Uncollected Poems
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Introduction
Vergiß, vergiß / Forget, forget
Sag weißt du Liebesnächte? / You don’t know nights of love?
Scharfer Burgbruch / Sharp castle-break
Mondnacht / Moonlit Night
Judith’s Rückkehr / Judith’s Return
An Lou Andreas-Salomé / To Lou Andreas-Salomé
Perlen entrollen / Pearls roll away
Ach, da wir Hülfe von Menschen erharrten / Ah, as we prayed for human help
O die Kurven meiner Sehnsucht durch das Weltall / O the curves of my longing through the cosmos
Komm wann du sollst / Come when you should
Ich Wissender / I, knower
Die Mandelbäume in Blüte / The almond trees in bloom
Die Spanische Trilogie / The Spanish Trilogy
Auferweckung Des Lazarus / The Raising of Lazarus
Der Geist Ariel / The Spirit Ariel
So angestrengt wider die starke Nacht / Straining so hard against the strength of night
Wir wissen nicht, was wir verbringen / We don’t know what we spend
Lange mußt du leiden / Long you must suffer
Weiβt du / The hawthorn
Unwissend vor dem Himmel meines Lebens / Unknowing before the heavens of my life
Überfließende Himmel verschwendeter Sterne / Overflowing heavens of squandered stars
Narziss [I] / Narcissus [I]
Narziss [II] / Narcissus [II]
Christi Höllenfahrt / Christ’s Descent into Hell
Nun wachen wir mit den Erinnerungen / Now we wake up with our memory
Dich aufdenkend / Thinking you
Bestürz mich, Musik, mit rhythmischem Zürnen! / Assault me, music, with rhythmic fury!
Hinter den schuld-losen Bäumen / Behind the innocent trees
Kopf Amenophis IV. In Berlin / Head of Amenophis IV in Berlin
Wie das Gestirn, der Mond / The way that bright planet, the moon
Tränen, Tränen, die aus mir brechen / Tears, tears that break out of me
Einmal nahm ich zwischen meine Hände dein Gesicht / Once I took you face into / my hands
Die Grosse Nacht / The Great Night
Hebend die Blicke vom Buch / Looking up from my book
Du im Voraus / verlorne Geliebte / You the beloved / lost in advance
Siehe das leichte Insekt / See the carefree insect
Wendung / Turning
Klage / Lament
›Man Muss Sterben Weil Man Sie Kennt‹ / “One Must Die Because One Has Known Them”
Fast wie am Jüngsten Tag / Almost as on the last day
An Hölderlin / To Hölderlin
Ausgesetzt auf den Bergen des Herzens / On the mountains of the heart cast out to die
Immer wieder / Again and again
Ach wehe, meine Mutter reißt mich ein / Ah misery, my mother tears me down
Der Tod Moses / The Death of Moses
Der Tod / Death
Die Worte des Herrn an Johannes Auf Patmos / The Words of the Lord to John on Patmos
Kreuzweg des Leibes / The body’s crossroads
Da wird der Hirsch zum Erdteil / Now the stag becomes part of earth
Graue Liebesschlangen / Gray love-snakes
Nur zu Verlierern spricht das Verwandelte / The transformed speaks only to relinquishers
An die Musik / To Music
Gott läßt sich nicht wie leichter Morgen leben / God won’t be lived like some light morning
Die Puppe. Versuchung! / The Doll. Temptation!
Dies überstanden haben / To have come through it
Die Hand / The Hand
Solang du Selbstgeworfnes fängst, ist alles / As long as you catch self-thrown things
… Wann wird, wann wird, wann wird es genügen / … When will, when will, when will it be enough
Gegen-Strophen / Antistrophes
Wir, in den ringenden Nächten / We, in the grappling nights
Mein scheuer Mondschatten / My shy moonshadow
Vasen-Bild / Vase Painting
Odette R.… / Odette R.…
Imaginärer Lebenslauf / Imaginary Career
Tränenkrüglein / Lachrymatory
Wir sind nur Mund / We’re only mouth
Schaukel des Herzens / Heart’s swing
Spiele die Tode, die einzelnen / Play the deaths swiftly through
Für Max Picard / For Max Picard
Daß wir nichts verlieren / That we lose nothing
Für Hans Carossa / For Hans Carossa
Der Magier / The Magician
Irrlichter / Will-O’-the-Wisps
Da dich das geflügelte Entzücken / As once the winged energy of delight
Vorfrühling / Early Spring
Vergänglichkeit / Transience
Spaziergang / A Walk
Weißt du noch / Do you still remember
Wilder Rosenbusch / Wild Rosebush
An der sonngewohnten Straße / By the sun-accustomed street
Durch den sich Vögel werfen / What birds plunge through
Unstete Waage des Lebens / Unsteady scales of life
Welt war in dem Antlitz der Geliebten / World was in the face of the beloved
Ach, im Wind gelöst / Ah, adrift in the air
Eine Furche in meinem Hirn / A furrow in my brain
Handinneres / Palm of the Hand
Nacht. Oh du in Tiefe gelöstes / Night. Oh you face against my face
Schwerkraft / Gravity
Mausoleum / Mausoleum
Irgendwo blüht die Blume des Abschieds / Somewhere the flower of farewell blooms
Aufgedeckter das Land / More unconcealed the land
Herbst / Autumn
O schöner Glanz des scheuen Spiegelbilds! / O bright gleam of a shy mirror image!
… Wenn aus des Kaufmanns Hand / … When from the merchant’s hand
Ach, nicht getrennt sein / Ah, not to be cut off
Unaufhaltsam / Undeterrable
Jetzt wär es Zeit, daß Götter / Now it is time that gods
Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust / Rose, O pure contradiction
Gong [I] / Gong [I]
Idol / Idol
Gong [II] / Gong [II]
Aber versuchtest du dies / But if you’d try this
Früher, wie oft, blieben wir / Earlier, how often, we’d remain
Die Vogelrufe fangen an zu rühmen / The birdcalls begin their praise
Bruder Körper ist arm / Brother body is poor
Von nahendem Regen fast zärtlich / Garden, by approaching rains
Elegie / Elegy
Vollmacht / Full Power
Ankunft / Arrival
Komm du, du letzter / Come, you last thing
Index of titles and first lines in German
Index of titles and first lines in English
Also by Edward Snow
In Praise of Uncollected Poems
Copyright
Introduction
After Rilke completed the second part of the New Poems in 1908, he virtually ceased publishing volumes of poetry. Requiem (occasioned by the death of Paula Becker) appeared in 1909, the poem cycle The Life of the Virgin Mary in 1913, but nothing major until the sudden appearance in 1923 of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus—and then nothing further from the time of their publication until Rilke’s death from acute leukemia in December 1926.
The story we tell of these circumstances (largely at the prompting of Rilke’s own letters) goes something like this: After more than a decade of free, uninterrupted productivity, Rilke was gradually drawn by his work on The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge into a realm of conflict and self-doubt—to such a degree that after that prose work’s publication in 1910 he found himself directionless and existentially exhausted, a beginner unable to begin, feeling more and more estranged from the “task” of poetry and yet looking to it increasingly for some definitive, life-answering statement. The years from 1910 through 1922 thus become Rilke’s “crisis” years, the crisis deepened by his failure to sustain work on the Elegies begun at Duino in 1912, and not resolved until the whirlwind completion of those poems at Muzot in February 1922, accompanied by the virtually unwilled “dictation” of the Sonnets to Orpheus, the latter a kind of gift or bonus confirming the high oracular achievement of the Elegies and taking its own place as Rilke’s one great “post-crisis” work.
So powerfully does this narrative influence our conception of the later Rilke that it can come as something of a shock to learn that the poet, both during his crisis years and after them, was writing poems continuously, often prolifically—in letters, in guest books, in presentation copies, and above all in the pocket-books he always carried with him. Both the quantity and the variety of this uncollected poetry1 are astonishing. There are over five hundred pieces, ranging from completed poems of great fluency and poise, to headlong statements that hurtle through their subjects, to brief, unassuming epiphanies that traverse consciousness like fireflies, to fragments that vary from hard aphoristic kernels (“The transformed speaks only to relinquishers. All / holders-on are stranglers”), to brief forays into the subconscious (“The Doll. Temptation! / The loaded doll, which falls into the chasm”), to self-contained, visionary excerpts (“… When from the merchant’s hand / the balance passes over / to the angel, who in the heavens / stills and soothes it with space’s equanimity…”). It is a formidable body of work. For all its miscellany, there is the sense of an alternate aesthetic informing it, easing distinctions between finishedness and non-finishedness and allowing poetry to take shape with minimal concern for openings and roundings off.
Surprise deepens as one encounters one superb poem after another in this assemblage—not just obvious masterpieces such as “The Spirit Ariel” and “The Death of Moses,” but a host of small, unprepossessing stunners like “Early Spring”:
Harshness disappeared. Suddenly caring spreads itself
on the field’s uncovered gray.
Small rivulets change their intonations.
Tendernesses, inexpertly,
reach toward the earth from space.
Roads run far into the land, foretelling it.
Unexpectedly you see its rising’s
visage in the empty tree.
After enough such beautifully pitched poems, one has to wonder what accounts for this body of work’s neglect—by Rilke himself and in Rilke criticism and biography up to the present day.
Explanations range from the mundane to the obscure. The poems themselves were assembled only gradually after Rilke’s death, in awkward stages (the pocket-books were not made available until 1945, and those from entire years may be lost), and J. B. Leishman’s rushed translation of the entire corpus, for all the bravery of the undertaking, has served in its near-unreadability as a kind of death’s-head keeping English-speaking readers away.2 More subtly estranging is the German edition’s division of the work into separate sections it designates “completed works” (Vollendetes), “dedications” (Widmungen), and “drafts” (Entwürfe)—an arrangement that makes it impossible to experience the poems in their temporal succession, and imposes on them the very distinctions they so curiously blur.3
Beyond such problems of access and presentation, however, there is the ever-present myth of Rilke’s Duino crisis, and that myth’s way of obscuring whatever might contradict it or undermine its drama. Rilke’s own neglect of the uncollected poems seems to stem from this phenomenon. Consider his complaint in a letter of 1915 to Princess Marie, his host and benefactor at Duino: “For five years now, ever since Malte Laurids closed behind me, I’ve been standing around as a beginner, though as a beginner who can’t begin.”4 Rilke must have truly felt this blockage, since he expressed it so often in his letters. But viewed in the light of the uncollected poems composed during the years he mentions, it is sheer mythologizing. Immediately after Malte Laurids there is not stagnation but modest growth. And then in 1913 and 1914—hard on the heels of the first suspension of the Duino project—there is an explosion of creative brilliance. Rilke composed more than 150 poems during these two years, many of them among the greatest he ever wrote: “The Spanish Trilogy,” “The Raising of Lazarus,” “The Spirit Ariel,” “Christ’s Descent into Hell,” “Once I took your face into / my hands,” “The Great Night,” “Turning,” “‘One Must Die Because One Has Known Them,’” “To Hölderlin,” “Again and again,” “On the mountains of the heart cast out to die”—to cite only the best known. Evidently Rilke, once he had become obsessed with the project of the Duino Elegies, could not accept these poems as validations. There is no indication that he ever considered publishing them together in a volume,5 and the self-fashioning aspect of his consciousness seems to have all but erased them. But they are major accomplishments nevertheless, and one would expect even the briefest treatment of Rilke’s poetic career to spotlight the period between late 1912 and early 1915 as one of its great florescences. Instead, the work from these years is typically placed within the sad aftermath of the Elegies’ initial waning (“The avalanche of poetry subsided and, instead of the ‘dictated’ flow and compulsive utterance, scraps of material had to be laboriously quarried”6), or treated as “crisis poems” (especially crisis poems about being blocked), or assimilated in some other way to the Duino mythos: “It might therefore be said that much of the poetry [Rilke] wrote between 1912 and 1914 is about the price he would have to pay in order to be able to complete the Duino Elegies, in order to achieve what might be called the ‘angelic vision,’ in order to be and remain the only kind of poet he now cared to be.”7
But there was obviously another kind of poet Rilke cared very much to be: the fact that he kept writing in the manner of the uncollected poems testifies to that. For one of the striking things about those poems is their difference from the high vatic mode of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. The two bodies of work seem to stand over against each other, in necessary counterpoise.
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