New Poems, 1907
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Introduction
Früher Apollo / Early Apollo
Mädchen-Klage / Girl’s Lament
Liebes-Lied / Love Song
Eranna an Sappho / Eranna to Sappho
Sappho an Eranna / Sappho to Eranna
Sappho an Alkaïos / Sappho to Alcaeus
Grabmal eines jungen Mädchens / Funeral Monument of a Young Girl
Opfer / Sacrifice
Östliches Taglied / Eastern Aubade
Abisag / Abishag
I / I
II / II
David singt vor Saul / David Sings before Saul
I / I
II / II
III / III
Josuas Landtag / Joshua’s Council
Der Auszug des verlorenen Sohnes / The Departure of the Prodigal Son
Der Ölbaum-Garten / The Olive Garden
Pietà / Pietà
Gesang der Frauen an den Dichter / Song of the Women to the Poet
Der Tod des Dichters / The Poet’s Death
Buddha / Buddha
L’Ange du méridien / L’Ange du Méridien
Die Kathedrale / The Cathedral
Das Portal / The Portal
I / I
II / II
III / III
Die Fensterrose / The Rose Window
Das Kapitäl / The Capital
Gott im Mittelalter / God in the Middle Ages
Morgue / Morgue
Der Gefangene / The Prisoner
I / I
II / II
Der Panther / The Panther
Die Gazelle / The Gazelle
Das Einhorn / The Unicorn
Sankt Sebastian / Saint Sebastian
Der Stifter / The Donor
Der Engel / The Angel
Römische Sarkophage / Roman Sarcophagi
Der Schwan / The Swan
Kindheit / Childhood
Der Dichter / The Poet
Die Spitze / The Lace
I / I
II / II
Ein Frauen-Schicksal / A Woman’s Fate
Die Genesende / The Convalescent
Die Erwachsene / The Grownup
Tanagra / Tanagra
Die Erblindende / Going Blind
In einem fremden Park / In a Foreign Park
Abschied / Parting
Todes-Erfahrung / Death Experienced
Blaue Hortensie / Blue Hydrangea
Vor dem Sommerregen / Before the Summer Rain
Im Saal / In the Hall
Letzter Abend / Last Evening
Jugend-Bildnis meines Vaters / Portrait of My Father as a Young Man
Selbstbildnis aus dem Jahre 1906 / Self-Portrait from the Year 1906
Der König / The King
Auferstehung / Resurrection
Der Fahnenträger / The Standard Bearer
Der letzte Graf von Brederode entzieht sich türkischer Gefangenschaft / The Last Count of Brederode Evades Turkish Capitivity
Die Kurtisane / The Courtesan
Die Treppe der Orangerie / The Steps of the Orangery
Der Marmor-Karren / The Marble-Wagon
Buddha / Buddha
Römische Fontäne / Roman Fountain
Das Karussell / The Carousel
Spanische Tänzerin / Spanish Dancer
Der Turm / The Tower
Der Platz / The Square
Quai du Rosaire / Quai du Rosaire
Béguinage / Béguinage
I / I
II / II
Die Marien-Prozession / Procession of the Virgin
Die Insel / The Island
I / I
II / II
III / III
Hetären-Gräber / Tombs of the Hetaerae
Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes / Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes
Alkestis / Alcestis
Geburt der Venus / Birth of Venus
Die Rosenschale / The Bowl of Roses
Copyright
Introduction
Rilke arrived in Paris for the first time in September 1902, commissioned by a German publisher to write a monograph on Rodin. He was twenty-seven, and already an accomplished poet with a considerable body of work behind him. In addition to the outpourings of his early years (nine books of poetry and fiction between 1894 and 1899), two of the three sections of The Book of Hours were complete, and the first edition of The Book of Images was about to be published. All this early work is unremittingly subjective; it still belongs tonally and texturally to the impressionistic, feeling-centered world of a late-nineteenth-century aesthetic. But what in the beginning borders on callow self-indulgence (one of the volumes of poetry is called In Honor of Myself) gradually deepens into a disciplined lyric temperament. The spacious, gently modulated rhythms of the first part of The Book of Hours are the creations of a poet who is very sure of himself; Rilke later said he could have continued in this style for the rest of his life.
But the move to Paris was to change everything. Shortly after Rilke arrived there, he met Rodin, and his interest in him soon deepened into near discipleship. As his enthusiasm for the sculptor’s work increased, so did his dissatisfaction with his own. Rodin was a laborer, a craftsman, and the energy and dedication with which he immersed himself in the actual process of making seemed to Rilke a rebuke to his own lyric dexterity and slavish dependence on inspiration. With Rodin’s “travailler, toujours travailler” ringing in his ears, he set about acquiring an entirely new set of working habits—forcing himself to write every day during regularly scheduled hours, wandering about Paris practicing the art of observation, taking notes, making lists of subjects for poems. Meanwhile he began to entertain the idea of a poetry that would answer to what he described as Rodin’s “art of living surfaces”—a poetry that would somehow manage to belong to the world of things rather than feelings. The results—appearing slowly at first, then coming to fruition in an incredible burst of creative energy that spanned the summers of 1906 and 1908—were the two volumes of the New Poems, which together constitute one of the great instances in modern literature of the lyric quest for objective experience.
What specifically is “new” about the New Poems? The most striking transformation occurs in Rilke’s language, which grows simultaneously more lucid and complex. Compression of statement and elimination of authorial self are taken to their extremes in the pursuit of an objective ideal. Only a few of these Dinggedichte or “thing-poems,” as Rilke liked to call them, are actually about objects, but all of them have a material quality, and confront the reader with a sculptural, freestanding presence. Even their semantic densities communicate a sense of volume and contour. One is always aware of them as things made. Syntax, especially, becomes a tensile material capable of being worked into structures that remind one more often of the space-mobilizing forms of Arp than of Rodin’s massive presences. Even in a poem like “The Capital,” devoted entirely to the description of a static object, visual image interacts with a kinesis of line and syntax to make the thing come alive in the imagination:
the vaulting’s
ribs depart from the tangled capital
and leave behind there crowded and mysteriously
interwoven, fluttering creatures:
their hesitance and the suddenness of their heads
and those powerful leaves, whose sap
mounts like a fit of temper, finally spilling
over in a quick gesture that clenches
and thrusts out—:
Several of the New Poems participate even more directly than this in the movements and energies they describe—the chthonic windings of “The Tower” and the flamenco gestures of “Spanish Dancer” are especially brilliant instances. Seldom is visual perception an end in itself, and often it is the focus of a poem’s deconstructive energies: a gazelle dissolves into the stream of discontinuous metaphors that evoke it; a marble fountain becomes a complex microcosm of fluid interchanges and secret relations. “As if “s proliferate through the poetry, keeping the reader’s attention fixed not so much on the object-world as on the zone where it and the imagination interact. Even the icons of indifference that figure so prominently in the New Poems live in the imagination whose desire for relation they refuse:
What do you know, stone creature, of our life?
and is your face perhaps more blissful still
when you hold your tablet out into the night?
(“L’Ange du Méridien”)
This interanimation of object and consciousness is, finally, the great theme of the New Poems, in spite of their apparent worship of states of withdrawal, apartness, and fulfilled isolation. At their most radical they seek to open the dimensions of what a phenomenologist like Merleau-Ponty would call the “lived world,” where subject and object are inseparable aspects of an imaginatively engendered unity. In “The Bowl of Roses,” the New Poem that goes furthest in this direction, what begins as an object of perception is gradually transformed by the imaginative impulse it releases into a multifarious world teeming with metamorphic energies:
What can’t they be: wasn’t that yellow one,
lying there hollow and open, the rind
of a fruit in which that same yellow,
more concentrated and orange-red, was juice?
And was its bursting-open too much for this one,
since in the air its indescribable pink
has taken on the bitter aftertaste of violet?
and that cambric one, isn’t it a dress,
the chemise still clinging to it, frail
and breath-warm, both of them cast off
in the morning shadows by the old woodland pool?
And this one, opalescent porcelain,
fragile, a shallow china cup
and full of small shining butterflies,—
and that one, containing nothing but itself.
The transformative capacities of the roses are, of course, those of the imagination that beholds them, but the effect is the opposite of mere projection: the act of viewing seems rather to cross over into a prior dimension where reality and imagination have yet to face each other off as opposites.
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