Against the oracular utterance of the Elegies—still sometimes thought of as Rilke’s only voice—the uncollected poems articulate a realm of pure occasion: the flooding or flaring of an emotion or a memory, the flash of an idea, the urgency of something willed or wanted or held in wait, acts of attention triggered by or issuing in surprise, upsurges of bitterness or revulsion—even, as in the following quatrain, moments of tough-minded scorn for the gentler self:

God won’t be lived like some light morning.

Whoever climbs down the shaft must give up

earth’s repleteness for the craft of mining:

stand hunched and pry him loose in tunnels.

Such poems tend to be fast, headlong, in transit. They touch down at full throttle. Often they appear to compose themselves before one’s eyes. An initial impulse, rather than undergoing “development,” seems to play itself through, without premeditation, often elliptically and toward no predestined end. Consider the following untitled poem (or “draft”), written the same year as the first Duino Elegy:

O the curves of my longing through the cosmos,

and on all the streaks: my being’s

flung-outness. Many an aspect returning

only after a thousand years on the sad ellipsis

of its momentum and passing on.

Hastening through the once-existent future,

knowing itself in the year’s seasons

or airily, as an exact influence

almost starlike in the overwakeful

apparatus for a short time trembling

Here especially there is an eerie sense of closeness to the poem in process. The first line flings itself out lavishly (one is reminded of some of the great opening lines of Donne’s Holy Sonnets), and what follows seems to ride that first surge, as it devolves in self-propagating metaphors toward the single, short-lived, unpunctuated light-point, “trembling.” It is an eloquent, beautifully paced poem, but it follows its own obscure trajectory, and what it “says” remains suspended in images that images beget, only half translated into some understanding behind the poem.

The uncollected poems could thus be said to give us the opposite of “angelic vision.” For the most part they aren’t interested in consolidating a transcendental consciousness, especially one with visionary wisdom or ex cathedra powers of speech.8 Everything in them tends to be registered at ground level (which makes all the more remarkable their vivid feeling for the self’s sidereal existence, the proliferation in them of arcs, trajectories, bridge systems through space), and some of their most memorable imagery is of dispersal and lavish, even wasteful expenditure. Even a fragment that promises visionary arrival does so in terms that seem calculated to undo the sober questing of the Elegies: “Play the deaths swiftly through, the single ones, and you will see— / how it rounds in upon itself, the infinite stream of stars[.]”

There are intrusions of second-level consciousness in the poems, but the experience—far from orphic—is usually of a descriptive voice interrupting itself, surprised, as the evoked moment speeds on:

Do you still remember: falling stars, how

they leapt slantwise through the sky

like horses over suddenly held-out hurdles

of our wishes—had we so many?—

for stars, innumerable, leapt everywhere;

almost every look upward was wedded

to the swift hazard of their play,

and the heart felt itself a single thing

beneath that vast disintegration of their brilliance—

and was whole, as though it would survive them!

So much contributes to this poem’s complex epiphany: again the ex nihilo opening, the single trajectory, the poem playing itself through; the long-ago other still present in conversation; the heart-catching, throwaway trope, sweeping through three enjambed lines and then caught up in thought before even one’s astonishment can register; a universe where swiftness, chance, and play reign, with the “suddenness” thrust into it by the human game of wishes a strangely integral component; memory not thinking back but confirming the moment’s life in consciousness; the elation over something “then” felt “now,” and the poem in fact producing that elation; cosmic disintegration as something lavished on the transient human self, bestowing the feeling of survival; the subjunctive which frames that feeling somehow not qualifying or undermining it but allowing exclamation.

Rilke wrote “Do you still remember” in 1924 (“Early Spring” belongs to the same year), in the midst of another great creative surge that is all but passed over in the canonical story of his later years. So much narrative force tends to get invested in the climactic, crisis-resolving “dictation” of the remaining Elegies and both parts of the Sonnets to Orpheus over a three-week span in February 1922 at Muzot (it does seem a miraculous achievement) that Rilke’s fate seems to close: there seems no reason why any poetry should intervene between this consummation and his death in 1926. But in this gap the uncollected work proliferates: some thirty poems in the latter months of 1923, and then, amazingly, more than a hundred in 1924, scarcely any of them negligible and many among Rilke’s best: altogether a body of more than two hundred last poems, stretching from the completion of the Orpheus sonnets to the last pocket-book’s final entry, a fiercely apocalyptic poem Rilke wrote only weeks before his death.9

It seems important to call attention to these last poems, if for no other reason than to stress the fact of their existence. But it would be misleading to regard them as a separate group, given the degree to which they continue the mode of the uncollected poems, virtually unaffected by the spectacular orphic interruptions of early 1922. If anything, they seem to intensify, distill, define more sharply the character of the uncollected work. But the poems of 1923 and 1924 do seem to enter a new zone, or at least take on a new coloration. Language lightens, yet grows dense with neologism, ellipsis, and wordplay. The change in feeling is elusive; Leishman, attempting to describe it, has recourse to the late Beethoven: “There is an Umschlag, a turn, a peripeteia: the prevailing mood is no longer one of strain and tension and effort, but of acceptance, or—to use Rilke’s favourite word—of consentment: now almost ecstatically joyful, now gravely tranquil, now sadly resigned; often, as in the last music of Beethoven, so much all of these together than [sic] one cannot say which prevails.”10 An even apter analogue might be Klee’s last paintings, which, like Rilke’s poems, are content to stay small, and which also proliferate, the apparent ease and slightness of the thing producing, again as with Rilke, disproportionately intense effects. (Klee’s angels, so alien to those of the Elegies, would be uncannily at home in the world of the uncollected poems.) Consider “Wild Rosebush,” the kind of poem that Rilke seemed able to write at will in 1924:

How it stands out against the darkenings

of the rainy evening, young and pure,

in its tendrils arched everywhere in givingness

and yet absorbed in its rose-being;

the shallow flowers, here and there already open,

each one unasked-for and untended:

thus, immeasurably exceeded by itself

and indescribably self-aroused

it calls to the wanderer, who in evening

meditation comes past along the road:

Oh look at me, see, over here, how safe I am

and unprotected and having all I need.

This deceptively simple poem is all contradiction, opposition, counterpoise. The isolated rosebush is heightened by its background and yet stands there against it, perhaps vulnerably near it both in space and in time (the Verdunkelungen at work behind the rosebush can suggest not just “darkenings” but deepenings, blackings-out, suppressions, obscure inflictings of harm). The rosebush itself is pure contradiction, a confluence of opposed motives pushed to their extremes: both “absorbed” (versunken can range from “sunk” to “immersed” to “engrossed”) in its rose-being—and thus both like and unlike the human being who walks past deep in thought—and extravagantly arched out in gestures of self-offering (ausgeschwungen, a Rilkean coinage suggesting not only the outward curve of the tendril but the motive force that extends it and perhaps even the desire that signals through it): gestures, it would seem, that go unheeded. The “shallowness” of the open flowers counteracts the bush’s “sunkenness” in its rose-being, and contradictory senses of abandonment (achingly forsaken or blissfully outside need) grow almost explicit in the paired participial adjectives (ungewollt und ungepflegt): either “unpremeditated and uncultivated”—hence spontaneously wild—or “unwanted and uncared-for,” as with an orphan.

As all this descriptiveness builds up in arcane formulations of self-exceeding and self-excitement (do they appear as summings-up or as non sequiturs?), the poem crosses over unexpectedly into the realm of voicing. As it does so—producing another quietly intense epiphany—new oppositions configure. Within the rosebush’s articulation of itself, are not “safe” and “unprotected” in blatant opposition? Or does it only seem so from one’s human standpoint? And if the rosebush is set apart from us in the unconflictedness of its contradictions, why the calling out so fervently to the human passerby, the intense desire to make itself seen and heard? Does it wish to offer itself up as an exemplum (as in “See how it might be for you”), or does it long for some connection? Either way, there is a pull. The rosebush and the solitary wanderer are themselves in counterpoise: the one possessing speech but sunk in silent thought, the other mute but calling fervently; the one passing by oblivious, the other straining from its rooted place; both of them solitary against the background “darkenings.” And if it is in the nature of things that the wanderer not hear the wild rosebush’s call, how then account for the poem’s own urgently imagined voicing of it? What human split does this configure? And last: as the poem rounds to its climax, how is it that the rapture in the voice prevails over its lostness on the human passerby?

*   *   *

The counterpositioning that makes “Wild Rosebush” so rich weaves through the whole of the uncollected poems; it is an obsessive leitmotif. Gegenüber is the key German term, whose slight distinctions Rilke seems always to mobilize: opposite, vis-à-vis, over against, facing, compared with, in relation to. Divides become the space of both severance and relation, longing and equipoise; opposites seek (sometimes mutually, sometimes one-sidedly) to bridge, cross over, bind, balance, renew, even stretch taut their “betweenness.” Male is posed against female, the face against the universe or the vast night sky. Women renew their tension with their mirror images, Narcissus views his lying lifeless on the water’s floor. Cups penetrate each other without clinking, the interval between them remains unchanged. Signals from the other side fail to reach us, change us anyway. The gods learned quickly to simulate halves, while wholeness may have been our worst mistake. “Brother body” must be humored in his sickness by his friend and fellow recluse “consciousness,” who is already a peculiar “we.” From over there in the creature world, “Everything tempts,” while from over here on our side, “even in the lightest things we waken counterweight.”

From this first leitmotif it would be only a step to the uncollected poems’ total weave: rising and falling, remembering and forgetting, gazing and heartwork, consent and refusal, renunciation and intractability, shelter and exposure, departure and arrival, holding on and letting go—on and on, in seemingly endless refiguration. Perhaps it is unremarkable that the poems should possess so elaborate an inner architecture.