The technique (if we can call it that) leaves Rilke painfully exposed: when nothing “comes” the result can be a kind of overwrought posturing, as in the puerile sentimentality of “Girl’s Melancholy” or the sometimes effete inventiveness of “From a Stormy Night.” But when the initial impulse perseveres, and against expectation finds its way into something real and unforced, the effect can be extremely moving—as in “The Blind Woman,” where at some point amid the verbal thrashing-about one begins to feel the quietly evolving strength of the old woman’s own confident voice. That evolution seems to take place not only in the speaker but in the poem’s own texture, as it works through sentimentality and overdramatization toward some special place beyond. Several of the poems in The Book of Images “evolve” this way, beginning with scant promise yet coming to a haunting close. “The Son,” “About Fountains,” “Martyrs,” “The Last Judgment,” the final section of “The Tsars,” the cycle “From a Stormy Night,” perhaps even “The Saint” and (at the very last moment) “The Three Holy Kings”: these poems can seem variously awkward, forced, tedious, or obscure, yet they all reach beautifully voiced conclusions.

In the most brilliant of the poems in The Book of Images, however, Rilke is uncannily confident from the first. The many great lyrics in the volume’s first half seem blessed with perfect pitch. The impulse that shapes their cadences seems to come from a place so deep and so exposed that there is a complete break with the sheltered ego-lyrics of the early work. When one turns from The Book of Hours to the best of these poems, the change in voice is dramatic. It is as if there has been “a ripening in silence,” to adapt a phrase from “Entrance.” The cloistered persona, the discursive, quasi-religious manner of the former volume are cast away, and a poem like “Evening” suddenly stands free, addressing us with an immediacy and closeness not so much “spoken” as shaped from and invested with the qualities of voice:

Slowly the evening puts on the garments

held for it by a rim of ancient trees;

you watch: and the lands divide from you,

one going heavenward, one that falls;

and leave you, to neither quite belonging,

not quite so dark as the house sunk in silence,

not quite so surely pledging the eternal

as that which grows star each night and climbs—

and leave you (inexpressibly to untangle)

your life afraid and huge and ripening,

so that it, now bound in and now embracing,

grows alternately stone in you and star.

Nothing in the early work prepares us for this stately, unforced solemnity, so assured in relation to the tangle of emotions it expresses. And it is as beautifully crafted as anything in the New Poems. The only difference is that while the most radical of the New Poems exploit syntax and semantic density to achieve their version of sculptural “thingness,”1 “Evening” works in the vocal register. Its focus may be visual, specific, oriented outward, but timing and cadence are its métier. It shapes voice, and this as much as anything else is what gives the poem its anti-impressionistic feeling.

*   *   *

Rilke chose to call this volume of poems Das Buch der Bilder, which can mean either a book of pictures or a book of images. I have translated it as “The Book of Images” in order not to trivialize the key term Bild, whose dualities are crucial to the poems. The word can designate a picture, a portrait, or any other form of pictorial representation (sculptural, architectural), and thus suggests a strong “belonging” to the visual world. But it can also designate an image that works as a metaphor—a figurative entity pointing to realities beyond or behind it. Bilder in this sense can populate the visual realm with traces, invisible connections, imaginings, remembrances, intimations of things lost or unrealized, waiting to be recalled or brought (back) to life.

The poems knowingly exploit these complications. The word first appears in “Girls I,” which asserts that girls, unlike others (who must travel long paths to reach “the dark poets”), “don’t ask/what bridge leads to images (Bildern).” Here the “image” connotes a desired place, a way of seeing or relating to life that requires (at least for “others”) a crossing-over. But only two poems later, in “The Song of the Statue” (“Das Lied der Bildsäule”), the term Bildsäule is used to designate a statue erected on a column. Here the image is a state of imprisonment, and what is trapped there longs for “life” and “blood’s rushing”—with strong implications that it once was life, before it was transformed into art.

The contradictions multiply in “Those of the House of Colonna,” where three different uses of Bild are played against one another. The poem opens as the speaker views, with a mixture of admiration and envy, portraits of the noblemen of a great Italian family: “Your face is so filled with gazing, / because for you the world was picture and picture (Bild und Bild).” The implication is that for these Renaissance princes, with their pragmatic, world-oriented realism, the world was what it looked like: “out of armor, flags, ripe fruit, and women / welled for you that great confidence/that everything is and counts.” But there is an irony: these men of action “stand now so motionless / in portraits (Bildern),” displayed forever in images that are both unnatural poses and true pictures of their self-fashioned, disciplined manhood. And that irony yields to another, as the speaker (himself a grown man) suddenly questions them about their forgotten or erased childhood, which he proceeds to recall for them in fond detail, as a time when imagination transformed or was enthralled by everything seen, when windows opened like doors upon distances, and when images engendered life in secluded places: “Back then the altar, with its painting (Bilde) /on which Mary gave birth, was tucked away / in the solitary side aisle.” It is as if the “actual” portraits become a bridge into the realm they signify as lost forever. At the end of the poem, the speaker, having crossed that bridge, remains in the imagined “back then,” still viewing the adult figures in the portraits but addressing them—with a new perspective—as “boys.”

It would be an adventure to trace the exfoliations of Bild throughout the poems, especially as the word becomes involved with other terms of similar complexity and weight—“voice” (Stimme), for instance, which often seems a strange ontological category bearing little relation to its ordinary-language meanings. One of the pleasures of the volume can be exploring its “secret architecture” (to use Baudelaire’s phrase), where motifs combine and recombine in intricate relations. Hand and face, for instance, are juxtaposed in the final lines of “From a Childhood” and “Those of the House of Colonna”; become a central opposition in “Prayer”; and intertwine with subtle polarities of red and white in “The Tsars” and “In the Certosa.” Obviously there are nascent themes here. The play of images is a way of thinking, and even this small cluster of motifs yields paradoxes of life viewed and grasped, possessed and relinquished, lived and imagined, sacrificed and transcended, undergone and belatedly understood. But to distill from such paradoxes (which are already deductions from sensuous particulars) a set of concerns that might give the book coherence would in the end only diminish its scope, and betray the tacit dimension where images leave their meanings. Rilke himself once expressed aversion to such resolution (it was during the period when he was working on these poems), and his words might almost be those of The Book of Images itself:

I fear in myself only those contradictions with a tendency toward reconciliation. It must be a very narrow spot in my life if the idea should occur to them to shake hands, from one side to the other. My contradictions shall hear of each other only rarely and in rumors.2

*   *   *

I would like to express my indebtedness to other translators of Rilke, especially J. B. Leishman, M.