The object of description in “Early Apollo” more or less passively accepts the metaphors it elicits; they embellish it (however brilliantly) as their ground, their occasion. But the metaphors of “Archaic Torso” inhere fiercely in their object, as if they were the very principle of its being. One can feel something of the same difference in many of the finest companion poems, “The Steps of the Orangery” (1907) and “Roman Campagna” (1908), for instance, or “Procession of the Virgin” (1907) and “Easter Eve” (1908), or the “Buddha” poems in both volumes. It is even true when the “objects” describe themselves, as in “The Courtesan” (1907) and “The Lute” (1908):

THE COURTESAN [1907]

Venice’s sun will in my hair

prepare a gold: all alchemy’s

illustrious issue. My brows, which

are like her bridges, look at how

they arch the soundless danger

of my eyes, which keep a secret commerce

with her canals, so that the sea

rises and falls and changes in them. Who

saw me once is envious of my dog,

since often on him in distracted pauses

my hand, not ever charred on any heat,

invulnerable and bejeweled, rests—.

And boys, the hopes of ancient houses,

perish at my mouth as if by poison.

 

THE LUTE [1908]

I am the lute. If you wish to describe

my body, with its beautiful arching stripes:

speak of me as you would of a ripe

full-bodied fig. Exaggerate

the darkness that you see in me. It was

Tullia’s darkness. In her most private place

there wasn’t so much, and her bright hair

was like a light-filled hall. Sometimes

she took some sound from my surface

into her face and sang while I played.

then I tensed myself against her yielding,

until at last my inmost self was in her.

“The Courtesan” is a wonderful mood-piece, and something of a tour de force in its evocation of Carpaccio’s Venice. But one is never really tempted to hear the voice as more than a conceit. No “real” courtesan speaks in the poem, and not much otherness of any kind interferes with our pleasure in image and rhythm. Even the sexuality and the seductiveness are very much surface gestures. But in “The Lute” the object exists, and the voice of the poem fully belongs to it. The narcissism, the self-possession, the combination of frankness and disregard, the absorption in distant memories, all are elements of a powerful inwardness, and help define the lute in its tantalizing inaccessibility. The sexuality in the poem, though less stressed, seems more immediate and real, largely because it is conceived in terms of tensions that inhere in the poem’s own address. Yielding and resistance, invitation and evasion, isolation and intimate relation, unguarded surfaces and sought-for depths, these compose the lute’s relation to both “Tullia” and the poet/reader, and give the poem a charged separateness that “The Courtesan” lacks. The brilliant reversal in the final lines, where the sex of the lute seems to change, and the narcissistic object of admiration turns into an avatar of sexual straining and release, dictates an entirely new set of terms to the reader, who is left suspended between sensations of consummation and escape.

Such tropes become more common in the second volume, as what draws the self takes on the power to question, displace, evade, estrange, undo, or otherwise disrupt it. The interpenetration of object and consciousness is in New Poems mainly a visionary theme: there is a euphoric sense of “re-seeing” the world in ways that transcend the opposition between inner and outer, empty and fulfilled. But New Poems: The Other Part seeks out darker, more problematical versions of that relation. The bull in “Corrida” is “from all eternity” gegen the matador he “recognizes,” where gegen means “toward,” “against,” and “in relation to” all at once. The young Don Juan feels an involuntary “inclination” toward a passing woman from whom “a strange ancient image” bars him. “Encounter in the Chestnut Avenue” describes a coming-nearer of the distantly glimpsed object, which, as consummated image, leaves the observer more isolated than before:

But suddenly the shade was deep,

and nearby eyes lay gazing

from a clear new unselfconscious face,

which, as in a portrait, lived intensely

in the instant things split off again:

first there forever, and then not at all.

Many of the most striking poems—“The Beggars,” “Foreign Family,” “The Site of the Fire,” “Corpse-Washing,” and “Snake-Charming,” for example—construct relation out of estrangement; fremd (foreign, alien, strange) is the word that appears over and over again. “Foreign” figures compel recognition, and draw the viewer with a combination of fascination and dread. The seductiveness of “One of the Old Women” is an especially vivid, Baudelairean instance:

In the evenings sometimes (you know how it feels?)

when they suddenly stop and nod backwards

and show you from under their half-hats

a smile that seems made of patches …

Next to them then is a building,

endless, and they lure you along

with the riddle of their scabs,

with the hat, the shawl, and the walk.

With the hand, which under the collar’s nape

waits in secret and longs for you:

as if it wished to wrap your hands

in a scrap of picked-up paper.

Against these uncanny figures with their “pull” on the viewer are the figures of enduring isolation that “pull in” around grief, pain, deprivation, and disfigurement, as with the urns that close “The Pavilion”:

                  How little has been driven off:

everything still knows, still weeps, still causes pain—.

And as you walk away through the tear-damp

unfrequented avenue

for a long time you feel on the roof’s ledge

those urns standing there, cold and split apart:

yet determined still to hold together

around the ashes of old aches.

Rilke’s ambiguity makes “split” (zerspalten) describe both the individual urns and their connection with one another. Holding on here, to grief and to the “pangs” of an interred life, becomes a means of cohering, a way of keeping both relation and the place of feeling alive. This theme, though less apparent than some of the others in New Poems: The Other Part, may ultimately go deepest. “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” “The Leper King,” “The Blind Man,” “Portrait,” “The Pavilion,” and “The Coat of Arms” all work variations on it. In place of übersteigen, “to transcend,” we tend to get überstehen, with its untranslatable combination of “to endure,” “to live through,” and “to survive.” What makes the theme so rich is the way this pulling in and hardening around severance and loss tends to grasp the vital core.