Aufschub. Vorwand um

größer zu werden. Alles rief und raunte.

Misch nicht in dieses was dich früh erstaunte]

 

Come, you last thing, which I acknowledge,

unholy agony in the fleshly weave;

just as I burned in spirit, look, I burn

in you; the wood has long held back,

long recoiled from those flames you blaze,

but now I feed you and burn in you.

Inside your rage my native mildness becomes

a raging hell, unlike anything here.

Without plan, completely pure, free of future

I mounted suffering’s tangled pyre,

so sure of nowhere buying times to come

for this heart, its store so mute.

Is it still I, burning here beyond recognition?

I will not drag memories inside.

O life, life: externality.

And I in flame. No one knowing me.

[Renunciation. That’s not the way illness was

in childhood. Putting-off. Subterfuge

for growing. Everything called and whispered.

Don’t mix those early marvels into this]

 

Valmont, mid-December 1926

Last entry in last pocket-book

Notes

Index of Titles and First Lines in German

Index of Titles and First Lines in English

Notes

Introduction

1. By the uncollected poetry I mean, following Leishman (below), all the German poems not collected and published in book form by Rilke himself. Rilke did from time to time allow individual “uncollected” poems to be published in the Insel-Almanach and other periodicals.

2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems 1906 to 1926, trans. J. B. Leishman (Norfolk: New Directions, 1957). Leishman gives a concise summary of the poems’ bibliographic history in the opening pages of his long introduction to this volume.

3. Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Ruth Sieber Rilke and Ernst Zinn, 6 vols. (Frankfurt: Insel, 1955–66), vols. 2 and 6.

4. Quoted and translated by Michael Hamburger, An Unofficial Rilke (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 1981), p. 17.

5. On three different occasions Rilke did make unpublished selections from the uncollected work. During the war he put together a small collection for Rudolf Kassner entitled Poems to Night. In 1922 he and his publisher Anton Kippenberg assembled a group of poems for a proposed appendix to the Duino Elegies—an idea that was subsequently discarded. Shortly before his death, he transcribed in a leather-bound volume a set of poems and prose pieces, From Pocket-Books and Writing Pads (Aus Taschenbüchern und Merkblättern), which he sent to Katharina Kippenberg for occasional publication in the Insel-Almanach.

6. Siegfried Mandel, Rainer Maria Rilke: The Poetic Instinct (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1965), p. 102.

7. Leishman, Poems 1906 to 1926, p. 23.

8. There are, of course, exceptions, such as the programmatic “What birds plunge through,” “As once the winged energy of delight,” and “A furrow in my brain”—though even in these poems the oracular advice voices sphinx-like conundrums.

9. The profusion of German poems scarcely indicates just how prolific Rilke was in 1924—the very year when the severity of his illness became unmistakable, and his transit between the castle-haven at Muzot and the nearby sanatorium at Valmont began.