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. Holding back and grim endurance become centers of emanation, and move toward exaltation and grace. This is true of the archaictorso’s radiant bursting-forth, the self-abandoned blind man’s “marriage,” the “contagiousness” of the leper king’s “new dignity,” and the winged exfoliations of the coat of arms’s “indrawnness.” “Persian Heliotrope” provides a gentle paradigm: as “sweet words” there “at night in sentences/pull close together, refusing separation,” they “perfume forth” to fill the silent four-poster that contains them. The last two poems in the volume consummate this theme beautifully, first with the cradled sleep of the ancient beetle-stones, then with the unattached Buddha installed in glory, welcomed as “center of all centers, core of cores.” But its most powerful expression is “The Solitary,” where the destructive element—here conceived of as distances—drives aloneness further and further into bliss:

No: a tower shall rise out of my heart,

and I myself will be placed at its edge;

where nothing else exists, once again pain

and unsayableness, once again world.

Still one thing alone in immensity

growing dark and then light again,

still one last face full of longing

thrust out into the unappeasable,

still one uttermost face made of stone

heeding only its own inner gravity,

while the distances that silently destroy it

force it on to an ever deeper bliss.

*   *   *

The gains of New Poems: The Other Part, however, are not without their costs. If it is more “intense” than New Poems, it is also less varied and relaxed. In its drive toward objectivity it loses the youthful quality of the first volume, and this registers as real loss. The gentle wistfulness of “Portrait of My Father as a Young Man” or “The Carousel”—itself supremely assured—scarcely survives into the second volume. Nor does the first volume’s extraordinary openness to the realm of women. In spite of isolated examples like “Woman in Love,” there is nothing in The Other Part to compare with the series of voicings of female desire that launches the erotic theme in New Poems. Nor, in spite of poems like “Lady at a Mirror” and “The Rose-Interior,” is there anything like the feeling for feminine withinness and apartness that produces the original volume’s magnificent concluding poems.

If New Poems sometimes flirts with sentimentality and false ingenuousness, The Other Part can seem near-pathological in its pursuit of “hardness.” Under the guise of maker (“not feelings but things I had felt”) Rilke sometimes seems to be cultivating distance for its own sake, and trying to expunge feeling itself. “Corrida” is a good example. It is a brilliant poem, technically and thematically, and it works out the relationship between its two antagonists with impeccable balance. But a coldness infuses its very making. The indifference that it cultivates even acquires a kind of sadistic edge, as in the queasy sexuality of its ending:

before he serenely, unspitefully,

leaning on himself, calmly, carelessly

into that great wave, turned round and once more

rolling toward him, above its lost thrust

almost gently sinks his sword.

Finally, it must be said that too often the poems in The Other Part seem merely willed, as if the desire to repeat the first volume were without any deep impulse or intuition. This is especially true of the early poems that stretch from “Dolphins” through “Magnificat.” Here important poems are almost ruined by a piling up of alliteration and assonance for their own sake, as in “Dolphins,” “The Last Judgment,” and “The Temptation.” Other times elaborate wordplay and rhyme schemes attempt to compensate for impoverished content, as in “The King of Münster” and the wretched “Absalom’s Rebellion,” surely one of the worst poems Rilke ever wrote. And few of the seemingly endless biblical poems ever acquire a life of their own. It is not until “Adam” and “Eve” that Rilke truly finds his voice and his themes, and after that the poetry rises to a level of sustained accomplishment comparable to that of the original New Poems. It would be a shame if the reader were deterred by those mediocre first poems.