New Poems, 1908
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Introduction
New Poems [1908]
Archaïscher Torso Apollos / Archaic Torso of Apollo
Kretische Artemis / Cretan Artemis
Leda / Leda
Delphine / Dolphins
Die Insel der Sirenen / The Island of the Sirens
Klage um Antinous / Lament for Antinous
Der Tod der Geliebten / The Death of the Beloved
Klage um Jonathan / Lament for Jonathan
Tröstung des Elia / Comforting of Elijah
Saul unter den Propheten / Saul among the Prophets
Samuels Erscheinung vor Saul / Samuel’s Appearance to Saul
Ein Prophet / A Prophet
Jeremia / Jeremiah
Eine Sibylle / A Sybil
Absaloms Abfall / Absalom’s Rebellion
Esther / Esther
Der Aussätzige König / The Leper King
Legende von den drei Lebendigen und den drei Toten / Legend of the Three Living and the Three Dead
Der König von Münster / The King of Münster
Toten-Tanz / Dance of Death
Das jüngste Gericht / The Last Judgment
Die Versuchung / The Temptation
Der Alchimist / The Alchemist
Der Reliquienschrein / The Reliquary
Das Gold / Gold
Der Stylit / The Stylite
Die Ägyptische Maria / The Egyptian Mary
Kreuzigung / Crucifixion
Der Auferstandene / The Arisen
Magnificat / Magnificat
Adam / Adam
Eva / Eve
Irre im Garten / Lunatics in the Garden
Die Irren / The Lunatics
Aus dem Leben eines Heiligen / From the Life of a Saint
Die Bettler / The Beggars
Fremde Familie / Foreign Family
Leichen-Wäsche / Corpse-Washing
Eine von den Alten / One of the Old Women
Der Blinde / The Blind Man
Eine Welke / Faded
Abendmahl / Evening Meal
Die Brandstätte / The Site of the Fire
Die Gruppe / The Group
Schlangen-Beschwörung / Snake-Charming
Schwartze Katze / Black Cat
Vor-Ostern / Easter Eve
Der Balkon / The Balcony
Auswanderer-Schiff / Emigrant-Ship
Landschaft / Landscape
Römische Campagna / Roman Campagna
Lied vom Meer / Song from the Sea
Nächtliche Fahrt / Night Drive
Papageien-Park / Parrot-Park
Die Parke / The Parks
I / I
II / II
III / III
IV / IV
V / V
VI / VI
VII / VII
Bildnis / Portrait
Venezianischer Morgen / Venetian Morning
Spätherbst in Venedig / Late Autumn in Venice
San Marco / San Marco
Ein Doge / A Doge
Die Laute / The Lute
Der Abenteuerer / The Adventurer
I / I
II / II
Falken-Beize / Falconry
Corrida / Corrida
Don Juans Kindheit / Don Juan’s Childhood
Don Juans Auswahl / Don Juan’s Selection
Sankt Georg / Saint George
Dame auf einem Balkon / Lady on a Balcony
Begegnung in der Kastanien-Allee / Encounter in the Chestnut Avenue
Die Schwestern / The Sisters
Übung am Klavier / Piano Practice
Die Liebende / Woman in Love
Das Rosen-Innere / The Rose-Interior
Damen-Bildnis aus den Achtziger-Jahren / Lady’s Portrait from the Eighties
Dame vor dem Spiegel / Lady at a Mirror
Die Greisin / The Old Lady
Das Bett / The Bed
Der Fremde / The Stranger
Die Anfahrt / The Arrival
Die Sonnenuhr / The Sundial
Schlaf-Mohn / Opium Poppy
Die Flamingos / The Flamingos
Persisches Heliotrop / Persian Heliotrope
Schlaflied / Lullaby
Der Pavillon / The Pavilion
Die Entführung / The Abduction
Rosa Hortensie / Pink Hydrangea
Das Wappen / The Coat of Arms
Der Junggeselle / The Bachelor
Der Einsame / The Solitary
Der Leser / The Reader
Der Apfelgarten / The Apple Orchard
Mohammeds Berufung / Mohammed’s Summoning
Der Berg / The Mountain
Der Ball / The Ball
Das Kind / The Child
Der Hund / The Dog
Der Käferstein / The Beetle-Stone
Buddha in der Glorie / Buddha in Glory
Copyright
Introduction
Rilke sent the finished manuscript of New Poems: The Other Part (Der neuen Gedichte anderer Teil) to his publisher on 17 August 1908, less than a year after completing the original New Poems (Neue Gedichte), and scarcely eight months after the first volume’s December 1907 publication. All ninety-nine of the poems in the second volume (one hundred and six, if one counts the poems that form sequences) were composed between one August and the next, and in periods of sustained creative output even more intense than those that produced the first volume: forty poems in August 1907 alone, followed by another forty-six in the summer of 1908. The two volumes thus issue virtually uninterrupted from the same initial impulse. And they pursue the same “new” project: to subordinate lyric “expression” to workmanlike “making” (“not feelings,” Rilke wrote in retrospect, “but things I had felt”) and achieve in poetry the same objective, free standing integrity Rilke admired in Rodin’s sculpture and Cézanne’s painting, his constant touchstones during this period:
Somehow I too must come to make things; not plastic, but written things—realities that emerge from handwork. Somehow I too must discover the smallest basic element, the cell of my art, the tangible immaterial means of representation for everything.…1
Given, then, all that the two volumes have in common, it seems inevitable that the boundary between them should by now have virtually disappeared: we routinely refer to the poems of both as the New Poems, and at most distinguish them as parts one and two of a single work. Yet when Rilke sent the manuscript of the companion volume to his publisher, what he stressed was its separateness and distance from the original work:
As I arranged the poems, I had the impression that the new volume could quite suitably join up with the earlier one: the course is almost parallel—only somewhat higher, it seems to me, and at a greater depth and with more distance. If the third volume is to join these two, a similar intensification will still have to be achieved in the ever more objective mastering of reality, out of which, entirely of its own accord, the wider significance and clearer validity of all things arises.2
It is hard to know what to make of language so general and abstract, but close attention to New Poems: The Other Part everywhere confirms its difference. Its mood and personality are so different, in fact, from the 1907 New Poems as to make it feel “other” in the same nontrivial sense that both volumes feel “new.” This is nowhere truer than in the poems with explicit parallels in the first volume. “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” for instance, announces New Poems: The Other Part in the same way that “Early Apollo” begins the original New Poems. But in making this connection it creates a virtual paradigm for how the second volume will “intensify” and differ from the first:
EARLY APOLLO [1907]
As sometimes between still leafless branches
a morning looks through that is already
radiant with spring: so nothing in his head
could obstruct the splendor of all poems
from striking us with almost lethal force;
for there is still no shadow in his gaze,
still too cool for laurel are his temples,
and only later from his eyebrows’ arches
will the rose garden lift up tall-stemmed,
from which petals, each alone, released
will drift down upon the mouth’s trembling,
which now is yet quiet, never-used and gleaming
and only drinking something with its smile
as though its song were being infused in him.
ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO [1908]
We never knew his head and all the light
that ripened in his fabled eyes. But
his torso still glows like a candelabra,
in which his gazing, turned down low,
holds fast and shines. Otherwise the surge
of the breast could not blind you, nor a smile
run through the slight twist of the loins
toward that center where procreation thrived.
Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt
under the shoulders’ invisible plunge
and not glisten just like wild beasts’ fur;
and not burst forth from all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
Both poems present the sculptural object as a first gesture, and the task of description as an intense imaginative project. And in both one can feel Rilke handling line and syntax as “materials” out of which to sculpt contours and build torques and tensions. But beyond this it is mainly the differences that register. “Archaic Torso of Apollo” has a drive and a weight that make “Early Apollo” seem almost coy and languorous by comparison. Its language is richer and more impacted, and pursues its course with almost reckless daring. Assonance and alliteration are pushed to near-limits in the pursuit of a dense internal music. “Unerhörtes Haupt” is typical, especially in its rhyme with “zurückgeschraubt.” A similar impacting occurs at the level of image. “Kandelaber” can mean either “candelabra” or “gas lamp,” and this visual choice is woven into the subsequent texture of the poem, becoming explicit in the contrast between the solitary standing presence of line 9 and the glittering beast’s pelt of line 11, and condensing again in the ambiguous “durchsichtigem Sturz” of line 10, which can conjure up (among other things) either the glittering cascade of a waterfall or the airless drop of a bell jar. “Zurückgeschraubt” itself epitomizes the poem’s daring. It refers to the candelabra/gas lamp’s “lowered” light, but by way of a metonymic, elliptical allusion to the “screwing back” of a control knob. The disconcerting, almost ruthless kinesis of the idea (reinforced by the very sound of the word) informs our sense of how tenaciously the gaze inwardly endures. It also forges a link with the poem’s own turnings, and with the “slight twist of the loins” that in line 8 leads to the fertile center.
“Zurückgeschraubt,” in fact, could describe in general the difference between the poems in the two volumes. Those in the second tend, like “Archaic Torso,” to feel indrawn and “screwed tighter” in relation to those in the first. Grammar and syntax become more convoluted and prolonged, and at the same time move faster. An inner momentum bordering on the compulsive often hurtles the reader through a poem—sometimes toward a breaking point, as in “Night Drive,” sometimes toward a final, unexpected reversal, as in “Archaic Torso” or “Black Cat,” and sometimes, as in “Comforting of Elijah,” going out of control. This intensification is a matter of content as well as texture.
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