(16 May 2025)
(7 716 words)
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That Rilke’s poetry “makes it sympathetic to philosophical interrogation” (Phelan 174) is a view shared by many Rilke scholars. It is an interrogation that typically goes down one of two paths, following routes that are either existential or phenomenological (depending upon whether the focus is on the Malte Notebook or on the “Dinggedichte”). There is no reason why these two paths should not be pursued separately, as parallel courses, but there is one thematic and scriptive area in Rilke’s work that arguably cojoins them: spiritualism: the belief – sometimes called “spiritism” – that it is possible (directly or through a medium), to communicate with the dead, and that the dark presence of the spiritual, the uncanny, that which defies rational explanation, resides within the factual, “normal” world.
Most scholars see spiritualism purely as a sentimental discourse within Victoriana, its attempt to engage with the transcendent the product of a second-hand and debased Romanticism. Its source, it is argued, lies in the nineteenth century fad for psychic renewal indulged in by those unable to accept the loss of their loved ones, a mindset cognate with telepathy, theosophy and the occult. Rilke’s spiritualism, when it is treated at all, is approached as a quirky tangent to the “genuine” philosophical content of his writing (Bishop and Sutherland, see “Works Cited” below, are exceptions). According to one biographer, Rilke espoused spiritualism purely to accord with the sentiments of his aristocratic associates, most notably his benefactor, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (Ralph Freedman, The Life of Rainer Maria Rilke, p. 241), but this was not the case. Rilke remained a convinced spiritualist throughout his life. As he explained to the princess in December 1913, “I am willing to give ear to any spirit if it has to expand and needs to break into my life” (Rilke, Selected Letters 236), and in a diary entry for 14 December 1900 [Worpswede diary], he wrote:
“Sometimes I remember in exact detail things and epochs that never existed. I see every gesture of people who never lived a life and feel the swaying cadence of their never-spoken works. And a never-smiled smiling shines. Those who were never born die. And those who never died lie with their hands folded, repeated in beautiful stone, on long level sarcophagi in the halflight of churches no one built. Bells that never rang, that are still uncast metal and undiscovered ore in mountains, ring. Will ring: for what never existed is what is on its way, on its way over to us, something in the future, new. And perhaps I’m remembering distant futures when what never existed rises up in me and speaks”.
Rather than marginalise spiritualism in Rilke’s work, we might see it more productively as a viaduct that links and supports the various stands of his”philosophical” thinking, the existentialist and “its thematics of negative desire that proliferate in Rilke’s poetry: the insatiability of desire, the powerlessness of love, death of the unfulfilled or the innocent, the fragility of the earth, the alienation of consciousness” (Paul de Man, 50), and the phenomenological, which represented for Rilke “a kind of vacating of the self and [an] extending of the unconscious to create a space in which things can go on ‘without us’ ” (Lough, 111).
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In 1896, at the age of twenty-one, Rilke moved from Prague to Munich to continue his university studies. Here he made contact with a number of philosophers, including Ludwig Klages and Alfred Schuler, who were interested in psychic phenomena and the paranormal, and who formed a group known as the Munich Cosmic Circle. On 16 February 1897, Rilke wrote to Karl Baron du Pre. Although not a member of the Munich Circle, as the author of Studies from the Realm of Secret Knowledge (1890) and Spiritualism (1893), du Pre adhered to its key supernatural tenets, “maintaining that man is a dual being whose second self appears in somnambulistic states and reaches to the Beyond” (see Notes to Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 367). Rilke wrote to du Pre explaining his attraction for the latter’s work: “apart from the charm of the mysterious, the domains of spiritualism have for me an important power of attraction because in the recognition of the many dormant forces and in the subjugation of their power, I see the great liberation of our remote descendants” (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 25).
In another letter written in 1904, Rilke had assevered, “I believe that nothing that is real can pass away” (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 145). What was “real” included the living presence of those who had died. One such presence was the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker whom Rilke had met (and become enamored with) during his brief stay at the artists’ colony in Worpswede in the summer of 1900. In 1907, Modersohn-Becker died following the birth of her child. Two years later, Rilke wrote “Requiem for a Friend” (“Freundin” in the German), in which he greets her return from the dead as a revenant. She comes back not just in his mind, as a memory, but as a material reality, as the plenitude of absence.
This was not the first time that Rilke had evoked Paula Becker in her absence. In January 1901, she had paid him a visit in his apartment in Berlin. He had moved here following his sudden departure from Worpswede the year before and had stayed in touch with Paula. In a letter written to her soon after her visit on the 13th, he described how he felt once she had left:
“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 same note of ritualistic assimilation informs Rilke’s poem. It opens begins with an apodictic statement and then develops in the form of a dialogue:
” I have had dead ones, and I let them go”
A line is drawn over the departed souls that Rilke has known, but he does not draw that line for Paula, although it is difficult to know, here as elsewhere in the poem, to what extent the poetic persona (Rilke) has willed Paula into existence. His attitude to her throughout is a vacillating one that prevents any clear contours from forming around his personality. This is the result, possibly, of the endemic mystery inherent in receiving a revenant or, on a biographical level, something that reflects, perhaps, his attitude to Paula during her life, a loved-one married to someone else. and perhaps someone who was not sufficiently appreciative of her art. As William Gass observes, “as with most apparitions, guilt is the ghost that walks within the Requiem“, and he adds, “at the end of her life Rilke “had been ambivalent, unhelpful, distant” (Gass 124):
“You alone, you come back:
you brush against me, you move around, you want
to bump up against something so that it makes a sound
and discloses you”.
The poetic persona queries why Paula has returned to this second-rate world, and finds her amiss that she has done so, for not being happy with eternity. Indeed, this is an upbraiding, a note of frustrated criticism, and characterises a voice that moves throughout the poem between admonition (although the sources of latter are in the pain caused by her death) and quizzicality “I believed you to be much further along. It confuses me”, through to grief and finally his acceptance of death, which brings no form of resolution. The poem also exhibits a certain note of desperation, which comes from the attempt to understand the dead in life. Paula is not content simply to be with Rilke; she is seeking, in the form of a plea, some explanation from him:
“And if only I could say that you are just resting,
that you come out of generousity, out of a spillling over,
because you are so certain, so secure in yourself,
that you wander around like a child, unafraid
of places where someone might do you harm –
But no: you are pleading. That cuts me
to the bone and goes through me like a saw”,
Paula was a painter who excelled in still-life paintings, in which she depicted inanimate objects, often fruit. When she fell pregnant, she too saw herself as the bearer of fruit, and represented herself thus in her work (and there is just a touch, intended or otherwise, of erotic jouissance in Rilke’s description of her):
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Took yourself out of your clothes, carried
yourself before the mirror, let yourself in
into your looking, which remained high above
and did not say: that is me, but that is“.
This is not simply a self-portrait but the depiction of an essential reality. Rilke would like to preserve her in that mode, but she will not allow him to do so. The mirror was a key image, a “Grundproblematik”, in Rilke’s work (Bollnow 250). The mirror represented a unity of subject and object (the person that we are looking at is ourselves). It is this unity that permits the lyrical voice to go beyond the simple “me” of the reflected image to posit an essentialist “is“:
“I want to keep you as you presented
yourself to yourself in the mirror,
deep within and away from everything. Why now do you come differently?”
The encounter transforms Rilke’s perception of Paula as he knew her (and they were putative lovers), but he accepts the fact of her transformation in three short lines that voice foundational tenet of the spiritualist credo:
“Come here into the candlelight. I am not afraid
to look at the dead. If they come,
they have the right to put themselves into our gaze, like other things”
Rilke (or his persona) grasps the fact that Paula is present. He discerns that presence, but he cannot see her directly only (like a blind person) indirectly through the sense of sight. Indeed, Paula remains a spectral figure throughout the poem (in spite of the many references to the tactile nature of her invoked presence), something that is reflected in the “extreme restlessness of the poem and in its “to-and-fro” oscillation of tone, mood and diction (Charlie Lough, Rilke: The Life of the Work. Oxford UP, 2020, p. 216). As Marielle Sutherland has noted, “the poetic voice roams desperately and restlessly (ghostlike in itself) around the irregular lines of the requiem poem, faltering in its faith in its own images of absence and concealment” (Sutherland p. 133):
“To understand that you are here. I understand.
Just as a blind man understands the things around him.”
“I would like to throw my voice like a shawl
Over the shards of your death
and pull it until it tatters
and everything that I say would go so ragged
into this voice and freeze”.
Paula is a solitary figure, in death as in life, but this is the fate of artists as they transform the world through their art. The artist belongs to life but only at a distance. To love also is to be alone (Rilke attests, broaching a subject that he will further explore in the Duino Elegies) because it is an absolute state that transcends the presence of the loved-one:
“The women suffer: to love means to be alone,
and artists sometimes sense in their work
that where they love they have to transfigure.
You began both”.
The return of Paula, her visit to Rilke, is seen by the poet as a possibility for knowledge, as a path to self-understanding:
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“Do not come back. If you can bear it
remain dead amongst the dead. The dead are preoccupied.
But help me in a way that does not distract you
as that which is furthest away sometimes helps me: in me”.
There is no sense of what this help may consist of. Some readers may be disappointed at the lack of explanation in these lines, noting the “dissonance that is unallayed”, the fact that “something troubled and unresolved remains at the end” (Charlie Louth paraphrasing Katharina Kippenberg in Lough 229). The failure to impose closure is, however, deliberate. appertaining to a worldview that sees life in death and death in life. Those, like Rilke, who hold to this worldview must necessarily live in penumbra, often seeing not clear shapes but the shadows of these shapes, both in the appearance of things and others but also shadows within the cognitive and conceptual attempts to explain and define through language these shadows. it is a practice of un-demarcated vision that Rilke will bring to completion in the Duino Elegies.
Rilke’s sensitivity towards those departed was to increase. In October1911, the poet went to stay with his new benefactor, the Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis and her husband, at their castle at Duino on the Adriatic coast. The princess, in fact, was to be an important facilitator in Rilke’s increasing bent to spiritualism. As she recounts in her memoir, on his arrival Rilke immediately felt in touch with the past history of the castle and with the people who had once lived there: “it really seems to me that Rilke lived amongst the shades at Duino. Not only did he feel the presence of Therese [Marie’s grandmother], but he was also aware of two other phantoms who seemed real to him as though time had stood still. These were two of my mother’s sisters whom I had never known: Raymondine, who had died as a bride at the age of twenty, and Polyxene, who had only reached the age of fifteen. We possessed portraits of both these girls”. The two departed souls, according to Rilke, “demanded his attention all of the time”, as he observed to her disbelieving brother, “who had no relation whatsoever to the ‘fourth dimension’ [a super-sensory element existing in a person or object beyond the three dimensions of height, length and width] ” (The Poet and the Princess 37-38). It was also at Duino that Rilke participated in a series of seances. Once again, Marie left an account of what happened:
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“One evening I brought the planchette [a heart shaped Ouija board made from polished wood with a hole in the centre for a writing implement] to the red drawing room, and we had a séance. My son held the pencil, I sat beside him and Rilke sat at the other end of the room and silently wrote down questions, which he did not read out to us until they had been answered. I was convinced that it was Rilke’s subconscious mind which manifested itself, and told him so, but in spite of my sceptical attitude, I was very interested. My opinion was not shared by Serafico [the Princess’s nickname for Rilke, meaning in Italian someone who shares the qualities of a Seraphin with, as the dictionary tells us, “della sua sublime intensità di amore o di carità”]. The unexpected answers to his unspoken questions impressed him profoundly” (The Poet and the Princess 53). The first communicator, the spirit who was contacted, was a member of the Hohenstaufen family, “but then, however, another spirit seemed to push out the Hohenstaufen – a communicator who assumed the name ‘die Unbekannte’ [the ‘unknown lady’] and demanded to speak to the poet”. “A long dialogue ensued, and although the questions were carefully concealed, the answers were almost invariably apposite. These are some of his questions and the answers, all of which I copied out on the night of the séance:
‘Which were the flowers that you preferred on earth?’
‘Crowns of roses, crowns of thorns’
“What shall I call you?’
‘Smiles, tears, blossoms, fruits, death’ “.
Later he was told: ‘You must travel … up the mountain, down into the valley, only towards the stars … You too will sound like the waves, where steel softly clings to angels …’ ” (The Poet and the Princess 53). There followed three more sittings at Duino, and one conducted later that year in Munich but without the presence of the Unknown Lady.
Rilke was indeed to travel, the following year to Spain, which was the home of the unknown lady who had died there (stabbed to death). She was, Rilke had been informed by a further spiritual visitor from the other world, buried in Toledo. Rilke left for Spain in October 1912. His first destination was Toledo. The unknown lady had spoken during a séance of “red earth – glow -steel -chains – churches – bloody chains” (The Poet and the Princess 54), and 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), he finally encountered 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, face to face. As he had learnt from a further séance, the unknown lady was called Rosamonde Trarieu, and Rilke attempted to find her grave in the Toledo cemetery, but in vain. He left Toledo for Seville and then Ronda, alive to the mysterious plentitude of the world once it is opened up to other senses, to “everything that transcends the individual, going I know not where, into the future or into the incomprehensible” (The Poet and the Princess 59).
Spain was the most recent destination in an extensive peregrination that Rilke embarked on in 1911, which took in Venice, North Africa and Egypt. All might be seen as paths of flight away from something, and that something was Paris. Rilke was looking for Otherness as happy consciousness and the fourth dimension as a liberation rather than the oppression of the dark inwardness of Angst and morbidity that he had previously experienced in Paris, where he had lived for eight years. In 1910, he published (just a few months before his experiences in Duino), his Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge. Here the boundaries between death in life; life in death also merge, an existential affinity evident from the very first words of the narrative: “people come here [Paris] to live; I should rather have thought that they come here to die”, the twenty-eight-year-old Danish narrator (a poet who writes little poetry),
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Malte observes (The Notebook 3). In this at least semi-autobiographical novel (diary, memoir, family history), spiritualism, with its ontological dismemberment of logic, time and space, also dwells, but it does so in a macabre and existentially acute form. Death, imagined, real (and what is the difference?), longed for, forgotten or anticipated, symbolic or metaphorical, the basis for this life or another life, provides the existential contours of Rilke’s book. People carry death within themselves (The Notebook 15). Indeed, death possesses animate human attributes, speaking to us, impatiently demanding things from all who come near it (The Notebook 13). The narrator encounters departed spirits such as a relative of the family, Christine Brahe (The Notebook 33-35), and Abalone (the youngest sister of Malte’s mother), who although departed makes a visitation: “it is a mirror that she holds. See! She is showing the unicorn [a family icon] its likeness – I imagine that you are here. Do you understand, Abalone? I think you understand” (p. 122). There is nothing abnormal in this. Sten, a family servitor, “always trafficked with spirits”, the narrator observes in a matter-of-fact way, “Abelone’s father often asked after the spirits, as one would enquire about the health of someone’s relatives. ‘Are they coming, Sten?’, he would ask benevolently. ‘It is good if they will come’ ” (The Notebook 142).
Such moments of a lived afterlife appear throughout the text, as in the face of the “young, drowned women” made into plaster cast in the morgue and hung outside a shop, “because it smiled, smiled so deceptively, as though it knew” (The Notebook 72). Sometimes the dead wish to make sure that they are dead. Malte’s dead father undergoes a further medical procedure to achieve. He has requested that his heart should be perforated, because “he wanted certainty”. The procedure is not effective: the dead will only die for a second time with difficulty. Malte witnesses the procedure and is left stranded observing past and future mortality: “I had the feeling that suddenly all time had gone from the room. We seemed like a group in a picture. But then time came rushing back and overtook us with a slight, gliding sound, and there was more of it than could be used. Suddenly there was knocking somewhere; I had never heard such knocking before – a warm, firm, double knocking”. The heart is knocking: “the knocking, so far as its tempo was concerned, sounded almost malicious” (The Notebook 148).
And the ambit is total. When attuned, all sentient creatures know the supernatural. “Cavalier” was the family dog. At one moment in the narrative, he gets up from the floor to greet the spectral visitation of his dead mistress. What then happened is told by a family member: “Cavalier shot from under the table as he always did and ran to meet her. I saw it, Malte, I saw it. He ran towards, although she was not coming. We understood that he was running to meet her. Twice he looked round at us, as if questioning. Then he rushed at her as he always did, just as he always did, Malte; and he reached her, right up to lick her.” “But suddenly there was a howl, and whirling around from his own leap in the air, he dashed back with unaccustomed clumsiness, and lay stretched out before us, strangely flat, and never moved” (The Notebook 84).
The sense for the immanence of mortality is pervasive, indeed, volantes. One warm summer’s evening, Malte’s apartment is invaded by flies. They too act as a spiritualist paradigm: they are at first aware and then unaware and then aware again of their mortality: “they sat there motionless for hours and gave themselves up as lost until it occurred to them that they were still alive; then they flung themselves blindly in every direction, not knowing what to do when they got there, and one could hear them falling down again, here, there and everywhere. And finally, they crawled about and slowly died all over the room” (The Notebook 156). As Rilke will make clear in the sixth Duino Elegy – the flies are humankind.
At other times in Malte’s narrative, the macabre becomes grim humour. This is the case in the description of the final moments of the death of the poet Felix Arvers (1806-1850, best known for his poem “un secret”). As he neared his end in a civic hospital, he overheard a nurse pronouncing “corridor” as “collidor”. “At that, Arvers thrust death from him. He felt it necessary to put this right first. He became perfectly lucid and explained to her that it ought to be pronounced ‘corridor’. Then he died. He was a poet and hated the approximate” (The Notebook 158).
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The encounter with death in the Notebook produces dimensions of experience that are fluid and indeterminable, but behind them dwells a reality that is no laughing matter. If death provides the key term in the first section of Malte’s narrative, it is with fear (“I am afraid”, The Notebook 7) with which the second section opens. The sleep of reason produces monsters. Very much like the character Roquentin will later do in Sartre’s Nausea (published in 1938, a novel that bears remarkable stylistic and thematic affinities with the Notebook), Malte too discerns a disturbing presence that exists over and beyond the person, and which gives rise to an existential dread that seemingly comes from nowhere and goes nowhere and hides behind all understanding, but simply exists as a “dark and secret threat” (Bollnow 39). As Malte painfully observes, “this disease has no particular characteristics; it takes on those of the person it attacks” (The Notebook 59). It is a sickness unto death, a nameless otherness to which Malte gives a name (that is not a name): the Big Thing. Malte is in a clinic when the Big Thing, which he has known since childhood, presents itself to him: “Now it was there. Now it grew out of me like a tumour, like a second head; it seemed to be part of myself”. “And my heart had to make a painful effort to drive the blood into it; there was hardly enough blood there. And the blood went into it unwillingly, and came back sickly and tainted. But the Big Thing gathered and grew before my face (The Notebook 58). The Big thing, “with a somnambulistic assurance, it drags from the profoundest depths of each one’s being a danger that seemed passed, and sets it before him again, quite near, imminent” (The Notebook 59). “All forgotten fears are there again” (The Notebook 60).
The Big Thing does not respect the modalities of past, present and future. Nor does the spiritualist mind (and perhaps the Big Thing is simply the hostile converse of this mind, and perhaps Malte has given himself over to the rage of Caliban). As the Notebook makes clear, the spiritualist attunement thrives on and cultivates the dislocation of time and space, where “the nearest tones take on the tones of distance”. At one point in his narrative, Malte’s hands, watched at a distance by their owner, are transfigured under a table, and are “moving all alone, down there, examining the ground”. Here, curiosity turns into “terror”. In the same disembodied state of the spiritualist experience, Malte observes, “I felt that that one of the hands belonged to me, and that it was committing itself to some irreparable deed” (The Notebook 88).
It is an experience, of self-alienation, of the uncanny twisting of the self through space and time, that Rilke had written about elsewhere, regarding an event that had befallen him on his first visit to Duino, in a short prose piece simply titled “Experience” (“Erlebnis”, 1913). He had come down from the castle into the surrounding gardens, where he had leant against a gnarled tree: “little by little his attention was awakened by a feeling that he had not known before; it was as if almost imperceptible vibrations were passing into him from the inside of the tree”. “His body was being treated as if it were like a soul and was put in a position to absorb a degree of influence that could not really have been felt at all in the distinctness of other bodily conditions”. He felt that he was receiving “a subtle and extensive message”. The unnamed narrator (although the context in which this happens – a castle with servants beside a sea – makes it likely that it is a persona of Rilke) feels that “he had come to the other side of nature”. Here spiritualism makes a phenomenological transformation of the world possible, in which new textures, time and space combine to permit access to the “other side”. In In this frame of mind, all objects appeared to him more distant and at the same time somehow more true”, exactly as they had done to Malte when he had been in a state of heightened perception (see The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, p. 17). Lest we overlook the cojoining of the two modes, the spiritualist and the phenomenological, indeed, their mutual dependency, the narrator proceeds immediately to liken himself to “a revenant who, already living elsewhere, wistfully enters into this tenderly laid away place”. “He was so convinced of this for a few seconds that the sudden appearance of a member of the household made him stand there, really prepared in his nature to see Polyxene or Raimondine, or any other deceased of the house, step out at the turn of the road”. “Rilke describes a spiritual experience in which the speaker inhabits the same plane as those who have died (Klaus Fischer, “Beyond Existentialism: The Orphic Unity of Life and Death”. In Rilke’s Sonnetts to Orpheus: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives. Edited by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge and Luke Fischer. Oxford UP. 2019. p. 143).
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“Experience” was written in 1913 (although not published until 1919), and narrator at the beginning tells us that it describes something that happened a year earlier. If that is the case, then the experience (which seems at least quasi autobiographical, or, at least, that is how it is presented) took place during a period in which Rilke had begun work on his Duino Elegies. That work was not completed until 1922, a year that saw the composition of the Sonnets to Orpheus. The latter work also contains a spiritualist dimension, evident in the myth of Orpheus, who links the Underworld with the world of the living. The bipartite cycle of poems was dedicated to the memory of Wera Ouckama Knoop, a friend of Rilke’s daughter, Ruth, a noted dancer who died at the age of nineteen. He dedicated them as a memorial (“Grab-mal”), the latter term, when hyphenated, meaning “grave marker”. “Through the ‘wound’ of Wera’s death, this life is opened up to its spiritual other half” (Klaus Fischer, “Beyond Existentialism: The Orphic Unity of Life and Death”. In Rilke’s Sonnetts to Orpheus: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives. Edited by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge and Luke Fischer. Oxford UP. 2019. p. 150). Rilke’s spiritualist hue is most evident in sonnets Part One, 2 (“where is her death? Before your song is lost, / can you not find this motif?”, Sonnet 6 (“Does he belong here? No, from / both realms his ample nature has grown”), Sonnet 7 (“Of the abiding messengers, / he reaches far into death’s door / glorious fruit in golden bowls”) Sonnet 9 (“Only in the dual / realm will voices become / eternal and pure”), Sonnet 16 (“You know the dead”), and Part Two, Sonnet 13 (“Be ever dead in Eurydice – arise singing / with greater praise”), Sonnet 16 “We hear the flowing from that well / where none but the dead drink”), and Sonnet 24 (“only death, the laconic / knows what we are / worth”).
But it is only in the Elegies that spiritualism forms a consistent and recurring conceptual theme. The entire cycle is a threnody seeking the light. When asked by is Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, in 1925 what the Duino Elegies was about, Rilke replied: “I use the phenomenal world for play and experimentation” (see Rilke. Selected Letters 392), adding “affirmation of life as well as of death prove themselves as one in the Elegies. To admit the one without the other would, it is here realised with exultance, be a limitation which would ultimately exclude everything infinite. Death is the side of life that is turned away from, and unillumined, by us”. “There is neither a This-side nor a That-side but a single great unity in which the beings who transcend us, the angels, have their habitation” (see Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Letters, 1902-1926. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. London. 1988. pp. 236-237).
It is precisely through an anonymous voice emerging from a centre of consciousness that is not that of the poet that calls the Duino cycle into existence. It utters the words “who, then, if I should cry would hear me from the Orders of Angels”. This is not Rilke (or his persona) speaking, although it is often in the secondar literature treated as if it were, but a phantom, a spectre. He stops and asks himself, “what is it?” [notably, not ‘who’ is it?] “What is next?” (the account was relayed by Rilke to Marie von Thurn. See The Poet and the Princess 35). Rilke registers these sentiments almost in the form of a dictation (he writes them immediately in a notepad). Here, as elsewhere in Rilke’s poetry, at crucial moments in his writing its source comes from an unspecified Otherness.
“Who, then, if I should cry …” forms the opening words of Elegy 1, and it is in this Elegy that the first of several spiritualist manifestations takes place. Midway through that Elegy (lines 62-68), the poetic persona embarks on a meditation, brought about by his remembrance of certain church plaques, on the “young dead”:
“When you were in the churches of Rome and Naples
did their fates not speak to you in hushed tones?
And were you not moved by the epitaphs
of their noble lineage, such as the one seen a short while ago
on a plaque in Santa Maria Formosa?
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But what do they want from me?
Am I supposed to undo in silence the semblance of injustice
that may at times hinder the pure motion of their spirits?
As has been observed, with the “young dead” “Rilke is referring to the diseased in a spiritually real sense, and not as a mere remembrance of their lives” (Fischer 147). Dead souls are beseeching the poetic persona. In German, the key line reads: “leise soll ich des Unrechts / Anschein abtun”. What does “soll” mean here? Is it “supposed to” or “should”? If it is the former, then we have a mandate that comes from beyond the poet, perhaps a promise that he has made to his aristocratic benefactors that he would remember their young dead in his poetry. If it is the latter, “should’, then it comes from within, from a personal wish to perpetuate their memory. Either way, the young dead are imminent and his recall of them represents a wish to de-familiarise death as an absence and re-familiarise it as a presence, as the “hard present” invoked in the poem, “Death”. It is a practice that brings death in all its forms into the centre of life, where it loses its intangibility, its deferred character: death which is “probably so close to us that the distance between it and the inner centre of our hearts cannot be registered” (see Rilke, Selected Letters 265).
In Elegy 1, the lyrical subject seems to observe the young dead from a distinct distance. As depicted in their memorial plaques, they are artefacts of eternity. In the fourth Elegy, however, that distance (and it is almost one of aesthetical contemplation) is closed, as the poetic persona engages with the presence of his diseased father. The lyrical subject leaves its spectating position and its view of puppetry to address the dead father (without any apparent connection between the two, although the spiritualist vision has no need of such logical or narrative connections): “am I not right? You, father, around me to whom life / tasted so bitter after you took a sip of mine”. The father occupies a disturbing space between the living and the dead. Lines 43-47 read:
“you, father, since you died, deep within me,
often within my hopes,
you have remained anxious for me, and have surrendered
those realms of serenity that the dead possess
for my paltry future”.
It is a portrait of the dead as living. The reader might wish to normalise this incongruity by allocating it to a process of recollection where the dead father is simply being remembered by the son, but in doing so we would lose the blurring of boundaries that generates the often intellectually unsettling contours of the Elegies, where normally clearly definable and discrete categories are problematised through a shifting ontological spectrum and through, as here, a spiritualist grasping of “reality”. In spite of his spectral form, the “dead” father possesses an intensity of presence that secures for him the status of the living.
The son joins the father in “death” but nevertheless remains on this side of the recognisably “living”. But, as Rilke makes clear in Elegy 9, that distance can be closed should we embrace what Rilke’s enigmatically calls the “Bezug” (“other realm”). On this side, we can grasp fortune in “our simple hands”:
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“But, oh, into
our other realm, what do we carry over?
Not the power of looking, which was slowly learnt here, and nothing
that happened here. None of that. Suffering, then. And, above all,
the heaviness of being,
the long experience of love:
the pure unsayable”.
“Bezug” possesses a variety of meanings, including “dimension”, “realm”, “relation” and “relationship”. Most of these translations treat “Bezug” as an affinity rather than a place or state of its own, but “Bezug” is almost certainly referring to death, a reading that is supported by the verb “carry over”, suggesting the voyage across the Styx in classical mythology. “Bezug” represents a cross-over between divergent yet related existential conditions: life in death, and death in life, the invisible that Rilke strives to make visible, the unsayable that yet must be described. “Bezug” is the other side that can be met on this side, once we have journeyed there.
Elegy 10 charts precisely that journey. Of all the Elegies, some readers may find number ten the most unapproachable, because it works not with spiritualism but within it, and its narrative produces in the process a landscape that is, both physically and metaphorically, unique. In fact, Elegy 10 is the only Elegy in the cycle that contains a narrative, a sense that all involved are going somewhere. The journey begins amongst the debased detritus of the city, where death is avoided through sham artistry and proceeds to an open plain, where death is greeted by a young dead who is led its acceptance by a female Lament, who “leads him gently through the broad landscape”:
Shows him the tall trees of tears
and the fields of ripe melancholy
(the living sees them only as fresh foliage)
shows him the grazing herds of grief”.
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Death has now assumed allegorical form, almost as if we are in a medieval mystery play, where the living presence of death was a person who lived with us, because the Other world was an immanence, and death a familiar, someone that you can touch. The young dead and Lament embark on a journey leaving the debased detritus of urban life, with its negative view of death, for a rural plain beyond, where a positive view of death prevails. The youth has left this world, hurrying into an early death, unable to see or understand it clearly. Lament, however, both sees and understands, as they traverse a landscape where nature not only has emotions but extreme emotions, and which replete with symbols of esoteric knowledge:
“In early death, his gaze remains unfocussed, unsteady,
but her gaze, coming from behind
the rim of her pschent, startles an owl.
And the bird, skimming with slows trokes
along her cheek (the one with the fuller curve), delicately
sketches into the hearing of the newly dead,
as upon a double page spread ope,
an indescribable curve”.
In this walk through the plain of suffering, conventional notions of time formed around narratives of linearity and progress make no sense. An owl, a symbol of wisdom, appears (as does the bird of transcendence) from behind a sphinx, an event that is framed against what cannot be understood but which, nonetheless, must be understood through a series of writing motifs that allow deep knowledge, the gnostic knowledge of the “fourth dimension”, to penetrate the ear and be engraved into the face. The dead one continues his journey, further into the mountains and further into pain:”Alone he climbs on, into the mountains of primal pain, / Not even his footfall echoes from his soundless fate”. There is no final destination for the young dead. Being dead seems a process rather than a state, and Rilke marks this nonresolution in his text with an asterix, followed by two brief stanzas that are addressed to us:
“But, should they make us think, these eternally dead, of an
allegory, see, they would point perhaps to the catkins
hanging from the empty hazels, or to rain that falls
on the dark earth in Spring.
And we, who think of happiness as rising,
would feel the emotions that almost overwhelms us,
when a happy thing falls”.
A similar penetration of the spiritualist immaterial (but none the less defining) pervades the cycle as a whole, even when the presence of the “fourth dimension” is not made explicit. That penetration is evident in the way that time, space and causality are construed in the Elegies.
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As Hans Egon Holthusen has argued, the Elegies, and Rilke’s writing in general, inscribe a mode of feeling that is “an endless remembrance, intensification, re-presentation and realisation; hence it is the enemy of time, and of itself creative of space”. And he adds, Rilke inhabits “a world from which time is excluded, in which all things which are real (that is, which can be felt) subsist side by side in a kind of magic contemporaneity” (see Holthusen 24). This magic contemporaneity is evident throughout the objects in Rilke’s writing (and Holthusen gives examples from the Sonnets to Orpheus). “These things are the present in a world made of space, a present that is not the ‘here and now’ of time, but an ‘ever’ and ‘never’, a suspension of time” (Holthusen 25).
The terms of the equation are essentially spiritualist, and Rilke made clear the terms of that equation in his letter of November 1925 to Witold von Hulewicz. Here, he recalled the inception of the Sonnets as the result of the premature death of Wera Ockama Knoop, “for this connection is another point of contact with the centre of that kingdom whose depths and influence we share, without boundaries, with the dead and the unborn”. And he added, “we, who are of the present, are not content for one moment in the world of time, nor are we fixed in it. We overflow continually towards those of the past, towards our origin”.
It was a vision that led to a preoccupation with boundaries in Rilke’s work (in / out, near / far, the concern with neighbours in Malte, for example). The same concern with boundaries helps structure conceptual knowledge of space (but not just knowledge, but our way, a la Heidegger, of handling it) in the Elegies. Sometimes the boundaries are clear, as in those that separate the lovers in Elegy 4, who “get no further than their boundaries” (which are both within them and beyond them), and other times the boundary references are obscure, as in the mysterious “Schwelle” of Elegy 9, and the lines,
“what is it for a pair of lovers that they should slowly wear away / their own ancient threshold of their door,
after the many that have gone before them and will come after …
lightly?”
A door to where? And who are the many that have been through this surely private door? Both place and destination possess an eerie nebulousness.
This confusing of boundaries can also be felt in the narrative structure of the Elegies, in the texts that come from nowhere and seem to possess a spectral independence from what proceeds and follows them. This is the case in Elegy 5 where amidst an extended depiction of the antics of the street performers a strange little vignette is interlarded (lines 36-39) to speak of the pain a boy has suffered when young (and it is made even stranger by the fact that it is the pain and not the boy that is the subject of the lines). This is then followed by two further texts that have no logical lineage: an invocation (line 73) of a place that the lyrical subject, who now dramatically makes an appearance, bears in his heart, but does not know where (and interrogative pronoun is both repeated and italicised – indeed, the often ungraspable nature of the Elegies is promoted through pronouns such as “where?”, “Who?”, When?”) this place is. Could this place be the “laboured” or “tiresome nowhere” that now follows:
“And, all at once, in this laboured nowhere,
suddenly: the unsayable place, where the pure too-little
inexplicably transforms itself,
veers into that empty too-much”.
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The subject of lines are two adverbs that have become nouns and in doing so have lost any degree of a comprehensible status (they are inexplicable, “unsayable” – a major trope in the Elegies). “Nowhere” also basks in its inscrutability, and in its vacuity rubs uneasy semantic shoulders with the active presence of “laboured”. If the “fourth dimension” could speak, it would do so in uncanny tones such as these, where states of unidentified being transform themselves in ways that are beyond explanation.
Works cited:
Bishop, Paul, “Rilke: Thought and Mysticism”, in Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Rilke. Cambridge UP, 159-173.
Bollnow, Otto Friedrich, Rilke. Stuttgart. 1951.
de Man, Paul Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke and Proust. Yale UP, 1979.
Fischer, Klaus, “Beyond Existentialism: The Orphic Unity of Life and Death”. In Rilke’s Sonnetts to Orpheus: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives. Edited by Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge and Luke Fischer. Oxford UP. 2019. pp. 133-177.
Gass, H. William, Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation. Basic Books. New York. 1999.
Holthusen, Hans Egon, Rilke. Translated by J.P. Stern. Bowes and Bowes, Cambridge. 1952.
Lough, Charlie, Rilke: The Life of the Work. Oxford UP, 2020.
Phelan, Anthony, “Rilke and his Philosophical Critics”, in Karen Leeder and Robert Vilain (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Rilke. Cambridge UP, 174-188.
Rilke, Rainer Maria, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, translated by John Linton. Hogarth Press 1969.
Rilke, Rainer Maria, Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1892-1910, edited by Jane Bannard Greene and M.D. Herter Norton. Norton Library, no date.
Rilke, Rainer Maria, Selected Letters, 1902-1926. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. London. 1988.
Rilke, Rainer Maria, Modersohn-Becker / Rilke Correspondence. Translated by Ulrich Baer. Eris. 2024.
Rilke, Rainer Maria, Duino Elegies. A New Translation and Commentary, Martin Travers. Camden House / Cambridge University Press. 2021.
Sutherland, Marielle, Images of Absence: Death and the Language of Concealment in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Berlin. 2006.
Thurn und Taxis, Marie, The Poet and the Princess: Memories of Rainer Maria Rilke. Amun press, no date.
Rilke, Duino Elegies Comparing Translations Martin Travers 