with the former that an “amitié amourese” (Lloyd p. 7) arose (and as “the blond painter” she appears repeatedly in his diary entries). As he noted on 10 September, “I found yet again how her eyes, whose dark centres were so smooth and solid, when fully developed opened up exactly like roses in full bloom, soft and warm, and contained gentle shadows and delicate hues as on the frame and breast of tiny backward receding skins of leaves”.
The aesthetic here is not far from the erotic. Indeed, their relationship grew in intensity, as the poem “The Betrothed” testifies. The text is ostensibly about the fiancée of Heinrich Vogeler, but it is possible that the real subject was Paula Becker:
I have felt her presence in this house
the blond bride, who suffered long, alone.
All hours sing with her soft voice,
and all steps follow her step’s tone.
Although he had intended to stay longer (indeed, according to his entry for 27 September, stay permanently), Rilke left Worpswede abruptly without a leave-taking in early October. It seems likely that he had discovered that Paula had formed a bond with one of the painters in the colony, Otto Modersohn, whom she was to marry the following year. Rilke returned to Berlin, and moved his possessions out of Villa Waldfrieden, where he had been living with Andreas-Salomé and her husband, and took up residence in an apartment in Misdroyer Strasse. Leaving Worpswede brought about in him an emotional trauma, as the poem “Solemn Hours” (“Ernste Stunde”), which was written at the time (and later published in his Book of Images) suggests:
I
Whoever now weeps anywhere in the world,
weeps without reason in the world,
weeps for me.
II
Whoever laughs now anywhere in the night.
laughs without reason,
laughs at me.
III
Whoever walks now anywhere in the world,
walks without reason in the world,
walks towards me.
IV
Whoever dies now anywhere in the world,
dies without reason in the world,
looks at me.
I
[Wer jetzt weint irgendwo in der Welt,
ohne Grund weint in der Welt,
weint über mich.
II
Wer jetzt lacht irgenwo in der Nacht,
ohne Grund lacht in der Nacht,
lacht mich aus.
III
Wer jetzt geht irgenwo in der Welt,
ohne Grund geht in der Welt,
geht zu mir.
IV
Wer jetzt stirbt irgendwo in der Welt ohne Grund stirbt in der Welt,
sieht mich an.] (i: 405-406).
Four short stanzas without rhyme are linked by the anaphoric repetition of the pivotal word of the text, “fallen”, which is inserted into the same grammatical position in each verse to communicate a weighty air of world-weary stoicism to the plaintiff voice of the poem. The lines increasingly shorted in successive stanzas, as do the metrical feet. The plight of the lyrical subject is total. And it is universal (or it is, at least reflected in the universal), where basic modes of feeling and behaviour in the text (crying, laughing, walking, dying) are extrapolated from the individual to all who perform such actions or possess such feelings.
“Without reason” / “ohne Grund” is a key term in this exposition of pained sensibility. Suffering has no rational cause. It is an affliction whose source is the dark and cruel mystery of living, which fixes the individual within a malign process. The lyrical subject adumbrates that process and then, in the concluding stanza, exhorts all who are likewise caught within it to (in the final stanza) turn their gaze on him. Does this reflect an act of sympathy? Or does it simply point to the emotional egotism of the subject? We know from the biographical background to the poem (and its place in Rilke’s diary) that the subject of the poem is lost love, but the classical austerity of its form, and the insistence of its minimalist tropes, lend it a broader existential provenance.
A physical separation may have taken place between Rilke and Becker, but not a separation of minds. Within two weeks, a period of lengthy and detailed correspondence between the two had begun. Over the next five months, they would converse on matters relating to art and poetry, in letters that often included lyrical words on nature and the passing of the seasons. There were also revealing insights into Rilke’s compositional technique, as in the letter of 24 January: “my way of doing things seems to be to keep pearls secreted away and then, in a fortuitous hour, to cast a great piece of jewelry, in which I can secretly set the pearl that’s been hidden away, now concealed in the festive procession of richly attired words that returns the pearl with a thousand triumphs” (Modersohn-Becker / Rilke Correspondence p. 72). Such letters were testimonies to a bond that both seemed to want to retain and even make flourish.
In January, Paula moved temporarily to Berlin (staying with relatives), to undertake a series of cookery classes in preparation for her future domestic life. Immediately after her arrival, she went to visit Rilke in his apartment in Schmargendorf, a visit that Rilke treated like a visitation. In a letter written to her soon after, on 13 January, he described how he felt once her visit had come to an end, and he had said farewell at a tram stop:
“I returned home. And the green lamp was lit, and the candle where we had been sitting. I did not touch a thing, so as not to strip off the fine layer of your having been there. I went up to my desk and said [quoting an early poem]: ‘you pale child, each evening the singer / shall stand darkly among your things …’ and pursued the willing verse ever further and imagined you still to be here, listening and remembering. It was as if you really were very close by – there where my words ended, at the furthest seam of sound” (Modersohn-Becker / Rilke Correspondence 65).
The language and its tones of devotion suggest a love letter, and it is quite possible that Rilke still harboured hopes that her attachment to Otto Modersohn would be temporary. The words of Rilke’s letter represent an act of homage, of worship even, but the reality (that Rilke clearly did not want to see) was that Paula Becker saw Rilke simply as a fellow artist and a dear friend, not as a putative lover. Then on 8 February, a letter arrived from her that finally shattered Rilke’s romantic hopes: for the first time, she referred to herself as “Otto Modersohn’s intended [‘Braut’]”.
Rilke (who was a daily letter writer) did not reply for over a week, and only then with three short vague sentences that did not mention of her betrothment. Her designation as “Braut” would have made it entirely clear that his increasingly intimate letters to her were no longer appropriate. Their correspondence was effectively over. There was one final revealing letter from Rilke, sent on the 21 February 1902, where he told her that he and Clara Westhoff (who was a cosignatory of the letter) had set up home in Westerwede, a short distance from the artists’ colony of Worpswede. Rilke and Clara Westhoff had, in fact, become lovers during a visit to Berlin that she had made in early February, to see both Rilke and Paula Becker. In April a second communication to Paula followed, in which Rilke included a wedding announcement. Rilke married Clara in the same month. A daughter, Ruth, was born in December (Clara was probably unaware that “Ruth” was a nom de plume used by Lou Andreas-Salomé in her early publications (see Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back. p. 194).
The engaged couple found a farmhouse in Westerwede that had long attracted Clara. It possessed too for Rilke a particular charm:
“a house like this in the middle of the moor, without neighbours (except for a few out of the way farmsteads), lying on no street and known to no one, is a good refuge, a place into which one can blend with a kind of inconspicuous mimicry, and is designed, forwards and backwards, in future and in memory, for a life full of equilibrium” (quoted in Polikoff p. 255).
It was in Westerwede, that Rilke wrote (in May) his book on Worpswede and the artists who worked there. Only the better-known artists figured in his book: Otto Modersohn, Fritz Overbeck, Hans am Ende and Heinrich Vogeler (there is no mention of Paula Becker or Clara Westhoff). What preceded these biographical expositions of the artists was a detailed reading of the genre of landscape painting, a reading that follows an historical trajectory (and more interestingly, in terms of our understanding of Rilke’s developing worldview) but engage not only with that genre as an aesthetic but uncovers that aesthetic as an ontology of the natural, its civic appropriation, its role and its attempted repression within mechanised cultures, the difficulties of inhabiting the natural, and its resistance (from within itself) to human attempts to do so.
As Rilke asserts in the Introduction, whoever wishes to write about landscapes “must have eyes to see its colours, and words to describe them” (v: 9). “He must not only be an historian; he must also be a psychologist” (v: 9), for nature holds itself distant from, and resists all temps to merge it with and bring it under the rational scrutiny of, the human realm. “Whoever wishes to write about the history of the landscape will find himself helplessly confronted by the alien, the unfamiliar, the incomprehensible. We are used to dealing with forms [‘Gestalten’], but the landscape has no form, we are used to reacting to the movements that come from acts of will, but the landscape does not want this when it moves. Water moves and in it hover and tremble the images of things. And in the wind that blows through old trees, the new forests grow, grow into a future that we will never seen” (v: 10). When we attempt to burrow into its secrets, we are playing with dark powers that are not to be grasped with our names” (v: 10), but if we do succeed in imposing our names upon them “they will at some point in the millennia stand up and shake from themselves these names, like someone suppressed throwing off of his master” (v: 12). And the earth then becomes once again great. The mystery of nature is a dark one, and Rilke describes its changing seasons in sombre tones but with a vivid eye that is his as the poet as painter. “Spring arrives and, although they are sad, the roses bloom, and the nights are full of nightingales, although they wish to die, and when they finally come to smile once again then the days of autumn are there, the heavy, so to speak, incessantly declining days of November, behind which a long winter without light comes” (v: 14-15).
That is how we must experience nature as it is inscribed into the landscape. But artists see it (both literally and metaphorically) differently, as they attempt “to grasp nature in order to integrate themselves somehow into its great connections” (v: 15). “In reality they [nature and artists] live beside one another, hardly aware of one another, and in painting, in architecture, in music, with one word, in art they appear to come together as in a higher prophetic truth, calling to one another” (v: 15). This unself-reflective symbiosis is evident, above all, in the depictions of those who live on the land, those, for example, of Rembrandt, who saw people as landscape and painted them as such.” “Sometimes people seem to emerge out of his landscapes, at other times the landscape seems to emerge out of the people” (v: 15).
This is what is happening in the paintings of the Worpswede circle. They are attempting to restore a unity that has been lost, and Rilke’s Introduction broaches a theme that will accompany him through his life, from the Malte Notebooks to the Duino Elegies: the corrosive encroachments of rootless modernity upon our sense of belonging, its destruction of the unity of the selfhood because (“unlike migrating birds / we have no shared understanding” / “wir sind nicht einig. Sind nicht wie die Zugvogel verständigt”, Elegy 4).
The Worpswede artists have that shared understanding, both with place and the people who live in that place. The moor of Worpswede is a unique landscape, which is flat “almost without a crevice, and the paths and water courses lead far into the distant horizon. There begins sky of almost indescribable changes and breadth, which is mirrored in every leaf” (v: 27). Everywhere there is water, rivers, canals, streams that are formed overnight. “The sea is the history of this land” (v: 27), a land that was reclaimed from the sea and still exists barely above sea level. Its inhabitants have created this landscape and that is reflected in their bodies. “All have but one face: the hard, tense face of labour”. “No depth, but faces that taper into a canniness, into probing, into cleverness” (v: 29). The Worpswede artists “do not teach these people anything; they do not seek to improve them. They bring nothing into their lives, which now as then is a life of want and darkness, but they fetch up from the depths of these lives a truth, out of which they themselves can grow, or, if not to stretch it too far, a possibility that one can grow to love” (v: 32).
The five Worpswede artists that Rilke discusses are individuals, but they converge on a shared commitment to locality and on their attempts to capture and communicate that commitment, graphically, without sentimentality but with beauty, in their art. He begins with Fritz Mackensen. His paintings seem “to accord with the passage of the seasons” (v: 48), both in their genesis and in their subject matter. Mackensen’s motto was “our eyes are healthy, and they are free” (v: 50), and Rilke finds this motto exemplified in the level proportions of Mackensen’s paintings, in their “balance of form and space, which conveys the “quiet, reserved, cautious essence of his work” (v: 50). Turning to Otto Modersohn, Rilke lauds him as a painter of “the small world”, who focusses upon the detail (although this is archetypal) of the familiar objects around him (and us): trees, walls, furniture (v: 70). That communion with nature of which Rilke spoke in his Introduction is supremely represented in the work of Modersohn, where “no flower is too small to be questioned, and stands up and says what it knows” (v: 73). Modersohn had learnt to see and understood that “being and the world are strangely interwoven to the eye that, once it has come close, steps back and in quiet contemplation attempts to grasp the whole” (v: 74). Modersohn realised that “nothing was impossible in this land. And the improbable also partook from the riches of the skies the solidity and truthfulness of real things” (V : 86).
What binds these artists into an aesthetic community (to support the togetherness of their real community) are a number of stylistic features in their art: a non-expressivity of the viewing self (so that the integrity of what is being seen is retained), a certain childlike simplicity in theme and focus, and a focus upon things of the natural world, a world often without people (although Vogeler tended to studies of ethereal young women, in the manner of the pre-Raphaelites, and the Millet inspired Mackensen painted scenes of rural life). It was perhaps Fritz Overbeck who best exemplified these qualities, most notably in his “childlike affirmation of the world, in his genial, sturdy work” (v: 91). His was the talent to represent “details in their entire glory, without thereby negating their total value” (v: 93). His paintings were imbued with a “characteristic silence”, deprived of movement (indeed, as a genre, the Worpswede style was one of statis).
Hans von Ende perhaps best represented the modest style of the Worpswede artists. His early work possesses “an unusual stillness, in painting pictures with white houses, farmyards, vicarages with large gardens, the sky, the earth. No past, no future, nothing other than the present. A quiet, simple, sober present” (v: 102). But these were by no means works of a miniature import, for in his nature studies there were “evening hours or twilight hours, where every thing seems to pass beyond its contours into something larger. The earth expands itself, the rivers broaden their banks. Skies seem to tumble over skies” (v :114).
For these artists, discovering (indeed founding) Worpswede meant discovering themselves. Heinrich Vogeler had been responsible for bringing Rilke as a guest to the colony. Vogeler was an authentic son of the German soil. When he travelled it was not “to take up what was foreign. but rather to hold himself firm against the same [‘was war Andersartige’], in order to establish the boundaries of his own personality” (v: 119), to complete his “inner and simple work” (v: 121). Stasis meant for the Worpswede artists not just the continuing stability of what was seen (and then depicted in their work: the ever-same spartan landscape of the moor, its still waters that barely flowed, its solitary poplar trees); it also typified a way of seeing, an equilibrium of perspective. Stasis was also evident in the creation of their oeuvre, which did not always show significant signs of development. This was not the case with Vogeler. During the course of his work, he underwent a change of focus from the friable and lightly glossed to an “endeavour to fill to completion in an organic way a given space” (p, 216). His best works Rilke possessed an expansiveness (a “Linienplastik”, v: 127, possibly through the influence of Aubrey Beardsley) that was lacking in his colleagues, and which perhaps indicated his final intention to move on to the more complete form of a “Jugendstil” proper.
Rilke finished his study of the Worpswede in May 1902, amidst the dissolution of a household where husband and wife were going their separate ways (and, their daughter, Ruth, would soon be sent to live with Clara’s parents). Looking back from the following year, in a letter to Andreas-Salomé, Rilke speculated on what had gone wrong: “I had a house, a wife, a child, had something real and undeniable, believed that this would make me more visible, more tangible, more factual. But, Lou, Westerwede existed, it was real, for I built the house myself and made everything in it. And yet, it was really outside me. I was not part of it and was not taken up with it” (Rilke / Lou Andreas-Salome, Correspondence, p. 92).
The personal had withered but art was flourishing, for at the same time Rilke was putting in order a further volume of poetry, Buch der Bilder, which would be published in the Junker Verlag (Berlin) in July. Its title contains a creative ambivalence. “Bild” can mean either “image” or “picture” in German. Perhaps that semantic slippage was intentional. An “image” is something that we can register without mediation; a “picture” is a construct, something tangible that is generally (but not always) made out of an image. The former is a matter purely of perception; the latter is a matter of art. The tension (or perhaps it is the synergy) between these two possible definitions of “Bild” acts as a heuristic framework for a number of poems in the volume, a volume that, although the first poems were written before Worpswede, show clear signs of the influence of Rike’s stay there (and the immediate aftermath of that stay) between 1900 and 1901. This is the case in the opening poem, “Entrance” (“Eingang”):
Whoever you may be: at evening step forth
out of your front room in which you know all.
Your house is the final one before the distant horizon:
whoever you may be.
With your tired eyes that can barely free themselves
from the worn-down door step,
you raise, slowly, a single black tree
placing it against the sky, slight, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is wide
and like a word ripening in silence.
And when you have grasped its meaning,
your thoughts will delicately let your eyes go free.
[Wer du auch seiest: am Abend tritt hinaus
aus deiner Stube, darin du alles weisst;
als letztes vor der Ferne liegt dein Haus:
wer du auch seiest.
Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum
von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein,
hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum
und stellst ihn vor der Himmel: schlank, allein.
Und hast du die Welt gemacht. Und sie ist gross
und wie ein Wort, das noch im Schweigen reift.
Und wie dein Wille ihren Sinn begreift,
lassen sie deine Augen zärtlich los …]
In this poem of self-address (the “du”, and a biographical referent may be suggested here, relating to Rilke and his home in Westerwede), the lyrical subject leaves his room and steps out of his house. The domestic space has lost its mystery for him (he knows everything about it). Leaving it behind will be an act of liberation (“befrein”, and most notably one that frees his perception of the world, “Augen”). It is a liberation from custom and the past, represented here by the well-worn door stop, “Schwelle”, the latter acting as a demarcation between an old uncreative world and a new creative one. The poem is written in a single stanza with an ababcdcdeffe rhyming scheme. Its irregular line lengths are broken with caesuras and with mid-line punctuation, conveying the consequential discourse of the poem: its logical underpinning of, its assertion of (and call for) artistic freedom (perhaps freedom per se).
The lyrical subject is not alone in this act. A broader universal subject is addressed twice (“whoever you may be”), drawn into the poem in the form of total anonymity. It is an existential query that is left hanging on the page. Whatever the identity of this second person, it joins the first in an artistic act that is simple but precisely because of its simplicity creates the world anew. Rilke will later argue in Duino Elegy 7 that “one simple thing that has been truly / grasped is just as good as many” (“ein hiesig / einmal ergriffenes Ding gälte fur viele”. Here too, a single object clearly seen (hence the importance of the “Augen” trope) can serve, in imagist terms, as a synecdoche for reality as a whole, its statement allowing, in the final lines, poetry (“ein Wort” ) to join with the pictorial.
The poems of the Buch der Bilder were written over a period of eight years and in variety of locations: Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, France. It is difficult to identify a single unified position of speech or homogeneous stylistic register that might unite them. Some are compact, focussed treatments of objects, moods and dispositions, others are extended, almost prosaic in their narrative lengths. Formally and thematically they cover a broad range, from the single eight line stanza of the nature poem, “Mondnacht” (i: 372), with its abbbabb no final rhyme scheme, to poems such as “das jüngste Gericht” (i: 415-442), with its variable rhymes and variable line lengths (just two words in some lines), through to historical reconstructions such as “Karl der Zwolfte von Schweden reitet in der Ukraine” (i: 421-424), which employ a rhymed epic form. Tableaux depicting the sick and outcast form a series in the second volume of the book, poems such as “Song of the Beggar” (“Das Lied des Bettlers”), “Song of the Blinden” (“Das Lied des Blinden”) and “Song of the Suicide” (Das Lied des Selbstmorders) (i: 448-451). All show the influence of Naturalism but in their sometimes garish imagery anticipate the epater le bourgeois idiom of the early Expressionists. Nature poems are also included but it is noticeable that the greater Worpswede recedes into the past, the more nature gives way to history, and the few nature poems that are written in the later volumes, such as “Fragments from lost Days” (“Fragments aus verlorenen Tagen”) (i: 445), lack the tangibility and personal recall of the earlier poems in that genre.
There is also an autobiographical dimension to the poems in The Book of Images, evident in the house that looks out onto a bleak landscape populated by a lone tree (a symbol of the solitary artist), which echoes “Dich wundert nicht des Sturmes Wucht” (i: 305) from The Book of Hours, and which seems to allude to Rilke’s married time in Westerwede. A similar recall of the past is evident in the allusion to the young women who found their way to the poet in Worpswede without effort of circumstance, as in “The Girls” (“Von den Mädchen”, i: 374), a poem that appears in Rilke’s diary and has its source in Rilke’s association with Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff. Rilke arrived at Worpswede at the end of August and stayed to the beginning of October, and an autumnal mood infuses a number of poems, such as “Autumn” (“Herbst”):
I
The leaves are falling, falling as if from far away,
as if distant gardens are withering into the skies,
they fall with a gesture of renunciation.
II
And through the night, the heavy earth
falls from every star into loneliness.
III
We are all falling. This hand is falling.
And look at the other one: it has fallen the most.
IV
And yet, there is one, who holds this eternal falling
gently in his hands.
I
[Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit,
als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten;
sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde.
II
Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde
aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit.
III
Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt
Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen.
IV
Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen
unendlich sanft in seinen Händen halt.] (i: 400)
It is late Autumn, and a winter scene is being depicted, in the midst of which is the unspecified “we”. Once again, the lyrical subject possesses a personal voice, one which appears throughout the early poems in The Book of Images but is lacking as that book progresses, where it gives way to the impersonal ingress of the epic voice.
The thematic structure of the poem is dominated by the anaphoristic “fallen”. A downward descent is being described, and even the hands that might have halted that descent are “falling”. The hands like the leaves and the heavy earth, are falling into loneliness (“Einsamkeit”). Is this the source of the falling or perhaps its end result? The poem in four short stanzas has no rhyming scheme, its largely tetrameter lines being held together through the repetition of “falling” (a structural repetition that echoes the word that it describes). The short two-line stanzas lend the bleak descriptive content of the poem an almost syllogistic weight, not just to its logic but thematically to the pressure of the inevitability of what is being described, a pressure formally underscored by alliteration and caesuras. In the final stanza, an “Einer” appears, a higher power who does possess hands that can hold. The religious connotations may seem clear (and the insistent “fallen” may suggest a Fall from Grace). However, in the absence of any further Christian iconography, the sense remains cryptic. It is a non-identified benevolence. Is this higher power the muse? The poet’s artistic mission?
Even in Rilke’s otherwise celebratory bucolic Worpswede diary, signs of hesitation, qualification, reserve were evident. Amidst the fellowship of the colony, Rilke saw himself as someone who “hears laughing; but what goes on behind it may not always be suitable for laughing, may in fact be toil or poverty” (4 September). It is a qualification that hovers over the poem “Autumn Day” (“Herbsttag”):
Oh Lord: it is now time. The summer was immense.
Lay out your shadow on the sun dials,
and release the wind onto the meadows.
II
Ordain the full ripening of the final fruit;
grant them still two southernly days
press them to completion and harry the
last remaining drop of sweetness into the vine.
III
Who has no house will build none now.
Whoever is alone, will long remain so,
will stay awake, will read, write long letters
and will go back and forth the through the wooded avenues,
restlessly wandering around the drifting leaves.
I
[Herr: es ist Zeit. Der Sommer war sehr gross.
Leg deinen Schatten auf die Sonnenuhren,
und auf den Fluren lasst die Winde los.
II
Befiehl den letzten Früchten voll zu ein;
gieb ihnen noch zwei südlichere Tage,
dränge sie zur Vollendung hin and jage
die letzte Süsse in den schweren Wein.
III
Wer jetzt kein Haus hat, baut sich keines mehr.
Wer jetzt allein ist, wird es lange bleiben,
wird wachen, lesen, lange Briefe schreiben
und wird in den Alleen hin und her
unruhig wandern, wenn die Blätter treiben.] (i: 398)
The tropes of colour, of the fecundity of nature and palatable bounty that enlivened Rilke’s Worpswede diary are here too, as is Rilke’s painterly perspective. All are framed within a decisive interpolation of time, not just of seasonal change but of the response of the implied lyrical subject to these changes, the unspecified “who” / “wer” who appears in the final stanza without identity (simply as a warning to others) and whose frailty is underscored by the form of the text, its parallel constructions and plodding alliteration.
All four stanzas have different line-lengths and a different rhyming scheme. The metre throughout is highly flexible, consisting of a mixture of dactyls (used for the imperative sentiments) and iambic feet (for the descriptive), and its opening words (“Herr: es ist Zeit”) might be read as spondees, befitting the assertive call upon the “Herr”. The latter may have a religious significance, but it is quite possible that Rilke is using it largely as a formal device which, unlike similar uses in The Book of Hours, does not necessarily refer to the presence of God but possibly to the Lord of the Harvest. Its purpose is to introduce solemnity and the participation of a higher power to witness and to frame the events depicted. If this is the case, then its function is rhetorical rather than religious.
The imperative mode is used throughout to engage with this harvest lord, to invoke him into the present. As such, it is a grammatical form that underscores the theme of time (immediate time) in the text (“now” /”jetzt” is used three times.) The seasonal changes both enlarge and restrict (put vital, even vitalistic, conditions on) the actuality of the lyrical subject. The present moment is urgent because the year has reached a crucial point between the potential of harvest and its actuality, where the promise of autumn is about to be realised. To miss this crucial moment of transformation means to be fated to an existence beyond nature and forgo a belonging to the world. Your house must be built now or not at all.
Failure to grasp the possibility of the moment, Kairos, condemns the lyrical subject to a sterile and lonely filling in and avoidance of time (and its abandonment of it as the path to self-realisation). The failure to embrace this possibility will lead, in a abject way, to barren other-directed past-times: “will stay awake, reading, writing letters”, where culture has replaced nature. These are activities whose routine pointlessness is highlighted through grammatical repetition and halting caesuras (although the activities themselves point possibly, within a biographical reading, to a particular lyrical subject). Here, if and when we do return to nature, we do so merely to register our disquiet and rootlessness, no longer in an autumn of bountiful harvest but in a winter and not amongst the fruit of the vine but wandering amongst scattered, dead leaves (which may be written or not).
Rilke, Duino Elegies Comparing Translations Martin Travers 