Reading Rilke

by William H. Gass

  Thomas Hardy, who is also a very great poet, tackles this kind of transmigration, as he always tackles his topics, head on, in some lines written after Louisa Harding, whom he’d been sweet on as a boy, died well along, at seventy-two.

  Portion of this yew

  Is a man my grandsire knew,

  Bosomed here at its foot:

  This branch may be his wife,

  A ruddy human life

  Now turned to a green shoot.

  These grasses must be made

  Of her who often prayed,

  Last century, for repose;

  And the fair girl long ago

  Whom I often tried to know

  May be entering this rose.

  So, they are not underground,

  But as nerves and veins abound

  In the growths of upper air,

  And they feel the sun and rain,

  And the energy again

  That made them what they were!14

  Like so many of the sentiments expressed in the Elegies, these thoughts are more than a bit balderdashy. In this poem, nothing asserted or surmised can possibly be so. Yet the sentiment expressed is everywhere splendid. Nor may we imagine, even for a moment, that Hardy believes that a portion of this yew is a man his grandsire knew. So what does he believe? Will he pick the rose his fair girl may have entered, mow the grass? How is one to reconcile the facts (false) and the sentiments (goody, they are not underground, what a comfort!) with what I take to be the excellence of the poem—a poem whose sole purpose, it appears, is to make the poet momentarily feel better? Can the poet really wish his fair girl were entering a rose? What is genuine here, beyond the rhyme? Is poetry the elevation of silliness into the sublime? Speaking of the silly sublime, let us risk blindness and take a look at the Angels.

  Why are the Angels of the Elegies so fortunate, so superior, in the poet’s eye? Each one is sufficient unto itself. Everything that streams out of them returns like an echo. They pass through the realms of life and death without feeling a tweak of difference. If we joined Leibniz to Berkeley for a moment, we might imagine the Angels as monads possessed of a deity’s power to perceive. God first anticipates our existence (we plan a picnic), then He directly makes us exist (we have our picnic), then afterward he remembers the way we were (we recall the picnic). We could say, then, that we’d always been, and would always be, so long as God, our Author, continued to plan for and expect us, steadily perceive us, and faithfully remember. A novel does no less.

  Everything that’s mirrored in a monad’s mind would exist on that single plane—as one kind of perception or other—and a whole history could unroll like a tapestry or the carvings on a triumphant pillar, or simply be read—anticipated and remembered—like the words of a text. Countries which fear foreign influences like to become “self-sufficient,” as the hermit does, the sage who sits in front of his mountain cave slowly ruminating on his gnomic wisdom; but individual self-sufficiency, obviously desirable up to a point, becomes dangerously antisocial in ways that are quite obvious. Rilke’s Angels, that is, have little to recommend them as ideal states for human beings. However, they are models of perfection which a formalist esthetic might advance as admirable for works of art.

  A work of art, from this point of view, is complete and self-contained. That does not mean that it makes no reference to the world. Monads are worlds in themselves. It does not mean that the work cannot depend upon information that must be found elsewhere. The explanation of every word in a poem lies elsewhere: the nature of hydrangeas, for instance. The poem does not require every quality these plants possess, but it calls on some, and pulls them into its orbit. The poem practices close observation, but the accuracy it displays is necessary only because otherwise it would draw the wrong information from the reader. Called “Blue Asters,” it would fail the litmus test. If the flowers are fictional, as characters in a novel are, the exactitude of observation (number, closeness, aptness of details, for instance) need only be mimicked; its precision can be as fictional as the rest; however, here, the point of the poem is that the flowers are not fictional, but appear and reappear in our lives like lacy Victorian valentines—maybe quaint, but prized.

  Formal perfection is equivalent to internal justification. If someone cries “Fire!” in a crowded theater, there’d better be a fire; if someone cries “Fire!” and the firing squad does, there will be an order to appeal to to justify the killing, not so easily a reason to find; and if someone recites

  This ae nighte, this ae nighte,

  Every nighte and alle,

  Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,

  And Christe receive thy saule

  then a belief in God, God’s Son, in sin, in having sinned, and consequently the need and yearning for salvation may explain the occurrence of the prayer, but the formal order of the dirge will suffice for its nature. Then I may sing these lines, in Benjamin Britten’s harrowing setting of them, any time I wish, even though a pagan, unneedy and unshriven. And their feeling will be never more genuine or “meant” or necessary.

  When the animals emerge from the forest to hear Orpheus sing, they form a magic circle and suffer a sea change. They enter a peaceable kingdom very unlike the war-filled world they just left. If I bring a revolver onstage during a play, or, like Beckett’s Winnie, I pull it out of my bag, even though it may be as real as the murder it might occasion in ordinary life, it is now a prop and can make only prop noise when it goes off, cause a fake bullet to fly, inflict only a simulated wound and, in pretended consequence, an actor’s feigned collapse into a role-real death, followed by a life-real rise at the curtain’s fall. The space of the poem is similarly transformative.

  Words are not just changed there, they are made. For what in the world does “fleet” mean? Well, there is a “brig” in the second stanza.

  From Brig o’ Dread when thou may’st pass,

  Every nighte and alle,

  To Purgatory fire thou com’st at last;

  And Christe receive thy saule.

  How does it help, this brig? I think: not at all. Some have suggested “sleet” should take its place, or “salt.” Salt? If I were forced to make a substitution, it would be “flight.” Fortunately, I don’t have to. Confounded curiosity leads me to look the word up: its etymology is probably “float” or “swim.” So I am swimming past the brig o’ dread on my way to hell, when …? Leave “fleet” alone. I know “fleet” no better than “wabe,” yet in time, and after repeated recitations, I happily gyre and gimbel in the wabe, and I fear fire, fleet, and candle-lighte, and am stricken with awe—though I perhaps perversely think this word I don’t know the meaning of should be spelled “flete.” Still, playing dumb won’t clinch the argument. As with “wabe,” I know what “fleet” means in this context. “Everything fleeting concerns us, we most fleeting of all.” “Fleet” means more than “fleeting,” however—a whole lot more. “Fire and fleet and candle-lighte” are a wondrous trio—creating one another as they go.

  Such space is Angel space, such life is Angel life, where everything is experienced like daydream theater, self-enclosed and without consequence. Daydreams can have consequences, of course. Some of them are rehearsals for a seduction (say) which might actually take place. Plays make money or fold. Consequences? Not when one is imagining that some wooden O holds the vasty fields of France.

  Attempts to break out of the frame, extend the apron of the stage, push into the audience (plant actors in it, enlist it, attack it), or use illusion or other ruses to heighten verismo, to journalize: each demonstrates the power of the art’s domain. It becomes as elastic as a rubber face, little dotted lines rush out and around every extension, and the audience isn’t insulted or actually frightened, the planted actors didn’t pay their way, nor do Céline’s raging pages hurt our hands. The reader is in the magic circle, too. There he may entertain the most sublime, the most harrowing, the most merry, the most morose, of ideas as if he were serving tea to friends.

 
Who makes the death of a child out of gray bread,

  or leaves it there to harden in the round mouth

  like the ragged core of a sweet apple?15

  The shock of these lines is mock shock. Admiration is genuine. “Out of gray bread,” “to harden in the round mouth” “the ragged core of a sweet apple.” Words like these set the mind free of the world. Free to see and feel afresh the very world it’s been freed from.

  However, as I’ve previously indicated, Rilke didn’t want the Elegies to be self-contained Dinge like the New Poems. He had begun his career as a poet of effusion, then trained himself to be a poet of reception; now (it is 1914, the same year as “The Great Night”) he needed to become a poet of internal intensity. Before he could pour forth again, he would have to work on himself and all the material he had stored like compost for a garden. I have already quoted a few lines from the poem that expresses this necessity as he saw it, and his forlornness and blind self-absorption in front of a war he was probably unaware was coming. The poem demonstrates, as his laments so often did, that Rilke had really nothing to complain about. He was actually at the height of his Orphic power.

  TURNING-POINT

  The way from an intense inwardness to greatness passes through sacrifice.

  For Rudolf Kassner

  For a long time his gaze had achieved it.

  Stars would be brought to their knees

  by the force of his upflung vision,

  or he would kneel himself to scrutinize,

  and the fragrance from this insistence

  would drowsy a god,

  till it slept in the smile that it smiled at him.

  Towers he would stare at so

  they were startled from their shapes—

  restoring them suddenly in a storm of stones!

  But how often the landscape,

  worn down by daylight,

  came to rest in his quiet perceiving, at evening.

  Animals entered his open look

  like a meadow, trustingly grazed there;

  even the imprisoned lions

  peered in, as though on a strange species of freedom;

  birds flew straight and easy through a space

  which felt their flight;

  flowers gazed back at him

  as large as they are for children.

  And the rumor that a Seer was about

  stirred the dimly,

  more dubiously visible—

  stirred the women.

  How long had this looking lasted?

  How long had his soul fasted?

  gone begging in the depths of his glance?

  When he, whose profession was Waiting, stayed in strange towns, the hotel’s

  bemused and preoccupied bedroom

  morosely contained him, and in the avoided mirror

  the room presided again,

  and, later, in the tormenting bed,

  yet again—

  where this adjudicating air,

  in a manner beyond understanding,

  passed judgment upon his heart—whose beating could barely be felt

  through its painful burial in his body—

  and pronounced this hardly felt heart

  to be lacking in love.

  (And denied him any further devotions.)

  For such looking, you see, has its limits.

  And your simply gazed-over world

  wants to grow greater through love.

  The work of the eye is complete now;

  work next at the heart’s work—

  on those images you’ve captured within you,

  led in and overcome and left unknown.

  Look—inside bridegroom—on your inside bride,

  so superbly drawn out of a thousand natures:

  a beauty thus far won,

  but thus far never loved.16

  If the persona of the poet plainly presides in most of these lyrics of lamentation and self-scrutiny (as one might expect), while a universalized “I” is the speaker of the Elegies, most of the Dingegedicht (“The Panther,” “Torso of an Archaic Apollo,” “Blue Hydrangea,” and “Death”), as well as many of the Sonnets to Orpheus, emerge from a voice not unlike that of a moral and esthetic conscience: either directly, “You must change your life,” or indirectly, as if the poet were saying, “And you should have seen, felt, thought this, too.” Does eating an apple (even in special circumstances) give us immense joy? No. But perhaps it ought to. In a machine-made world, in a world of multiplying masses and increasing commercialism, where heads by the millions are filled with vulgar images, stupid thoughts, and crass pleasures, it is incumbent on those of us who wish to “rise above ourselves” (and hence above others) to perform first the hard holy work of the eye and then the painful hidden work of the heart. We are not here to praise the Lord, but to praise the world, to show the Angel—things.

  Praise this world to the Angel, not the unutterable one.

  You cannot impress him with the splendor you’ve felt,

  for in the heaven of heavens, where he feels so sublimely,

  you’re but a beginner. Show him some simple thing, then,

  that’s been changed in its passage through human ages

  till it lives in our hands, in the shine of our eyes, as a part

  of ourselves. Tell him things. He’ll stand more astonished,

  as you stood by the roper in Rome or the potter in Egypt.

  Show him how happy a thing can be, how innocent and ours;

  how even Sorrow, in the midst of lamenting, is determined to alter,

  to serve as a thing, or fade in a thing—to escape

  into beauty beyond violining. These things whose life

  is a constant leaving, they know when you praise them.

  Transient, they trust us, the most transient, to come

  to their rescue; they wish us to alter them utterly,

  within our invisible hearts, into—so endlessly—us!

  Whoever we may finally be.17

  By now, Rilke’s psychological patterns should be fairly clear. First, he expects of ordinary life far more than it can possibly produce in any regular way. Second, he consequently enters a state of dismay and disappointment. Third, he requires of the poet that he lead an elevated life anyway. Fourth, the poet, in order to lead that elevated life, is forced to accept and praise the same ordinary world he began by disdaining.

  In short, an absolute intimacy is demanded. Then, when this is found to be impossible, the effort to love is redoubled. Love that’s unrequited, love without any physical involvement, love which will last because it is almost a private unseen state of the soul, becomes the higher obligation. Everything is in flux, therefore we should embrace change. Why?—in order to remain. “Who speaks of victory? To endure is everything.”

  And if what’s earthly no longer knows you,

  say to the unmoving earth: I flow.

  To the rushing water speak: I stay.18

  The death of a young woman, before her life has really begun, is awful, therefore we shall celebrate it; childhood is misery, so we shall call it wonderful, innocent and open. Heritage is status, so we shall deny our Czech past, refuse to be labeled a German, find that everything Austrian disgusts us, regret that our parents live on like monsters inside us, and, because we believe each man is a multitude—of ogres and urges going back to the primeval slime—we shall require, in its stead, to see Unity … Oneness: Maninkindness, if I may sound German. Using our carefully created higher awareness, we should seek the simple openness of the animal. Aloof from the mob, we nevertheless join it—to cancel the count. Hoping to merge with all things, celebrate distance. Practice makes perfect, but as “The Fifth Elegy” warns, perfection soon shows itself to be empty and sterile. And if we observe our own heart’s curtain lift to display a thoroughly bourgeois performance (as we do in the fourth), shall we boo and catcall?

  Hey! I’m waiting. Even if the lights go out;

  even if I’m told, “Tha
t’s all”; even if absence

  drifts toward me like a gray draft from the stage;

  even if none of my ancestors will sit silently by me anymore,

  nor a woman, nor the boy with the squinting brown eyes:

  I’ll stay in my seat. One can always watch.

  Over and over again, Rilke takes away with one hand, and gives with another. What he takes away may have been a gift, but what he gives is always a task. Life is not a song, he says, so sing!

  In sum: we live only once, and everything that fills this life, we shall have only once—once and no more. And what is this life but our awareness of ourselves and our awareness of the world? Alas, most of this consciousness of ours is narrowed, perverted, and wasted by the burdens of daily life. We can try to save ourselves through love, which turns out only too often to be an attempt to possess someone or something, to hold back the flux (love me forever!), but also to obstruct the loved one’s freedom. If the world awaits our seeing, if our duty is to give consciousness to things, that consciousness will disappear with bitter quickness, for we are the most fragile of all. So what is to be done? Leave that consciousness behind as a quality of our created things; deposit it in the forms and textures we give to objects. But our created things are mostly crushed and tossed away after use like daily newspapers or concert programs. We care only for power, and, having it, do what? Go to war for more, consume the fruits of the earth, make paper cups from which to drink our Todlos, “the dark bitter beer so sweet to the addicted, so long as they swallow it while chewing on fresh distractions.” Those few attainments which display the grace of great things, we must take into ourselves and save from an indifferent multitude. Because all our knowledge, even the gift of a pleasant life, comes to nothing if we know more, enjoy more, only to destroy more. “The Seventh Elegy” comes right out with it.