That year, in addition to the German poems, he composed Vergers and Quatrains Valisans, French poem sequences of fifty-nine and thirty-six poems respectively. He also entered into the two-year verse correspondence with Erica Mitterer that elicited some forty poems from him between June and August of 1924.

10. Leishman, Poems 1906 to 1926, p. 37.

To Lou Andreas-Salomé

The couple’s passionate few years together were more than ten years in an estranged past when this sequence was written. Rilke copied out the three pieces and sent them to Lou along with other poems in a letter of May 18, 1919. The title is an editorial addition.

Head of Amenophis IV in Berlin

Rilke records his encounter with this sculpted Egyptian head in letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé (August 1, 1913) and Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe (August 8, 1913). Some months after writing the poem and the prose description, he elaborates on its significance for him in a letter of February 1, 1914, to Magda von Hattingberg (“Benvenuta”): “When you are in Berlin, go look at the head of Amenophis IV in the central courtyard of the Egyptian Museum…, feel, in this face, what it means to be over against the infinite world and, within so limited a surface, through the heightened arrangement of a few features, to form a counterpoise to the entire universe. Could one not turn from a starry night to find in this face the same law in bloom, the same grandeur, depth, inconceivableness?” The title is an editorial addition.

Turning

Kassner: Rudolf Kassner (1873–1959), Austrian writer and cultural philosopher, and Rilke’s close friend (the eighth Duino Elegy is dedicated to him). The epigraph is one of Kassner’s “Sayings of the Yogi” (1911), altered by Rilke’s strong misremembering of it. Its actual wording is: “He who wants to proceed from inner intensity [Innigkeit] to greatness must sacrifice himself.”

To Hölderlin

Hölderlin: Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), perhaps the greatest German Romantic poet. Rilke read his odes passionately during the summer of 1914.

The Words of the Lord to John on Patmos

Rilke sent the first half of this poem (up through the line “stripping-bare awaits us at the end”), along with a copy of Dürer’s Apocalypse, to his wife, Clara, as a birthday gift on November 21, 1915. The title is an editorial addition.

The Doll. Temptation!

From drafts of a much longer uncompleted elegy on childhood and growing up.

… When will, when will, when will it be enough

In a selection of unpublished poems Rilke copied out for Katharina Kippenberg in June 1926, this poem bears the dedication “from M’s belongings,” along with the postscript “Written on the evening before the Orpheus sonnets.”

Antistrophes

Rilke originally conceived this poem as the fifth of the Duino Elegies; he replaced it with the “Saltimbanques,” the last of the Elegies to be composed. (It was written on November 14, five days after “Antistrophes” was completed.)

My shy moonshadow

Compare the ponderous imagery of sphinx and moonscape in the tenth and last Duino Elegy, completed on February 11.

Odette R.…

Inscribed in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge for Margarethe Masson-Ruffy, in memory of her sister Odette Ruffy, a painter who died young.

Lachrymatory

The second of a two-poem sequence titled “Two Poems” and dedicated to “E.S.,” Elisabeth Gundolf-Salomon.

Heart’s swing

First draft of a poem inscribed in the Duino Elegies for Baladine Klossowska (“Merline”). The inscribed version bears the heading “Dedication to M.… / Written on the 6th and 8th of November 23 (as beginning of a new winter’s work at Muzot),” and follows the draft up to line 18, where it diverges significantly:

Or dare I say: quarters? And factor in, since it refuses,

that other half-circle, the one that repels the swing?

It’s not my figment, the mere reflection of my earthbound

swinging. This isn’t guesswork. One day it shall

be new. But from endpoint to endpoint

of my most reckless swing I already make it fully mine:

overflowings from me stream there and fill it out,

almost tauten it. And my leave-taking,

when the propelling force breaks off from it,

makes it feel to me all the more near.

For Max Picard

Inscribed in the Duino Elegies.

For Hans Carossa

Inscribed in the Duino Elegies.

Unsteady scales of life

The fifth of a nine-poem sequence titled “Jottings in the Churchyard at Ragaz.”

O bright gleam of a shy mirror image!

The third of a three-poem sequence titled “Three Poems from the Thematic Material [Umkreis]: Reflections.”

Rose, O pure contradiction

Epitaph composed by Rilke and included in his last will and testament. It is inscribed on his tombstone in the churchyard at Raron, Switzerland.

Brother body is poor

Inscribed by Rilke in the Book of Images for his fellow patient Madame Verrijn-Stuart and her husband.

Elegy

Marina Tsvetayeva (1892–1941): one of the great modern Russian poets. Without ever meeting, she and Rilke carried on a passionate correspondence during the spring and summer of 1926. Her long poem “Novogodnee,” written in early January 1927, addresses Rilke with wild directness, as if in a refusal to grieve. l. 18, Kom Ombo: probably a stop on Rilke’s trip to Egypt in 1911. What he “saw” there remains obscure, as does the elliptical formulation of a renunciation or “self-withholding” in the poem’s next line. Something of what Rilke has in mind may be illuminated by two extraneous passages from his writing. The first is from one of the poems—it concerns Karnak and the ancient Egyptian friezes—in his cycle From the Remains of Count C.W. (November 1920):

… the god-king, like a suckling child, peaceably

receives and smiles. His sacredness

is never short of breath. He takes and takes,

and yet such alleviation reigns in him

that often the princess only clasps

the papyrus-flower, instead of breaking it.—

The second is from a letter to Katharina Kippenberg of May 28, 1924:

[Instead of picking flowers from my garden and sending them to you for your birthday on a journey they could never survive,] I will offer them in the manner of the sacrificers on the Egyptian reliefs, who dedicated and presented their flowers to the gods not by picking them, but by holding their hands for a time quietly and intently around the living, growing stems.

Come, you last thing

The last four lines are canceled in the pocket-book.

Index of Titles and First Lines in German

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