Ahead of All Parting

by Rainer Maria Rilke

  O Lacrimosa: “O tearful [woman].” The epithet usually refers to Mary lamenting for Jesus at the foot of the cross.

  Ernst Křenek (1900–1991): Austrian composer. His setting for this poem, for “high voice” with piano accompaniment, was published in 1926 as his opus 48.

  You know that, in general, all attempts to surprise my verses with music have been unpleasant for me, since they are unrequested additions to something already complete in itself. It has rarely happened that I have written verses which seemed either suited for, or in need of, stirring up the musical element, out of a mutual center. With the little trilogy “O Lacrimosa” (which would like to pretend an imaginary Italian origin, in order to be still more anonymous than it already is—) something remarkable happened to me: this poem arose for music—, and then came the wish that sometime (sooner or later) it might be your music in which these impulses could find their fulfillment and their permanence.

  (To Ernst Křenek, November 5, 1925)

  [Ah, not to be cut off] (Paris, summer 1925)

  [Now it is time that gods came walking out] (Muzot, mid-October 1925)

  [Rose, oh pure contradiction] (In the testament of October 27, 1925)

  At Rilke’s request, these lines were carved on his gravestone in the churchyard of Raron.

  Idol (First line: Paris, summer 1925; completed: Muzot, November, 1925)

  Gong (Muzot, November 1925)

  [Four Sketches] (Muzot, December 8, 1925)

  The “little notebook with four prose-pieces” was sent to Monique Briod on December 10.

  this page, Rustic Chapel: The small St. Anne chapel next to Muzot.

  … the abandoned rustic chapel which I take care of; because of its decrepitude, no mass is read in it any longer, and so it is now given back to all the gods and is always filled with open simple homage.

  (To Clara Rilke, April 23, 1923)

  this page, “Farfallettina”: Little butterfly.

  this page, bilboquet: A wooden toy, consisting of a cord with a ball on one end and a stick on the other; the object of the game is to catch the ball on the spike-end of the stick.

  For Veronika Erdmann (Val-Mont, March 10, 1926)

  Dedication-poem in a copy of his translation of poems by Paul Valéry.

  Elegy (Muzot, June 8, 1926)

  Dedication, Marina Tsvetayeva (1892–1941): One of the great modern Russian poets. She and Rilke never met in person, but they exchanged a number of intense letters during the spring and summer of 1926. Her long elegy, “Novogodnee” (“For the New Year”), written early in 1927, describes the impact of Rilke’s death on her.

  l. 18, Kom Ombo: Probably a stop on Rilke’s trip to Egypt in 1911.

  l. 20, marks as a signal on the doors: Cf. Exodus 12:7, 13.

  [Dove that ventured outside] (Ragaz, August 24, 1926)

  Written to Erika Mitterer after she had undergone a serious operation.

  That a person who through the horrible obstructions of those years had felt himself split to the very depths of his soul, into a Once and an irreconcilable, dying Now: that such a person should experience the grace of perceiving how in yet more mysterious depths, beneath this torn-open split, the continuity of his work and of his spirit was being re-established—this seems to me more than just a private event. For with it, a measure is given for the inexhaustible stratification of our nature; and many people who, for one reason or another, believe that they have been torn apart, might draw special comfort from this example of continuability. (The thought occurs to me that this comfort too may somehow have entered into the achievement of the great Elegies, so that they express themselves more completely than they could have done without endangerment and rescue.)

  (To Arthur Fischer-Colbrie, December 18, 1925)

  PART 2

  Selected Prose

  FROM

  The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

  (1910)

  [FACES]

  Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It’s still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time.

  For example, it never occurred to me before how many faces there are. There are multitudes of people, but there are many more faces, because each person has several of them. There are people who wear the same face for years; naturally it wears out, gets dirty, splits at the seams, stretches like gloves worn during a long journey. They are thrifty, uncomplicated people; they never change it, never even have it cleaned. It’s good enough, they say, and who can convince them of the contrary? Of course, since they have several faces, you might wonder what they do with the other ones. They keep them in storage. Their children will wear them. But sometimes it also happens that their dogs go out wearing them. And why not? A face is a face.

  Other people change faces incredibly fast, put on one after another, and wear them out. At first, they think they have an unlimited supply; but when they are barely forty years old they come to their last one. There is, to be sure, something tragic about this. They are not accustomed to taking care of faces; their last one is worn through in a week, has holes in it, is in many places as thin as paper, and then, little by little, the lining shows through, the non-face, and they walk around with that on.

  But the woman, the woman: she had completely fallen into herself, forward into her hands. It was on the corner of rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. I began to walk quietly as soon as I saw her. When poor people are thinking, they shouldn’t be disturbed. Perhaps their idea will still occur to them.

  The street was too empty; its emptiness had gotten bored and pulled my steps out from under my feet and clattered around in them, all over the street, as if they were wooden clogs. The woman sat up, frightened, she pulled out of herself, too quickly, too violently, so that her face was left in her two hands. I could see it lying there: its hollow form. It cost me an indescribable effort to stay with those two hands, not to look at what had been torn out of them. I shuddered to see a face from the inside, but I was much more afraid of that bare flayed head waiting there, faceless.

  [THE DEATH OF CHAMBERLAIN BRIGGE]

  When I think back to my home, where there is no one left now, it always seems to me that things must have been different back then. Then, you knew (or perhaps you sensed it) that you had your death inside you as a fruit has its core. The children had a small one in them and the grownups a large one. The women had it in their womb and the men in their chest. You had it, and that gave you a strange dignity and a quiet pride.

  It was obvious that my grandfather, old Chamberlain Brigge, still carried a death inside him. And what a death it was: two months long and so loud that it could be heard as far away as the manor farm.

  The long, ancient manor-house was too small for this death; it seemed as if new wings would have to be added on, for the Chamberlain’s body grew larger and larger, and he kept wanting to be carried from one room to another, bursting into a terrible rage if, before the day had ended, there were no more rooms that he hadn’t already been brought to. Then he had to go upstairs, with the whole retinue of servants, chambermaids, and dogs which he always had around him, and, ushered in by the chief steward, they entered the room where his dear mother had died. It had been kept exactly as she had left it twenty-three years before, and since then no one had ever been allowed to set foot in it. Now the whole pack burst in. The curtains were pulled back, and the robust light of a summer afternoon examined all the shy, terrified objects and turned around clumsily in the forced-open mirrors. And the people did the same. There were maids who, in their curiosity, didn’t know where their hands were loitering, young servants who gaped at everything, and older ones who walked around trying to remember all the stories they had been told about this locked room which they had now, incredibly, entered.

  But it was especially the dogs who were excited by this place where everything had a smell. The tall, slender Russian wolfhounds loped busily back and forth behind the armchairs, moved across the rug swaying slightly in long dance-step
s, stood up on their hind legs like the dogs on a coat-of-arms, and, leaning their slender paws on the white-and-gold windowsill, with sharp, attentive faces and wrinkled foreheads gazed right and left into the courtyard. Small, glove-yellow dachshunds sat on the large silk easychair by the window, looking as if everything were quite normal. A wire-haired, sullen-faced setter rubbed its back on the edge of a gilt-legged table, and on the painted top the Sèvres cups trembled.

  Yes, it was a terrible time for these drowsy, absentminded Things. Down out of books which some careless hand had clumsily opened, rose leaves fluttered to the floor and were trampled underfoot; small, fragile objects were seized and, instantly broken, were quickly put back in place; others, dented or bent out of shape, were thrust beneath the curtains or even thrown behind the golden net of the fire-screen. And from time to time something fell, fell with a muffled sound onto the rug, fell with a clear sound onto the hard parquet floor, but breaking here and there, with a sharp crack or almost soundlessly; for these Things, pampered as they were, could not endure a fall.

  And if anyone had thought of asking what had caused all this, what had called down such intense destruction upon this anxiously protected room,—there could have been only one answer: death.

  The death of Chamberlain Christoph Detlev Brigge at Ulsgaard. For he lay on the floor in the middle of the room, enormously swelling out of his dark blue uniform, and did not stir. In his large, strange face, which no one could recognize now, the eyes had closed: he no longer saw what was happening. At first they had tried to lay him on the bed, but he had put up a fight, for he hated beds ever since those nights when his illness had first grown. Besides, the bed in this room had turned out to be too small, so there was nothing left but to lay him on the rug; for he refused to go downstairs.

  So now he lay, and one might think that he had died. As it slowly began to grow dark, the dogs had one after another slipped out through the half-closed door. Only the stiff-haired setter with the sullen face sat beside its master, and one of its wide, shaggy forepaws lay on Christoph Detlev’s large gray hand. Most of the servants were now standing outside in the white hallway, which was brighter than the room; but those who had stayed inside sometimes stole a glance at the large darkening heap in the middle of the room, and they wished that it were nothing more than a large blanket over some rotten inanimate object.

  But there was something more. There was a voice, the voice that, seven weeks before, no one had known: for it wasn’t the Chamberlain’s voice. This voice didn’t belong to Christoph Detlev, but to Christoph Detlev’s death.

  Christoph Detlev’s death was alive now, had already been living at Ulsgaard for many, many days, talked with everyone, made demands. Demanded to be carried, demanded the blue room, demanded the small salon, demanded the great banquet-hall. Demanded the dogs, demanded that people laugh, talk, play, stop talking, and all at the same time. Demanded to see friends, women, and people who had died, and demanded to die itself: demanded. Demanded and screamed.

  For, when night had come and, exhausted, those of the servants who didn’t have to sit up tried to get some sleep, Christoph Detlev’s death began screaming, it screamed and groaned, it howled so long and continuously that the dogs, which at first had howled along with it, fell silent and didn’t dare to lie down and, standing on their long, thin, trembling legs, were afraid. And when, through the huge, silvery Danish summer night, the villagers heard it howling, they got up out of bed as if there were a thunderstorm, dressed, and stayed seated around the lamp, without a word, until it was over. And the women who would soon give birth were brought to the most remote rooms and to the most inaccessible alcoves; but they heard it, they heard it, as if it were screaming from inside their own bodies, and they begged to be allowed to get up, and came, white and heavy, and sat down among the others with their blurred faces. And the cows that were calving then were helpless and miserable, and the dead fruit had to be torn out of one of them, along with all the entrails, since it refused to come out at all. And everyone did their daily work badly and forgot to bring in the hay because they spent the day dreading the arrival of night and because they were so worn out by the sleeplessness and the terrified awakenings that they couldn’t concentrate on anything. And when on Sunday they went to the white, peaceful church, they prayed that there might no longer be a master at Ulsgaard: for this one was a terrifying master. And what they were all thinking and praying, the minister said out loud up in the pulpit, for he too had no nights anymore and could no longer understand God. And the churchbell said it, having found a terrible rival which boomed out all night long and against which, even when it rang with all its metal, it could do nothing. Indeed, they all said it; and one of the young men dreamed that he had gone to the manor-house and killed the master with his pitchfork; and they were so exasperated, so overstrained, that they all listened as he told his dream and, quite unconsciously, looked at him to see if he were really brave enough to do that. This is how people felt and talked in the whole district where, just a few weeks before, the Chamberlain had been loved and pitied. But though there was all this talk, nothing changed. Christoph Detlev’s death, which had moved in at Ulsgaard, refused to let itself be hurried. It had come for ten weeks, and for ten weeks it stayed. And during that time it was master, more than Christoph Detlev Brigge had ever been; it was like a king who is called the Terrible, afterward and for all time.

  This was not the death of just any old man with dropsy; this was the sinister, princely death which the Chamberlain had, all his life, carried inside him and nourished with his own experiences. Every excess of pride, will, and authority that he himself had not been able to use up during his peaceful days, had passed into his death, into the death that now sat squandering these things at Ulsgaard.

  How Chamberlain Brigge would have looked at anyone who asked him to die any other death than this. He was dying his own hard death.

  [FOR THE SAKE OF A SINGLE POEM]

  … Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough)—they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else—); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,—and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

  [FEARS]

  I am lying in my bed five flights up, and my day, which nothing interrupts, is like a clock-face without hands. As something that has been lost for a long time reappears one mornin
g in its old place, safe and sound, almost newer than when it vanished, just as if someone had been taking care of it—: so, here and there on my blanket, lost feelings out of my childhood lie and are like new. All the lost fears are here again.

  The fear that a small woolen thread sticking out of the hem of my blanket may be hard, hard and sharp as a steel needle; the fear that this little button on my night-shirt may be bigger than my head, bigger and heavier; the fear that the breadcrumb which just dropped off my bed may turn into glass, and shatter when it hits the floor, and the sickening worry that when it does, everything will be broken, for ever; the fear that the ragged edge of a letter which was torn open may be something forbidden, which no one ought to see, something indescribably precious, for which no place in the room is safe enough; the fear that if I fell asleep I might swallow the piece of coal lying in front of the stove; the fear that some number may begin to grow in my brain until there is no more room for it inside me; the fear that I may be lying on granite, on gray granite; the fear that I may start screaming, and people will come running to my door and finally force it open, the fear that I might betray myself and tell everything I dread, and the fear that I might not be able to say anything, because everything is unsay able,—and the other fears … the fears.

  I prayed to rediscover my childhood, and it has come back, and I feel that it is just as difficult as it used to be, and that growing older has served no purpose at all.

  [THE MAN WITH ST. VITUS’ DANCE]

  Yesterday my fever was better, and this morning the day began like spring, like spring in paintings. I want to go out to the Bibliotheque Nationale and spend some time with my poet, whom I haven’t read for many weeks, and afterward perhaps I can take a leisurely walk through the gardens. Perhaps there will be a wind over the large pond which has such real water, and children will come to sail their little red boats.