(7 September 2025)
(6 014 words)
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On 16 October 1908, Rilke visited the Paris salon, where he saw for the first time the painting, ” A View of Toledo”, by the Greek-Spanish painter known as “El Greco” (Domenikos Theotokopoulus, 1541-1614). It was an elemental experience, and Rilke felt the need to put that experience in words for another artist who also belonged to the elemental: Auguste Rodin. As he wrote to Rodin on the same day, “El Greco’s landscape becomes increasingly more astonishing in my mind. Let me describe it”:
A storm has just burst and is falling violently behind a city which, on the slope of a hill, climbs hastily up towards a cathedral and, higher still, towards a fortress, square and massive. A flickering light is belabouring the earth, stirring it, ripping it open, and making the pale green fields behind the trees stand out clearly here and there, like sleepless hours. A narrow river emerges motionless from a pile of hills, menacing terribly with its black and nocturnal blue the green flames of the bushes. The startled and affrighted city rises in a final effort as though to pierce the anguish of the atmosphere” (Letters 1892-1910, p. 341).
Barely a year earlier, Cézanne had transformed Rilke’s viewerly optic through his restrained and self-less depictions of the object world (human and natural), in paintings where design and colour were reconfigured through a new way of handling space and through promoting time as stasis. Cezanne’s paintings represented the culmination of a tradition in the experimentation with perspective that had its roots in Renaissance Italy (indeed, what Cézanne achieved can perhaps only make sense within that tradition). El Greco did not belong to that tradition; indeed, his “View of Toledo” tore that tradition apart. It gave shape to a vision of Otherness, almost in the manner of Expressionists such as Oskar Kokoschka, in whom a heightened colour was allied to heightened emotion, in paintings where body postures were distorted and space extended or conflated, disrupting accepted relationships between objects and people and objects.
Rilke encountered El Greco’s painting in the midst of his own Expressionist journey: the writing of the Malte Notebook. The pushing of formal and thematic boundaries in that work, its confronting alteriority, Malte’s experience of self-alienation, of the uncanny twisting of the self through space and time, which form the central modality of that work, are all disruptions of (interventions into) the conventions of narrative logic. Such ventures into such unfamiliar modes clearly reflected a mind that was open to difference, and t is perhaps this sense of difference that Rilke welcomed when he had the opportunity to make contact with the non-European cultures of Egypt and North Africa. In 1910, work of the Malte Notebook had temporarily stalled. Rilke wished to travel. As he wrote to Clara at this time, “I feel so plainly that I must be one my way again, travel as far as ever as I can” (quoted in Prater, p. 180). In September 1910, he met in Munich the socialite and Rilke admirer, Frau Jenny Oltersdorf. She had long been planning a journey to North Africa and persuaded the poet to accompany her. Commencing in November, they followed an itinerary took them first to Algiers and Tunis, and then on a second trip, begun in January 1911, to Cairo from where they sailed down the Nile to Luxor and Aswan, before returning to Cairo.
Rilke’s initial impressions of what he termed “the Orient” were conveyed through a small number of letters, in which he gave expression to his “wonder at an alien world” (Freedman, p. 311). Within a few days of arriving, he confessed to Clara (26 November) that “brightness and looking have made me very tired; besides, nothing can be put into words. I foresee that it will be a long time before I shall be able to express myself about all that is here”. Language may have failed Rilke, but the painterly eye was quickly put into service. The poet wandered through the streets of Tunisia (much as he had wandered through the streets of Moscow more than ten years earlier), not refraining from the commonplace, the demotic but, on the contrary, seeking it out in the bazaars and souks. As he told Clara (17 December), he was taken by the sights and sounds of a magic world: “the little niches are hung so full of gaudy objects, the fabrics are so lavish and surprising, the gold flashes out as promisingly as if one were to get it tomorrow as a gift, and then in the evening when a single lantern, across from it all, burns and moves, excited, as it were, by the presence of everything that its light engages, then Arabian Nights pass over into all that ever was anticipation, wish and suspense in one”.
Beneath such enticing if superficial opulence of north Africa there lay, however, a deeper core of spirituality, in which the attraction of the eye gave way to the tremors of the soul. Four days later, Rilke visited Kairouan, a pilgrim destination for the Islamic faithful. He described his impressions, once again, to Clara: ” like a vision, the flat white city lies there in its round-pinnacles ramparts, with nothing but plain terrain and graves around it, as though it was besieged by its dead who lie everywhere in front of the walls and do not stir and are ever increasing. One feels the simplicity and vitality of this religion in a wonderful way here. It is as if the Prophet [Mahammed] is of yesterday, and the city is his, like a kingdom”.
In a sense, Rilke had already prepared himself to be impressed by Islam and Mahammed. In the concluding pages of his New Poems (Neue Gedichte), he devoted a poem to the prophet, in which the latter is seen as emerging in human garb, out of the people. It is written in four stanzas of unequal length, in short tetramers, which are intended to succinctly outline Mahammed’s modest secular origins. In the opening stanzas, an angel appears to Mahammed, informing him that he is the Chosen One. Mahammed is unbelieving of this choice and refuses to accept it. The final two stanzas read:
III
But the Angel, commanding, pointed again and again
to what lay written on his page,
and did not give up but exhorted one more time: read!
IV
And so, he read: and thus, the angel bowed towards him.
and now he was already one who had read
and, obeying, followed the command).
III
[Der Engel aber, herrisch, wies und wiese
ihm, was geschrieben stand auf seinem Blatte,
und gab nicht nach und wollte wieder: Lies.
IV
Das las er: so, daß sich der Engel bog.
Und war schon einer, der gelesen hatte
und konnte und gehorchte and vollzog] (i: 638).
Rilke’s attraction to the Prophet did not represent a conversion. As a matter of philosophical disposition, Rilke held himself distant from the dictates of all religions. Rather it was an immersion in a spiritual experience that was, at the same time, an expansion of his sense of selfhood. As he wrote later to Karl and Elisbeth von der Heydt on 25 February, “it is worthwhile to have felt God from Mahammed’s side (this perhaps most usable God) and to have tried one’s humanity next to these people in the mosques, in the bazaars and everywhere outside in the unobstructed world-space, or to have put one’s hand on the surface of the earth somewhere, on the pure star of earth” (quoted in Polikoff, p. 451).
Rilke’s journey was halted (for the most banal but critical of reasons: lack of funds) and it was not resumed until January of the following year. Now the real fruits of this venture would come to the fore: Cairo and the culture of Egypt. He and his companion arrived in Cairo, and then almost immediately embarked on trip down the Nile, reaching Luxor and the “incomprehensible temple” of Karnak shortly afterwards. The latter was for Rilke was a work of art (a disturbing work of art). As he enthused in a letter to Clara, he was able to view it by night, “under a moon just beginning to wane, and I saw, saw, saw. Dear Heaven, one summons up one’s strength, looks with all the will to believe with two focussed eyes, and still it begins above them, extends everywhere beyond them (only a god could work such a field of vision). There stands a column, solitary, surviving, and one does not encompass it, so out beyond one’s life does it stand, only with the night can one somehow take it in, perceiving it all of a piece with the stars, whence it becomes human for a second – human experience”.
Rilke in his letters often commented upon the local light, which played a major role in bringing the colours of the Egyptian landscape to life. Rilke responded to this landscape and registered this light and these colours with the eye of a painter, as in a letter to Clara of 10 January: “the colours are just variations on the theme of brown, which possesses the mysterious ability to imitate pink. Strips of field are like the green in miniatures, and one has become increasingly able to discriminate between blacks and blues as colours, and to treat a rare piece of red like a jewel”.
Rilke was deeply taken by the non-European otherness of the sights and by the religion that inspired its culture. The journey left a lasting legacy in Rilke’s deep fascination and respect for Islamic culture and had reawakened spiritual impulses in him. As he wrote to the princess at the end of February, it had all been exhausting and detrimental to his health, but it had delivered ” unimaginably new knowledge”, “a mountain of world that he had wished for and which he had needed” and upon which he would build for the future. Indeed, Rilke would conclude his Duino Elegies with a recall in a poem of “the sublime Sphinx” who refuses to reveal its mystery, “which in silence has / laid our human faces onto the measuring soles of the stars / forever” (“und sie stauen dem krönlichen Haupt, das für immer, / schweigend, der Menschen Gesicht / auf die Waage der Sterne gelegt” (i: 724). As elsewhere in the Elegies where the iconography of Egypt is invoked, the Sphinx here symbolises knowledge as the unknowable, the claim on us of Otherness.
A number of years earlier, in 1920, his experience of Karnak gave rise to a poem in which he tried to capture the beauty (as terror) of his encounter with its intimidating monuments: the Sphinx and the Pylon: One evening, they ventured out into the desert to confront those imposing forms, “in the centre of a moonlit world”.
The guardian at the entrance portioned out at once
III
the shock of height. How lowly he stood beside
the forever rising above itself of the gate.
And now, for our entire life,
the pillars -; those! Was this not enough?
IV
Destruction was appropriate for them.
The highest roof would not be
high enough.
It remained standing and bore the dark Egyptian night.
The Fallah with us
stayed back.
We needed to time to survive all this,
because it threatened to destroy,
that such an edifice belonged to the
existence in which we would die.
[ Der Wächter an dem Eingang gab uns erst
III
des Maßes Schreck. Wie stand er niedrig neben,
dem unaufhörlichen Sich-überheben
des Tors. Und jetzt, für unser ganzes Leben.
die Säule -; jene! War es nicht genug?
IV
Zerstörung gab ihr recht: dem höchsten Dache
war sie zu hoch. Sie überstand und trug
Agyptens Nacht.
Der folgende Fellache
blieb nun zurück. Wir brauchten eine Zeit,
dies auszuhalten, weil es fast zerstörte,
daß solches Stehn dem Dasein angehörte,
in dem wir starben”] (ii: 118).
“Karnak” is a poem, whose complex subdivisions make identifying individual stanzas difficult, a task made even more difficult by the run on structure of several stanzas. Likewise, the metre is variable as is the rhyme, which is in certain stanzas non-existent. A shock is being registered. Rilke carefully adumbrates a scene. The guardians (“Wächter”) are possibly the ram-headed statues the guard the Avenue of the Sphinxes. They are the initial purveyors of a majesty that is a terror, although that majesty is dwarfed by the gates (Pylon”) and pillars that lie behind them. Through the decay of time, they no longer bear a roof, but what they do hold up is something more imposing: the dark night of Egypt.
As Rilke and his companion look, their peasant guide (“fellah” / “Fellache”) hangs back, refusing to go any further into the sacred complex. It is a sight that cannot be countenanced at once. Time is needed to register it, as if the sight is not to destroy the viewer (a destruction that echos on a human level the destruction (“Zerstörung”) that has fallen on the regal and awe-inspiring architecture through time. Rilke finds that like the guardians the two European too are dwarfed by the scene: “the discomforted one, in her travel attire/ and me, a hermit in my theory” (“die Leidende, in deinem Reisekleide, / und ich, Hermit in meiner Theorie” (ii: 119).
Rilke returned to Paris, to his apartment on the rue de Varenne in April 1911. Old habits are taken up, old friend and associates contacted, old cultural patterns activated, but to no avail. Rilke is forced to undergo yet another period of unproductive work and to suffer physical illness. Accidie has settled in. Rilke has become a victim of time. As he wrote to the princess on 10 May, “everything has caught up with me. Time continually steals a march on me. I look at it from behind like a straggler, like a marauder. The devil when will this stop?” It stopped at the end of that year when Rilke when to stay with the Princess at her castle in Duino a small hamlet on the Adriatic coast, south of Trieste. His first visit the previous year had dissolved into the meaningless flourish of aristicratic social life. But his time it, was different. It was here, between October 1911 and May 1912, that Rilke would spend his longest and most productive literary sojourn since his stay in Italy five years earlier, taking advantage of the necessary seclusion to reassess his personal and creative identity. It was in Duino that Rilke wrote the first of his elegies, which would ultimately take their title from the name of that castle. Perhaps to relieve the intensity of poetic introspection (almost painful, if we read his letters), Rilke left Duino in May for Venice, an old haunt and one that he seems to have come to regard as his personal retreat, although he wrote little during his stay. A more radical change of place was needed for the Muse to return. In October, Rilke (now temporarily in Munich) boarded a train for Spain, the initial destination being Toledo. This was where the artist El Greco had lived for most of his life, whose paintings Rilke had been inspired by in Paris. That sense of inspiration has now been made manifest.
On his journey to Spain, Rilke was seeking the depths of the past, but it was the depths of the present that provided the co-stimulant. Since his early days in Paris, Rilke had been friends with Spanish painter, Ignazio Zuloaga (1870-1945). The style of Zuloaga’s paintings, such as “Castilian Landscape”, owed much to those of El Greco in their use of colour and in their thematic focus, often, as in that painting, depicting landscapes where swirling dark skies ominously dwarf small villages and their churches. Zuloaga also drew on the emotive religiosity of El Greco’s work, as in “Christ of the Blood”, where suffering is transfigured through faith. It was acombination of elements that Rilke haoped to find in the medieval cloisteed cities of Spain.
Rilke arrived in Toldeo in early November. Rilke had moved, in fact, not to just a new place but to a new reality. As he wrote to the Princess in early November (taking up a recurrent theme in his work – the failure of language to capture aesthetic immediacy, particularly immediacy linked to spiritual ingress), “what is it like here? That I shall never be able to say (it would be the language of angels, their use of it among men), but that it is, that it is, you will just have to believe me. One can describe it to no one”. Rilke had reached a destination that was not just geographical (a new place to be explored) but a destination for the growth of his self, of his potential for realisation as an individual and as an artist. And in the same letter we read, “my God, how many things have been dear to me because they were trying to be something of all that is here, because a drop of this blood was in their hearts, and now it is to be whole. Will I be able to bear it?
Toledo was a city where, in its culture and its deeply felt Catholicism and art born form the same, life and death fused. The immanence of its spirituality shone forth, for Rilke, from its streets and buildings, all of which were artefacts designed by a greater power. As he wrote, the city “is, in equal measure, for the eyes of the dead, the living and the angels, – here is an object that might be accessible to all three of those so widely different visions, so that over it, they could come together and have one and the same impression” (to the Princess on 13 November). This is a city in which “on the very threshold of houses, prophesying comes” (ditto). As he later related to Elsa Bruckmann (28 November), “you must imagine a reality that is completely possessed by the unheard-of, that bears within it the mission of an apparition [‘Erscheinung] ‘”. What brought Rilke to Toledo was El Greco, and it was in his viewing of his paintings that Rilke found the dark (although multicoloured) depth of Otherness that he was seeking. El Greco was “the beautiful buckle that gathers the great vision more tightly about things”, and Rilke added (in French), he was “an enormous cabochon set in this terrible and sublime reliquary”.
Rilke attempted to depict something of El Greco’s “great vison” in a poem called “Himmelfahrt Maria”. Although El Greco is not named in the poem, its title corresponds to his “The Assumption of the Virgin” (“Asuncion de la Virge Maria”), which was the centre piece of the Church of Santo Domingo el Antiguo in Toledo, and which Rilke would have almost certainly seen whilst there. The poem is in four abba rhyming stanzas. Its opening lines read:
Oh, exquisite one, oh brush of oil, that seeks to ascend,
blue border of smoke from a smouldering basket
and just so the intoning theorbo,
milk of the earthly, pour out,
the heavens softly.
I
[KÖSTLICHE, o Öl, das oben will,
blauer Rauchrand aus dem Räucherkorbe,
grad-hinan vertönende Theorbe,
Mlich des Irdischen, entquill
still die Himmel …] (ii: 46).
Unconventional grammar and typography (capitalisation in “Köstliche” and “Milch” and absence of main verbs) produce the impression of a will straining to ascension, a will that is expressing itself through paint. The spiritual is combined with the earthly (as art is infused with religion). El Greco was known for his exuberant coloration and dramatic brush strokes, and it is possible that Rilke wishes to convey something of this style in the lines of his poem, with their short assertive figuration and energetic formations such “grad-hinan”, and the neo-logistic “entquill”. In the stanzas that follow, such formations occupy an increasing centrality, as the lyrical voice attempts to gain closer contact with his subject, the “Steigende” (stanza 3), a designator that seems to embrace the Virgin and ascending artist alike.
The artist, the city of Toledo and now Rilke himself all dwelt within a landscape that spoke of the elemental. Rilke felt that “El Greco was in this landscape”, where ” ‘the truth of the human spirit has found its final expression, has reached an existence, a visibility which one feels must be the same for a goatherd as for God’s angels’ ” (Prater and Rilke quoted in Prater, p. 217). It was a visibility on which Rilke focussed his painterly eye, as he looked out on one occasion from his room to the sky: “menacing clouds rolled up and spread themselves out far away above the bright reliefs of other clouds, which innocently held themselves against them, imaginary continents -, all of this was above the desolation of a landscape that was made sombre by that”. Against this stormy mass of sky lay the city “in every tone of gray and ochre against the east’s open and yet quite inaccessible blue”.
Rilke wrote no poetry in Toledo, except for one unfinished piece of verse, dedicated to “The Expected One” (“An die Erwartete”). The Expected One was also known as the “Unknown Lady”. The “Unknow Lady” was a spectre, a spiritual apparition who had “appeared” as a communicator in a séance held at Duino castle earlier that year. The unknown lady had spoken of “red earth – glow -steel -chains – churches – bloody chains” (The Poet and the Princess 54), all of which she told the poet he would find in Toledo. Now, “with this feeling of being taken and led with indescribable sureness”, as he wrote to the princess on All Souls’ Day (Selected Letters 219), having arrived in Toledo, Rilke finally encountered face to face these artefacts from the fourth dimension, the red soil around the city and the bloody chains used to tie prisoners to the wall in the monastery of San Juan de los Reyes. As he had learnt from a further séance, the unknown lady was called Rosamonde Trarieu, and was buried in Toledo. Rilke attempted to find her grave in a local cemetery, but in vain.
The first short stanza of “the poem “To the Expected One” reads:
. . . . .
Come at the right time. All this will have already
passed fully through me for you to breathe.
I have long been looking at it, for your sake, without revealing myself,
with the gaze of poverty, and have so loved it.
as if you were already
beginning to drink it to its full.]
[ . . . . .
Komm wann du sollst. Dies alles wird durch mich
hindurchgegangen sein zu deinem Atem.
Ich habs, um deinetwillen, namenlos
langangesehen mit dem Blick der Armut
und so geliebt als tränkst du es es schon ein.]
Otherness possessed Another side for Rilke, who believed in the ability of properly attuned sensibilities to make contact with the dead and dearly departed. Rilke in this poem, in a way that anticipates the crossover of the realms of the living and the dead in the Duino Elegies, encounters in his mind the “expected one”, who is there but not there, occupying a shadowy space between life and death. This slippage of presence is reflected not just thematically but also in the form of the poem. Written in vers libre of irregular metre (but with repeated heavy dactylic and spondee accentuation, and possessing largely consistent line lengths), the poem, beyond the first short stanza, consists of a single sentence (but even that, in keeping with the disorientating modality of the poem, does not end with a period). The speaking subject seems torn a cross a variety of positions, its lack of stability communicated through the fragmentation of lines frequently broken up through caesuras and intrusive punctuation. The latter is evident in the first stanza and increases as the poem develops.
The “I” of the poem is struggling to make contact with an unidentified (perhaps unidentifiable) presence, a visitation that belongs both to his memory (this shadowy figure reaches back to his childhood) and to a present that is not immediate but about (it is hoped) to materialise from the future. “An die Erwartete” is a fragment. There may have been circumstantial reasons for Rilke leaving it thus, but it is possible that its unfinished state relates to its theme the tendentious and internally fraught nature of attempts to recall the dead.
Rilke remained in Toledo for a month and then moved on to other locations, to Seville and then Ronda. Ah wrote in a letter, he wished to remain alive to the mysterious plentitude of the world once it had opened itself to other senses, and he felt that he needed to embrace “everything that transcends the individual, going I know not where, into the future or into the incomprehensible” (The Poet and the Princess 59). After a few weeks, he reached Ronda, an erstwhile Moorish mountain top city in Andalusia, in the plains between Gibraltar and Malaga. Ronda was an impressive sight, “the incomparable phenomenon of this city piled up on two steep rock-masses divided by a narrow deep river gorge”, as if “offering itself up on an immense altar” (Prater, p. 217). “It is indescribable” he wrote, “surrounding the whole is a spacious valley, busied with its expanse of meadows, its evergreen oaks and olive trees, and beyond, as if well rested, the pure mountain range, mountain behind mountain, forming the stateliest distance”. Bucolic plenitude is here supported by an eye that pushes the sense of detail to the extreme. It was, however, an eye that may, at times, have been over extracting reality, and Rilke is aware of this. Writing to the princess two days later, he made the following remarkable admission, critically commenting on a faculty that he had used throughout his life and his career to sustain an aesthetic grasp of the world: “now it seems to me sometimes as if I were using too much violence towards impressions (which I do in practice on so many occasions). I stay too long before them. I press them into my face, and yet they, by nature, already are impressions, aren’t they? even if one very quietly leaves them alone for a while”.
The soulful splendour of Toledo and now Ronda. And yet even these uplifting glimpses of the celestial cannot satisfy Rilke’s restless soul. He seems to be continually in search of something that even he cannot define. In spite of the achievement of the first two Duino Elegies, in spite of his immersion in the spiritually rich climes of Spain and the Occident, he is forced to confess to Andreas-Salomé in a letter of 19 December 1912: “when I look back to a year ago, it does honestly seem to me that I haven’t moved since, except for going round in circles”. As Rilke wrote in a letter to Andreas-Salomé’ on 19 December 1912 from Ronda, “once more, I am a burden on my own heart, with all the weight and with the heaviness of I know not what”. He went into greater detail concerning his malaise to Anton Kippenberg the following month: “my indispositions are not due to the climate but are only a new chapter in this singular overcoming or renewal which my entire nature is having to accomplish in these years”. This involved “a digging-up process of the entire soil of my being in which the uppermost goes down to the very bottom”. These are times “when it would be most propitious to have no consciousness at all”. As he had written to Lou on 17 December, “things must become different with me, from the ground up, otherwise all miracles in the world will be in vain”.
In fact, what Rilke was looking for was not the future but the past (a past, perhaps, informed by the future), and in the same letter to Lou (19 December), he reconstructs the latter in plaintiff nostalgic terms: “I have a feeling that what would help me would be an environment similar to the one that I had with you in Schmargendorf. Long walks in the woods, going barefoot and letting my beard grow day and night, having a lamp in the evening, a warm room, and the moon, as often it suits me, and the stars, when they are there, and otherwise sitting and hearing the rain or the storm, as though it were God himself”. It is picture of a retrospective utopia in which all yearning for the sublime Other is undone.
Rilke remained in Ronda until 18 February 1913, and it was here that he started to write again, producing a series of poems subsequently known (they were first published in 1916) as “Poems to The Night” (“Die Gedichte an die Nacht”).The small number that possessed an overt Spanish referent were called “The Spanish Trilogy” (“Die Spanische Trilogie”). As so often in Rilke’s poetic idiom, universal statement and the autobiographical (indeed, confessional) mode inform one another. The first poem reads:
I
From this cloud, look and see! the star
so wildly covered that was there before- (and from me),
from these dark clustered hills which hold the night,
the night-winds, for a while – (and from me),
from this river on the valley floor that catches
the light from a torn opening in the sky – (and from me);
from me and all this: to make
a single thing, Lord: from me and the feeling
of the flock, penned in the fold, breathing out
the great dark no-longer-being of the world,
from me every light burning in the dark of every house.
Lord: just to make a single thing, from strangers, for
I know no one here, Lord, and from me, from me,
to make but one thing, from those asleep, from
the old men left alone in the hospice, who
cough needily in their beds, from the
sleep-drunk at unfamiliar breasts,
from so much that is uncertain and always from me,
from nothing but me and from what I do not know,
to make that thing, Lord Lord Lord, that thing
that is of the earth and the world, like a meteor gathering
within itself the sum of all its flights, waying nothing but arrival.
I
[Aus dieser Wolke, siehe: die den Stern
so wild verdeckt, der eben war – (und mir),
aus diesem Bergland drüben, das jetzt Nacht,
Nachtwinde hat für eine Zeit – (und mir),
aus diesem Fluß im Talgrund, der den Schein
zerrissener Himmels-Lichtung fängt – (und mir);
aus mir und alledem ein einzig Ding
zu machen, Herr: aus mir und dem Gefühl,
mit dem die Herde, eingekehrt im Pferch,
das große dunkle Nichtmehrsein der Welt
ausatmend hinnimmt -, mir und jedem Licht
Im Fintsersein der vielen Häuser, Herr:
ein Ding zu machen; aus den Fremden , denn
nicht Einen kenn ich, Herr, und mir und mir
ein Ding zu machen; aus den Schlafenden,
den fremden alter Männer im Hospiz,
die wichtig in den Betten husten, aus
schlaftrunkenen Kindern an so fremder Brust,
aus vielen Ungenaun und immer mir;
aus nichts als mir und dem, was ich nicht kenn,
das Ding zu machen, Herr Herr Herr, das Ding,
das welthaft-irdisch wie ein Meteor
in seiner Schwere nur die Summe Flugs
zusammennimmt: nichts wiegand als die Ankunft.] (ii: 43).
Formed in one breathless sentence of twenty-four lines, the first poem in the trilogy possesses no rhyme or consistent metre, and what lloks like the stabilising use of alliteration in certain lines is countermanded by frequent interruptions of destabilsing grammar and syntax (parataxis, in the first two lines, for example) abd by intrusive punctuation. The poem as a whole reads like prose that has been condensed by compelling imagery (centred on light and darkness) and thematically by a lyrical subject whose fixation upon the self (most manifest in the frequent idiosyncratic use of “mir” / “to me” or “from me”) lends the tone of the poem a disconcertedly obsessive quality.
The poem gives voice to the insistent wish of the lyrical subject to create a single thing. It is an aspiration made in the face of a world that has lost “being” (“sein”, line 10) and it is made in contexts that move between the natural (lines 1-9) to the human (lines 12-19), between the stormy intemperance of the fomer, bedecked by continual night (possibly a recall of the Toledo landscape) and quotidian habit (where the dying old and the suckling young are the victims of disquiet). The trope of the making of a (single) thing both looks back in Rilke’s work to the “Dinggedicht” aesthetic formulated in the period of the New Poems (Neue Gedichte), between 1903 and1907, and forwards to the Duino Elegies (1922). In Elegy 7 we are told that “one simple thing that has been truly / grasped is just as good as many” (“ein hiesig / einmal ergriffenes Ding gälte für viele”). It is a philosophy that speaks of the self-sufficiency of the phenomenal world, of a cutting through of complexity (as Rilke found it in the work of Rodin and Cezanne) to the core that resides within it.
It seems a simple declaration (the declaration of simplicity), but in this poem it is framed within a discourse whose textual energies are centripetal rather than centrifugal, and move not towards a centre but away from it, the holism of the former suffering frequent disruption, not only thematically through the uncertainty (“Ungenaun, line 19) that is evident in the overly insistent self-assertion of the lyrical subject (although it finds presence largely in the dative form – the first person is not used until line14), but also textually in the ungainly syntax, anaphoric repetition of words and haltering grammar, all of which contribute to the overall tone of the poem, which suggests despair rather than celebration.
It is, perhaps, for this reason that a deity (“Herr”) is so consistently invoked (in lines 8, 12, 14 and as an uninflected concatenation, in terms of punctuation, in line 21, where it should be read not an invocation but as a call for help). This “Herr” (“God” or “Lord”), however, is not the formal God of the established religions: Rilke remained throughout his life an atheist or, at least, an agnostic. When Rilke invoked “God” in his writing the latter was typically employed as a metaphor for tangible spiritualism or interpolated as a superior witness. On such occasions, “the invoked deity”God” is something that has to exist rather than does exist, an absolute required to set against, as in this poem “the great dark no-longer-being of the world”. Like the Angel in the Duino Elegies, “God” is a fiction that is real, and to inquire into its substantiality is to misunderstand its necessity. “God” never loses its hypothetical status.
In February 1913, Rilke left Spain and returned to Paris, He had already anticipated his departure in a number of letters sent to his friends and supporters. Once back, he took stock of his trip to Spain, which had “gripped my heart so violently” (as he wrote to the Princess on 21 March). “All that is past, like a little sleep”. It had been a dream. Paris surges to meet him like a Toledo that has lost its soul. However, the experience of this lost soul is as expansive as that which he had encountered in Spain, and he now brings to bear on this experience the same visualist sensibility. Rilke bestrides the streets of Paris, as he tells the princess on 21 March, “in walking I occasionally feel a smile on my face, a reflection of this wide and open air, just like one of the houses shimmering at the end of the street, brightly, brightly, notwithstanding perhaps that the saddest thing is happening in it. What reality in this city! I marvel again and again at how pain stands there, misery, horror, each like a bush, blossoming”. What has to be transformed through Rilke’s optic – places and people – has changed, but the optic itself has remained the same, as has the aesthetic imperative behind it.
DELETIONS
Born in Crete, he lived almost his entire adult life in Spain, where he painted religiously inspired work during the Counter Reformation.
Rilke, Duino Elegies Comparing Translations Martin Travers 