History of Literature







Rainer Maria Rilke




"Duino Elegies"

Rainer Maria Rilke   Rainer Maria Rilke From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Rainer Maria Rilke (also Rainer Maria von Rilke) (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926) is considered one of the German language's greatest 20th century poets. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets. He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. His two most famous verse sequences are the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland. Life 1875-1896 He was born René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke in Prague, Bohemia (then within Austria-Hungary, now the Czech Republic). His childhood and youth in Prague were sorrowful. His father, Josef Rilke (1838-1906), became a railway official after an unsuccessful military career. His mother, Sophie ("Phia") Entz (1851-1931), came from a well-to-do Prague family, the Entz-Kinzelbergers, who lived in a palace on the Herrengasse (Panská) 8, where René also spent much of his early years. Despite his mother's Jewish background, Rilke was raised Roman Catholic[citation needed]. The relationship between Phia and her only son was encumbered by her prolonged mourning for her elder daughter who was lost after only a week of life. In fact, during Rilke's early years Phia acted as if she sought to recover the lost girl through the boy by dressing him in girl's clothing when he was young, and making him act like a girl, etc.. The parents' marriage fell apart in 1884. His parents pressured the poetically and artistically gifted youth into entering a military academy, which he attended from 1886 until 1891, when he left due to illness. From 1892 to 1895 he was tutored for the university entrance exam, which he passed in 1895. In 1895 and 1896, he studied literature, art history, and philosophy in Prague and Munich.   1897-1902 In 1897 in Munich, Rainer Maria Rilke met and fell in love with the widely traveled intellectual and lady of letters Lou Andreas-Salome (1861-1937). (Rilke changed his first name from "René" to the more masculine Rainer at Lou's urging.) His intense relationship with this married woman, with whom he undertook two extensive trips to Russia, lasted until 1900. But even after their separation, Lou continued to be Rilke's most important confidante until the end of his life. Having trained from 1912 to 1913 as a psychoanalyst with Sigmund Freud, she shared her knowledge of psychoanalysis with Rilke. In 1898, Rilke undertook a journey lasting several weeks to Italy. In 1899, he traveled with Lou and her husband, Friedrich Andreas, to Moscow where he met the novelist Leo Tolstoy. Between May and August 1900, a second journey to Russia, accompanied only by Lou, again took him to Moscow and Saint Petersburg, where he met the family of Boris Pasternak and Spiridon Drozhzhin, a peasant poet. Later, "Rilke called two places his home: Bohemia and Russia".In autumn 1900, Rilke stayed at the artists' colony at Worpswede, where his portrait was painted by the proto-expressionist Paula Modersohn-Becker (illus. above). It was here that he got to know the sculptress Clara Westhoff (1878-1954), whom he married the following spring. Their daughter Ruth (1901-1972) was born in December 1901. However, Rilke was not one for a middle-class family life; in the summer of 1902, Rilke left home and traveled to Paris to write a monograph on the sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Still, the relationship between Rilke and Clara Westhoff continued for the rest of his life.   1902-1910 At first, Rilke had a difficult time in Paris, an experience that he called on in the first part of his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. At the same time, his encounter with modernism was very stimulating: Rilke became deeply involved in the sculpture of Rodin, and then with the work of Paul Cézanne. For a time he acted as Rodin's amanuensis, eventually writing a long essay on Rodin and his work. Rodin taught him the value of objective observation, which led to Rilke's Dinggedichten ("thing-poems"), a famous example of which is "Der Panther" ("The Panther"). During these years, Paris increasingly became the writer's main residence. The most important works of the Paris period were Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907), Der Neuen Gedichte Anderer Teil (Another Part of the New Poems) (1908), the two "Requiem" poems (1909), and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, started in 1904 and completed in January 1910.   1910-1919 Between October 1911 and May 1912, Rilke stayed at the Castle Duino, near Trieste, home of Countess Marie of Thurn and Taxis. There, in 1912, he began the poem cycle called the Duino Elegies, which would remain unfinished for a decade due to a long-lasting creativity crisis. The outbreak of World War I surprised Rilke during a stay in Germany. He was unable to return to Paris, where his property was confiscated and auctioned. He spent the greater part of the war in Munich. From 1914 to 1916 he had a turbulent affair with the painter Lou Albert-Lasard. Rilke was called up at the beginning of 1916, and he had to undertake basic training in Vienna. Influential friends interceded on his behalf, and he was transferred to the War Records Office and discharged from the military on 9 June 1916. He spent the subsequent time once again in Munich, interrupted by a stay on Hertha Koenig's Gut Bockel in Westphalia. The traumatic experience of military service, a reminder of the horrors of the military academy, almost completely silenced him as a poet.   1919-1926 On 11 June 1919, Rilke traveled from Munich to Switzerland. The outward motive was an invitation to lecture in Zürich, but the real reason was the wish to escape the post-war chaos and take up once again his work on the Duino Elegies. The search for a suitable and affordable place to live proved to be very difficult. Among other places, Rilke lived in Soglio, Locarno, and Berg am Irchel. Only in the summer of 1921 was he able to find a permanent residence in the Chateau de Muzot in the commune of Veyras, close to Sierre in Valais. In May 1922, Rilke's patron Werner Reinhart purchased the building so that Rilke could live there rent-free. In an intense creative period, Rilke completed the Duino Elegies within several weeks in February 1922. Before and after, he wrote both parts of the poem cycle Sonnets to Orpheus containing 55 entire sonnets. Rilke afterwards called it "the great giving."[citation needed] Both works together constitute the high points of Rilke's work. From 1923 on, Rilke increasingly had to struggle with health problems that necessitated many long stays at a sanatorium in Territet, near Montreux, on Lake Geneva. His long stay in Paris between January and August 1925 was an attempt to escape his illness through a change in location and living conditions. Despite this, numerous important individual poems appeared in the years 1923-1926 (including Gong and Mausoleum), as well as a comprehensive lyrical work in French. Only shortly before his death was Rilke's illness diagnosed as leukemia. The poet died on 29 December 1926 in the Valmont Sanatorium in Switzerland, and was laid to rest on 2 January 1927 in the Raron cemetery to the west of Visp. Rilke had believed that his death would be from blood poisoning as the result of having been pricked by a rose thorn. He chose his own epitaph as: Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust, Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel Lidern. Rose, oh pure contradiction, joy of being No-one's sleep, under so many lids. Rilke's literary style Rilke's work was highly influenced by his education and knowledge of classic authors. Ancient gods Apollo, Hermes and hero Orpheus can be found often as motifs in his poems and are depicted in new ways and original interpretations (e. g. story of Eurydice, apathetic and dazed by death, not even recognising her lover Orpheus, who descended to hell for her, in the poem Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes). Other characteristic figures in Rilke's poems are angels, roses and a character of a poet and his creative work. Rilke often worked with metaphors, metonymy and contradictions (e. g. as in his epitaph, rose is represented as a symbol of sleep - rose petals remind of closed eye lids, and of awakened senses - colour, scent and fragility of a rose). Rilke's 1898 poem, "Visions of Christ" depicted Mary Magdalene as the mother to Jesus' child. Quoting Susan Haskins: "It was Rilke's explicit belief that Christ was not divine, was entirely human, and deified only on Calvary, expressed in an unpublished poem of 1893, and referred to in other poems of the same period, which allowed him to portray Christ's love for Mary Magdalene, though remarkable, as entirely human."     Fall Day Lord, it is time. This was a very big summer. Lay your shadows over the sundial, and let the winds loose on the fields. Command the last fruits to be full; give them two more sunny days, urge them on to fulfillment and throw the last sweetness into the heavy wine. Who has no house now, will never build one. Whoever is alone now, will long remain so, Will watch, read, write long letters and will wander in the streets, here and there restlessly, when the leaves blow. What fields are fragrant as your hands? You feel how external fragrance stands Upon your stronger resistance. Stars stand in images above. Give me your mouth to soften, love; Ah, your hair is all in idleness. See, I want to surround you with yourself And the faded expectation lift From the edges of your eyebrows; I want, as with inner eyelids sheer, To close for you all places which appear By my tender caresses now. (1909) Tanslated J.B. Leishman     DUINO ELEGIES   Type of work: Poetry Author: Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) First published: 1923   For the reader who must rely on a prose translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's culminating work, the story and the man behind its appearance may overshadow the poem itself. Nothing of the elegiac quality of the original German can be translated which is as deeply affecting as the inspiration which produced the work, or the philosophy of the man who wrote it—a craftsman, a visionary, and one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. In October, 1911, Rilke visited his friend, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, at Schloss Duino, near Trieste. He remained at the castle, alone throughout the winter, until April, and there he composed the first, the second, and parts of several other elegies. The opening stanza, "Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?" came to him while walking in a storm along a cliff two hundred feet above the raging sea, a romantic interlude worthy of an atmospheric passage in a Gothic novel. Rilke conceived the plan of all ten elegies as a whole, though ten years elapsed before the poem found its final form. The First Elegy, like the first movement of a musical work, presents the central theme and suggests the variations that follow. From the opening line to the last, Rilke invokes the Angels, not those of Christianity but of a special order immersed in time and space, a concept of being of perfect consciousness, of transcendent reality. As a symbol appearing earlier in Rilke's poetry, the Angel represents to him the perfection of life in all the forms to which he aspired, as high above man as God is above this transcending one. Nearest to this angelic order are the Heroes—later he praises Samson—and a woman in love, especially one who dies young, as did Gaspara Stampa (1523-1554), whom Rilke celebrates as a near-perfect example. Like the lover, man must realize each moment to the fullest rather than be distracted by things and longings. With this contrast of Man and Angels, of Lovers and Heroes, and with the admission of life's tran-science, the poet suggests the meaning of life and death as well as words can identify such profound things. If the introduction or invocation is a praise of life, the Second Elegy is a lament for life's limitations. We moderns must, at best, content ourselves with an occasional moment of self-awareness, of a glimpse at eternity. Unlike the Greeks, we have no external symbols for the life within. In love, were we not finally satiated, we might establish communication with the Angels; but finally our intuitions vanish and we have only a fleeting glance at reality. Rilke began the Third Elegy at Duino and completed it in Paris the following year; during an intervening visit to Spain he composed parts of the Sixth, Ninth, and Tenth Elegies. In the third section he confronts the physical bases of life, especially love. He suggests that woman is always superior in the love act, man a mere beginner led by blind animal passion, the libido a vicious drive. Sublime love is an end in itself, but often human love is a means to escape life. Even children have a sort of terror infused into their blood from this heritage of doubt and fear. From this view of mortality Rilke would lead the child away, as he says in powerful though enigmatic conclusion, . . . Oh gently, gently show him daily a loving, confident task done,— guide him close to the garden, give him those counter- balancing nights. . . . Withhold him. . . . Perhaps the advent of war made the Fourth Elegy the most bitter of all, written as it was from Rilke's retreat in Munich in 1915. The theme of distraction, our preoccupation with fleeting time and time serving, makes this part a deep lament over the human condition. We are worse than puppets who might be manipulated by unseen forces, Angels. Our attempts to force destiny, to toy with fate, cause us to break from heaven's firm hold. We must be as little children, delighted within ourselves by the world without, and with our attention and energies undivided, alone. Here, we will find our answer to death as the other side of life, a part of life and not the negation or end of it. The Fifth Elegy, the last to be composed, was written at the Chateau de Muzot in 1922. Rilke was inspired by Picasso's famous picture of the acrobats, Les Saltim ban-ques. Its owner, Frau Hertha Koenig, had allowed Rilke the privilege of living in her home in 1915 in order to be near his favorite painting. Either the poet imperfectly remembered the details of the painting when the poem was finally written or else he included recollections of acrobats who had so delighted him during his Paris years. Regardless of influences, however, this poem is remarkable in its merging of theme and movement with a painting, emphasizing Rilke's conviction that a poem must celebrate all the senses rather than appeal to eye or ear alone. The acrobats, symbolizing the human condition, travel about, rootless and transitory, giving pleasure neither to themselves nor the spectators. Reality to the acrobat, as to man, is best discovered in the arduousness of the task; but routine often makes the task a mockery, especially if death is the end. If death, however, is the other side of life and makes up the whole, then life forces are real and skillfully performed to the inner delight of performers and spectators, living and dead alike. The Hero, Rilke asserts in the Sixth Elegy, is that fortunate being whose memory, unlike that of long-forgotten lovers, is firmly established by his deeds. He, being single-minded and single-hearted, has the same destiny as the early departed, those who die young without losing their view of eternity. The great thing, then, is to live in the flower of life, with the calm awareness that the fruit, death, is the unilluminated side of life. For the Hero, life is always beginning. In the Seventh Elegy, the poet sings the unpremeditated song of existence: Don't think that I'm wooing! Angel, even if I were, you'd never come. For my call is always full of ' Away!' Against such a powerful current you cannot advance. Like an outstretched arm is my call. And its clutching, upwardly open hand is always before you as open for warding and warning, aloft there, Inapprehensible. From this viewpoint, Rilke attempts in the Eighth Elegy, dedicated to his friend Rudolph Kassner, to support his belief in the "nowhere without no," the "open" world, timeless, limitless, inseparable "whole." "We," conrasted to animals, are always looking away rather than toward this openness. The theme of creative existence Rilke continues in the Ninth Elegy, possibly begun at Duino but certainly finished at Muzot. Here he suggests that the life of the tree is superior in felicity to the destiny of man. We should, perhaps, rejoice in spite of the limiting conditions of man by overcoming this negation of the flesh with a reaffir-mation of the spirit. Then death holds no fears since it is not opposite to life, not an enemy but a friend. This work may represent the author's own transformation from the negating, inhibiting conditions of the Great War to a renewed faith in life. The Tenth Elegy, the first ten lines of which came to Rilke in that burst of creativity at Duino, contains a satiric portrait of the City of Pain where man simply excludes suffering, pain, death, from his thoughts; where distractions, especially the pursuit of money, are the principal activities. This semi-existence the poet contrasts with that in the Land of Pain, Life-Death, where there is continuous progress through glimpses of a deeper reality to the primal source of joy. And we, who have always thought of happiness climbing, would feel the emotion that almost startles when happiness falls. Perhaps Rilke means that by complete submission or attunement to universal forces one is suspended or even falls into the "open." This deeply realized philosophy he developed in the Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), a work which complements the Duino Elegies, though it does not surpass them in deep emotional undertones and sheer power of expression.       "Duino Elegies" Translated by Robert Hunter           THE FIRST DUINO ELEGY Who, though I cry aloud, would hear me in the angel orders? And should my plea ascend, were I gathered to the glory of some incandescent heart, my own faint flame of being would fail for the glare. Beauty is as close to terror as we can well endure. Angels would not condescend to damn our meagre souls. That is why they awe and why they terrify us so. Every angel is terrible! And so I constrain myself and swallow the deep, dark music of my own impassioned plea. Oh, to whom can we turn in the hour of need? Neither angel nor man. Even animals know that we are not at home here. We see so little of what is clearly visible to them. For us there is only a tree on a hillside, which we can memorize, or yesterday's sidewalks, or a habit which discovered us, found us comfortable and moved in. O and night...the night! Wind of the infinite blowing away all faces. Within our solitude appears a nearly lovely god or goddess, all the heart is ever apt to meet. Lovers fare no better, concealing, by their love, each other's destiny. Do you still not understand? Pour your emptiness into the breeze- the birds may soar more swiftly for it. Yes, springtime needed you! The very stars, row on row, sparkled for your attention. From bygone days a wave rolled or a violin yielded itself as you wandered by some open window. These were your instructions. But what could you do- distracted, as you were, by all of that significance?- as though each signpost pointed on beyond itself towards something higher yet: a mere prelude to The Beloved! (Where would you find room to keep such a one, in amongst those vast, weird thoughts, always coming and going, often spending the night?) Sing, in your lovelorn longing, of the losers. Make their dark fame glisten. Sing of those whom you are nearly moved to envy in the purity of their despair: hearts more loving in their pain than many never broken. Sing again-and yet again- your altogether insufficient praise of them. The hero lives! His ruin is but a pretext to be born again. Depleted Nature calls her lovers back into her bosom, as though she had not strength to fashion them anew. Have you yet sung the bold grief of Gaspara Stampa so poignently that another girl, likewise spurned in love, might be moved to similar transcending passion? Is it not time these ancient seeds of pain put forth a flower?...time that, lovingly, we free ourselves from lovers?... time we fit ourselves, quivering like an arrow to its bowstring, enduring tension with the prospect of flight exceeding the limits of the feathered shaft, the string, the very bow which looses it? Nowhere may we remain. Voices, Voices! Hear, my heart, as only the holy hear, lifted from Earth by celestial command but taking no notice, so perfect is their listening. You could not bear to hear the voice of God. Not that, no... but perhaps attend the ceaseless murmer of silence: the vespers of the untimely dead, borne upon the wind... the whispers of the children who haunted that cathedral in Naples- the church in Rome... the injunction discovered on a tombstone last year at Santa Maria Formosa. All they ask: "Weep no more for us! Your tears muddy the path of our ascent." Strange to be no more of Earth. To quit half learned habits. To view roses and their kind no more in human terms. To be no more a babe in arms that ever fear to drop you. To leave the name you are known by like a child leaves a broken toy. Strange to desire nothing. Strange to watch the known world dissolve. Death is very difficult. Lost time is painfully reconstructed until the struggle yields some slight glimmer of eternity. The living are mistaken in their distinctions- angels often do not know whether they walk among the quick or the dead. So 'tis said. The storm of eternity roars; all voices drown in its thunder. Children who have gone do not require us. Weaned, they need no mother's breast. Our joys and sorrows don't concern them. But we, for whom the mysteries are golden, still unsolved, our very sustenance- can we exist without them? Grief is our spirit's fodder. Remember the Lament for Linos: how the first shaft of song shot through barren air carving a sudden vacuum in the astonished space where godlike youth forever vanished, leaving only a melody, which is our sole comfort and enchantment.           THE SECOND DUINO ELEGY Every angel is terrible. Knowing this, I invoke thee, O Deadly Birds of the Soul. Gone are the days of Tobias, when shining Raphael, awful majesty disguised, stood at a door, twin to the youth who gazed out, curious, upon him. Should such an archangel now descend a single step from behind the stars, our hearts would rise and rage until they burst! Who art thou? Primordial Perfection! First darlings of Creation: mountain summits crimson in the dawn of genesis- pollen of Godhead in resplendent blossom, essence of light... halls, stairs, thrones, places of pure being, shields shaped of ecstasy, swirling storms of rapture- all suddenly ceasing... mirrors!...commanding all the scattered sweetness into themselves again. When we feel, we do not recoup but blow until we empty, fading like embers or trace of perfume, bit by bit. Should someone say: "You are the sweet spring air I breathe, my heart's own blood!"... what can it mean? Contain us? They? No! We slip in, out and round them like wind. And the beautiful... Who can hold them? Fairness pours from their faces and...gone!-morning dew in rising sun... our essence dissipates like steam from a kettle. O smile, where do you run, eyes turned to the sky... new, warm, receding wave of the heart's own sea? O sorrow: all these things are what we are. Is there any taste of us in that eternity into which we merge? Do angels reclaim only perfect light, or does some hint of what we were remain? Do our faces linger, if only in that slight way a mother's face reflects her unborn child? They cannot see it in their swirling return to self! (How could they see it?) Lovers, had they the time, could recite words of wonder to the night. But most things end by concealing us. Look: trees are! Our shelters endure. But we, like mingled winds, claim no single habitat. All things conspire to keep us secret-half, it seems, from shame and half in token of some unspoken hope. O Lovers, completed in one another, I turn to you to ask of us. Is there certainty in your embraces? Look at it this way... my hands sometimes recognize each other and offer sanctuary to my weary face. This yields some slight sensation. But what proof of existence is that? You who fan the fires of one another's passion till, overcome, you cry "No more!"-who, beneath lover's hands, swell like purple grapes at harvest; who subside, that the other may more completely come to be: I ask you about us. I know the blessed touch abides with you-that what love cherishes does not decay; immortality oozes from those caresses- a promise, almost, of eternity. And yet, when you've weathered the shy fear of first glances, the sighs of longing at the window, the first-never again that first- garden promenade together: O lovers, are you then as you were? When you raise the glasses of each other's lips to drink, thirst to thirst, where does the drinker vanish? Were you not awed by the easy attitudes of Grecian graveyard statuary? Did not love and farewell sit lightly on their shoulders, as though compounded of an essence unknown to us? Remember how the hands rested without pressure despite apparent strength? Their very poses seem to say: "It is given us to touch this way. If the gods press us harder... that is for the gods to say." If only we could discover such a singular human place- pure, determined, self-contained, our own fruitful soil between the river and the stone! But our hearts outrun us. We cannot capture their essence by lingering before consoling statuary, nor by contemplation of those godlike forms containing all for which we yearn in monumental measure.             THE THIRD ELEGY   To rhapsodize the beloved is one thing. It is another, alas, to call forth the shameless River God of the blood from his hidden places. What does her young lover, face dissolving in the distance, know of the Lord of Lust who erects himself, despite her attempted soothing, from the depths of solitude, godhead adrip with unknown essences, blind at times to her very existence, rousing night to a continuous riot? O, blood's Neptune, O terrible trident, O, dark wind of his breast sounding the spiral conch! Listen to the night's hollow ring. Is it not, O stars, from you that the lover's lust for his beloved's face comes streaming? Is not the substance of his secret vision of her purest inner being drawn from your virgin constellations? You are not the one, alas, nor was it his mother, who lent that arch of expectation to his brow. Not from you, attentive girl, nor from your kiss, did his lips achieve a more fruitful curve. Do you expect your gentle step to shake the ground he stands upon, you who waft like morning breezes? It is true you startled his heart but terrors more ancient rocked him, awakened by your touch. Call as you will, you cannot free him from those dark companions, though he himself desires escape. Succeeding, he throws off their weight and settles in the bower of your heart. Discovering the seed of himself within you, he begins to manifest his individual being. But does he ever actually begin? Mother, you made him small. In you was his beginning. To you was he new and above the new eyes you spread the friendly world, barring disturbing strangeness. Ah! Where are the years fled when your slender silhouette was all he needed to obliterate the impending waves of chaos? You made it all all-right, hid true darknesses and lighted, with the sweetness of your heart, the suspicious corners of his room; rendered them harmless, mixing human breath into their chill, alien wind. His nightlamp was your presence, not the candle in the darkness, but the glow of friendly love. You explained each creak with a smile which implicitly stated foreknowledge that the alloted time for the floorboard to assert itself had come. He believed you and was soothed. All this your presence, at his bidding, settled. His tall, cloaked shadow of a fate slipped back into the closet, for the moment foiled- or mingled with the ripples of his curtains. Lying there rescued-as your sweet defending presence drowsily dissolved into gentle sleep- he seemed so secure, yet who could truly contain the internal floods of his fearsome origin? There were no doubts in this sweet dreamer... but in nightmare or in fever: another matter! How this new sprout grew, entangled with the roots of olden things; with strangling vines among prowling ancient predators! He was the born lover of this internal primeval wilderness. Among the rotting trunks of deposed giants, his heart sprouted green as the spring and loving. Loving, he left, descending through the shoots of his own roots, on out... out where the grand source of his little birth already lay outmoded. Loving, still, he waded into the depths of vast arroyos flowing with the blood of his fathers; where every cohort terror lay winking in complicity. Yes, the face of horror smiled upon him. Seldom, O Mother, have you, yourself, so sweetly smiled. What smiled at him, he loved- how could he help it? He loved it before he ever knew you- it was part and portion of your embryonic waters, upon which he floated. Observe: a season does not contain our whole lifetime, as with a lilac. When we love, a slower sap, thicker than centuries, courses through our embrace. O my love, consider: the child we would fain conceive was never an individual but a multitude, the personification of the fathers lying in our depths like mountains leveled to the lowest summits; like the barren riverbeds of mothers past- the entire soundless panorama, whether cloudy or clear, of mutual destiny. Before you, sweet lover, this was... And you, yourself, are you able to know anything of the eternal darkness which you stirred in your lover? How much of his forefathers' being claimed him? What women, coveting him, despised you? What dark jealousy of unknown lovers have you awakened in his veins? Dead children reach out to you... Ever so gently, perform with love some ordinary task before him. Lead him to the margin of the garden. Show him the counterweight of darkness..... Stop him.....             THE FOURTH DUINO ELEGY   O Trees of Life, when does your winter fall? Strangers to instinct, we lack the focus and the harmony which guide the southbound birds. Overtaken and tardy, we thrust ourselves upon the wind; fall out of the sky into icily indifferent ponds. We wither as we blossom, knowing both states at once. Somewhere lions roam, knowing nothing of weakness in the hour of their majesty. But we cannot focus on a single object without worrying about another. Conflict is our essence. Aren't lovers always crowding one another, despite mutual longing for wide open spaces, homestead and plentiful hunting? As when a canvas is carefully stretched and primed to receive a spontaneous sketch, the better to offset it, we do not observe the background of emotion, only what is splashed upon it. Who has not sat frightened before the heart's curtain, watching it rise upon a scene of farewell? So well understood: the familiar garden, lightly swaying. Then came the dancer. No! Not that one! No matter how lightly he flies, he is only a costumed actor, an ordinary man who takes his bow then hurries homeward, entering through the kitchen door. I will no longer endure these half filled masks! Better the completeness of an honest puppet. No matter the stuffing and the wire frame; the painted face of pure appearance. Here I stay! Though they cut the lights and declare there is no more... though a grey mist of emptiness curls from the stage... though my silent ancestors no longer sit beside me -neither that woman nor the boy with the squint brown eye- here I stay! I still may watch. Am I not right to do so, Father? You I ask, whose cup of life seemed bitter after tasting mine, so vital with the bouquet of youthful promise but bearing a troubling aftertaste. You often searched the depths of my unfocused eyes for signs of my uncanny future. Am I not right, O Father, who, so oft since dying, hath roused thyself from vast eternal peace to shudder at my crumb of fate? I pray it may be so. Am I not right? And you, dear ones, who loved the first stirrings of my love inside yourselves: am I not correct? You, beloved ones, whose faces faded in my very gaze to distances in which I never existed, am I not right to sit here, staring at the puppet stage, if only to gaze so steadily that an angel must arise, obedient to balance, to startle the stuffed skins into living action. Angel with marionettes! Actual theatre at last! What our presence has divided now is in our presence joined. Only now do the interstellar seasons correspond to the seasons of the soul. Above and beyond an angel frolics. Do only the dying notice how vapid and pretentious are all of our accomplishments here, where nothing is allowed to be as it is meant to be? O childhood hours, the shadows of whose shapes were not yet mere repetitions of shades past- when that which gleamed ahead was not yet the future. Growing, we often wished we were already grown, half to please those for whom nothing but their own maturity remained. Yet, when alone, we played with eternal toys and stood enchanted in the breach between our playthings and the world: a place primordially prepared for an immaculate advent. Who can show a child as he really is; set him starlike in his proper firmament and place the rod of distant measure in his hand? Who bakes the gray bread of his death and leaves it hardening, sharp as a sweet apple's inedible core, in his rounded mouth?.....Murderers are easy enough to understand. But to hold death, the whole of death, even before life is fairly begun- to contain it gently and without complaint- that defies understanding.             THE FIFTH DUINO ELEGY   for Frau Hertha Koenig   Who are these rambling acrobats, less secure than even we; twisted since childhood (for benefit of whom?) by an unappeasable will? A will which wrings, bends, swings, twists and catapults, catching them when they fall through slick and polished air to a threadbare carpet worn ever thinner by their leaping: lost carpet of the great beyond, stuck like a bandage to an earth bruised by suburban skies. Ensemble, their bodies trace a vague capital "C" for Creation... captured by an inevitable grip which bends even the mightiest, as King Augustus the Strong folded a pewter plate for laughs. Around this center the Rose of Looking blossoms and sheds. Around this pounding pestle, this self pollinating pistle producing petals of ennui, blooms of customary apathy speciously shine with superfluous smiles. There: the wrinkled, dried up Samson, becomes, in old age, a drummer- too small for the skin which looks as though it once held two of him. The other must be dead and buried while this half fares alone, deaf and somewhat addled within the widowed skin. There: the young man who seems the very offspring of a union between a stiff neck and a nun, braced and buckled, full of strength and innocent simplicity. O, you, children, delivered to the infant Pain as a toy to amuse it, during some extended illness of its childhood. You, boy, discover a hundred times a day what green apples know, dropping off a tree created through mutual interactions (coursing through spring, summer and, swift as water, fall, all in a flash) to bounce, thud, upon the grave. Sometimes, in fleeting glances toward your seldom tender mother, affection almost surfaces, only to submerge as suddenly beneath your face...a shy, half-tried expression... and then the man claps, commanding you to leap again and before any pain can straddle your galloping heart, your stinging soles outrace it, chasing a brief pair of actual tears to your eyes, still blindly smiling. O angel, pluck that small flower of healing! Craft a vessel to contain it! Set it amongst joys not yet vouchsafed us. Upon that fair herbal jar, in flowing, fancy letters, inscribe: "Subrisio Saltat." ...Smile of Acrobat... And you, little sweetheart, silently overlept by the most exciting joys- perhaps your skirthems are happy in your stead, or maybe the green metallic silk, stretched tight by budding breasts, feels itself sufficiently indulged. You, displaying, for all to see, the fruit which tips the swaying scales of balance, suspended from the shoulders. Where...O where is that place, held in my heart, before they'd all achieved such expertise, were apt still to tumble asunder like poorly fitted animals mating... where the barbell still seems heavy, where the discus wobbles and topples from a badly twirled baton? Then: Presto! in this exasperating nowhere: the unspeakable space appears where purity of insufficiency transforms into overly efficient emptiness. Where the monumental bill of charges, in final arbitration, totals zero. Plazas, O plazas of Paris, endless showcase, where Madame Death the Milliner twists and twines the ribbons of restlessness, designing ever new frills, bows, rustles and brocades, dyed in truthless colors, to deck the trashy winter hats of fate. Angel! Were there an unknown place where, upon an uncanny carpet, lovers could disport themselves in ways here inconceivable-daring ariel maneuvers of the heart, scaling high plateaus of passion, ladders leaning one against the other, planted trembling upon the void... Were there such a place, would their performance prove convincing to an audience of the innumerable and silent dead? Would not these dead toss down their final, hoarded, secret coins of joy, legal tender of eternity, before the couple smiling on that detumescent carpet, fully satisfied?             THE SIXTH DUINO ELEGY Fig tree, I've long found it significant that you omit, almost entirely, to flower but, early in the season press, untrumpeted, your purest secret into resolute fruition. Through your arched boughs the sap is driven downward, then forced up, fountainlike, where, hardly waking, it bursts from sleep into the bliss of sweetest achievement. Look-how Jupiter becomes the swan. .....But, sadly, we hang on. Our glory is all in the flowering. We press into our final tardy fruit already swindled. Few are moved so boldly by the impetus to action that they stand already glowing in fulness of heart when, like a soft night breeze, the temptation to flower brushes their youthful lips and strokes their eyes. That is the attitude of heroes- and of those elected for an early grave, veins trained differently by Death the Gardener. They dash ahead of their own smiles like the galloping team of conquering Pharoah in the gently sculpted friezes at Karnak. Wondrously akin are the young dead and the hero. Survival is the mission of neither. His is the ascent unending through amorphous constellations of everlasting personal peril. Few could overtake him there. But Fate, to us so mute, toward him bends inspired, singing the hero on to meet her roaring storm in his cataclysmic world. I hear none like him. Suddenly the river of wind rushes through me, bearing his voice of muted thunder. Then do I despair of my longing for lost youth with future hope intact, leaning on arms unmolded yet to read of Samson: how his mother gave birth at first to nothing, then-to everything. O Mother, was he not, unborn, a hero? Did his peremptory decisions not begin while still within you? Thousands broiled in your womb, wishing to become him. But observe: he chose one thing, disdained another and by the power of choice prevailed. If ever he broke mighty columns, it was in quitting the world of your body to confront the more constricted world where he continued to act and choose. O mothers of heroes- O fonts of storm whipped rivers! Gorges where tearful virgins have plunged from the heart's sheer cliff, as sacrifice to the son! Whenever the hero stormed through the way stations of love, each heart that beat for him pushed him on beyond that heart, where, turning away, he stood, at smile's end-transfigured.             THE SEVENTH DUINO ELEGY Wooing no more, no more shall wooing, voice grown beyond it, be the nature of your cry-though the cry be pure, as of a bird when lifted by the spiraling season-nearly forgetting that it is a simple fretful creature, not a solitary heart tossed into the brightness of intimate skies. Like him would you woo, so purely that, all unseen, you might awaken a silent lover, arousing in her, ever so slowly, an answering call, kindled by your own bright passion into a complementary flame. O and springtime would take hold and carry it everywhere until no cavern nor crannie could fail to echo your annunciation: the soft first question of the frail flute magnified in the limpid stillness of a daytime of entire agreement. Then up the ladder of your song, rise to the temple of the future discovered, on a time, in dream. Then the trill-a geyser gathering its spent streams back into itself, in recirculation of playful promise and still, ahead of you, the summer. Not only each and every sun of summer at a single rising; not only the way they steal dawn's gold into high noon... Not only the days themselves which roll so grandly over constellated trees be they never so gentle in amongst the blossoms; not only the ardent zeal of each of these unfolded forces, nor only the footpaths through twilight meadows, not these alone, nor the clarity of breath in the wake of an afternoon thunderstorm; not only the approach of sleep with its omens in tow... but these NIGHTS! Heights of the summer's nights, stars above and stars of Earth besides: O to be dead at last and at long last eternally to know the stars... the stars! How, how, how can they ever be forgotten? I called my love. She came, but not alone. From out of unsecured graves other girls arose and gathered round. How could my call, once sounded, be limited to one? These unfinished ones seek again the Earth. O children, one thing fully learned here is fit harvest for a lifetime. Destiny is only the dense residue of childhood. Often, if truth be known, you caught up with the beloved, short of breath from joy of the race, panting for further chase into entire freedom. To be here at all is a glory. You knew it, maidens, even those of you seemingly passed over, sinking into the city's meanest streets, festering alleys choked with trash and stinking of excretions. Each of you had her hour, or if not an hour, an instant, at least, between two moments when life burst into flower. Every blessed petal. Your veins throbbed with it. But we so soon forget what our laughing neighbor neither applauds nor envies. We desire that they be admired, but even the most visible of joys cannot be seen until transformed-within. Nowhere, beloved, does any world exist save that within. Life spends itself in the act of transformation, dissolving, bit by bit, the world as it appeared. Where stood a solid house now stands a mental construct, entirely conceptual, as though its rafters supported a rooftop in the very brain. The spirit of our time has raised storehouses of infernal powers, edifices shapeless as the primal force he wrenches from creation. Temples are unknown to him. It is we who try in secret to perpetuate such wasteful luxuriance of the heart. Yes, if one thing survives before which we genuflected, which we served or worshiped, it passes intact into the invisible. Many, perceiving it no more, fail to seize the chance to build it up anew, with greater pillars and more commanding statues than in days of yore-within! Each sluggish revolution of the world leaves its dispossessed-heirs neither of things past nor of those impending. The immediate future is distant for man. This should not confuse but confirm the needfulness of preserving those forms we still can recognize. This once stood amongst us, here in the province of Fate the Great Annihilator, in the very midst, knowing not whither nor whence, firm in its existence, calling down stars from their secure heavens to stand in witness. Angel, behold the vision. I will show it to you-Voila! Gather it into your eternal sight where it may at last endure, upright and redeemed: pillars, monoliths, the Sphinx, the gray cathedral's striving thrust o'er some strange and fading city. Is it not miraculous? Attend well, O angel; This is what we are, O Great One. Be thou herald of these wonders! My own scant breath will not suffice to celebrate it fully. We have not, after all, failed to employ our assigned spaces, these generous spaces of our own. (How fearfully vast they must be- aeons of our feelings have not overfilled them.) Was not a single tower great? O angel, indeed it was, even by your measure. The cathedral at Chartres was great- music rose higher still, quite surpassing us. Even a girl in love, at night, alone by her window... didn't she reach to your knee? Do not think I woo thee, angel! Should I do so, you would not be moved, so full of conflict is my cry. Against such utter counter force you cannot prevail. My call is like an open hand thrust out to seize, to defend, to warn off-while you, unattainable, receed far beyond its grasp.             THE EIGHTH DUINO ELEGY Animals see the unobstructed world with their whole eyes. But our eyes, turned back upon themselves, encircle and seek to snare the world, setting traps for freedom. The faces of the beasts show what truly IS to us: we who up-end the infant and force its sight to fix upon things and shapes, not the freedom that they occupy, that openess which lies so deep within the faces of the animals, free from death! We alone face death. The beast, death behind and God before, moves free through eternity like a river running. Never for one day do we turn from forms to face that place of endless purity blooming flowers forever know. Always a world for us, never the nowhere minus the no: that innocent, unguarded space which we could breathe, know endlessly, and never require. A child, at times, may lose himself within the stillness of it, until rudely ripped away. Or one dies and IS the place. As death draws near, one sees death no more, rather looks beyond it with, perhaps, the broader vision of the beasts. Lovers, serving only to obstruct one another's view of it, approach the place with awe... as if by accident, it appears to each behind that precise spot before which the other stands... neither can slip behind the other and so, again, the world returns. We behold creation's face as though reflected in a mirror misted with our breath. Sometimes a speechless beast lifts its docile head and looks right through us. This is destiny: to be opposites, always and only to face one another and nothing else. Could that surefooted beast, approaching from a direction different than our own, aquire the mental knack to think as do we, he would spin us round and drag us with him. But he is without end unto himself: devoid of comprehension, unselfscrutinized, pure as his outgoing glance. We see future; he sees eternal completion. Himself in all. Even so, within the alert warmth of that animal, the weight and care of one great sadness dwells. He is not exempt from an unclear memory-which subdues us as well: the notion that what we seek was once closer and truer by far than now... and infinitely tender. Here... distances unending. There... a gentle breathing. After that first home, this one seems windstruck and degenerate. O bliss of the diminutive: creature born from a particular womb into womb perpetual. O delight of the mite who leaps on, embryonic, though his wedding day impends! All is womb to him. But observe the lesser certainty of the birds who seem to know both circumstances, by very birthright, like some Etruscan soul rising from the cadaver of a sarcophagus sculpted with its tenant's face. Imagine the general bafflement of anything born of the womb and required to take flight! Frightened by its very self, it cuts the air with fractured arcs, jagged as bat tracks, cracking the porcelain sky of evening. We are, above all, eternal spectators looking upon, never from, the place itself. We are the essence of it. We construct it. It falls apart. We reconstruct it and fall apart ourselves. Who formed us thus: that always, despite our aspirations, we wave as though departing? Like one lingering to look, from a high final hill, out over the valley he intends to leave forever, we spend our lives saying goodbye.             THE NINTH DUINO ELEGY Since this short span might well be lived as lives the laurel, deeper in its green than all other green surrounding, leaves, edged by wavelets, smiling like the breeze- then why, destiny overcome, must we still be human and long for further fate? Not because happiness exists, that apparent advantage which barely presages loss. Not out of curiosity, nor as an exercise of such a heart as likewise in the laurel lies... But because to be here means so very much. Because this fleeting sphere appears to need us- in some strange way concerns us: we... most fleeting of all. Once and once only for each thing-then no more. For us as well. Once. Then no more... ever. But to have been as one, though but the once, with this world, never can be undone. So we persevere, attempting to resolve it and contain it in our grasp, in overfilled eyes and within our voiceless heart; attempting to be it, as a gift-for whom? For ourselves, forever! But what can we abscond with? We cannot take our insight with us into the other realm, no matter how painfully gathered. Nor anything which happened. Not one thing; neither suffering nor the heaviness of our lot. Not the hard earned lore of love, nor that which is beyond speaking. What can these things matter, later, underneath the stars? Better these things remain unsaid. When the rambler returns from the mountain to the vale, he carries no esoteric clump of soil, but some hard won word, pure and simple: a blossom of gentian, yellow and blue. Could it not be that we are here to say: house, bridge, cistern, gate, pitcher, flowering tree, window-or at most: monolith... skyscraper? But to say them in a way they, themselves, never knew themselves to be? Is not the undeclared intent of Earth, in urging lovers on, to make creation thrill to the rhythms of their rapture? Threshold. What do lovers care if, splinter by ancient splinter, they shred the lintels of their own front doors? As well they as the many before and the multitude to come... it was ever so. Here is the home and the time of the tellable! Speak out and testify. This time is the time when the things we love are dying and the things we do not love are rushing to replace them, shadows cast by shadows: things willingly restrained by temporary confines but ready to spew forth as outer change of form decrees. Between its hammer blows the heart survives-as does, between the teeth, the tongue: in spite of all, the fount of praise. Exalt no ineffable, rather a known world unto the angel. What do your splendors signify to him? You are an ingénue in the sphere of feeling he inhabits. So show him a common thing, the crafting of which has been passed down from age to age until our hands are, themselves, shaped to the making of it and our eyes to its beholding. Speak of objects! His eyes will grow wide, as did yours at the twister of the ropes in Rome or the pot-spinner by the Nile. Show him creature joy, without blame, entirely our own; how grief's bitter wail can live as song or transcend the utmost eloquence of violin in service of sorrow. These things that live upon the gesture of farewell know full well when they are praised: dwindling away, they demand rescue! And, that, through us- the most dwindling of all! They desire that we change them, whole, within our invisible hearts; transform them endlessly, Ah!... into ourselves. Whomever we are to be. Earth, is this your will? An invisible resurrection within ourselves? Is it your desire one day to vanish? Earth! Invisible! What do you demand but transformation? Beloved Earth, I will! Further springtimes are not required to win me- On my word, a single May is too heady for my blood. I have been your tongue-tied subject lo, these many years. Ever you spoke true and your holiest idea is Death, our constant friend. Look, I live! On what? Neither childhood nor future grows less... prodigious springs of being swell within my heart.             THE TENTH DUINO ELEGY That someday, delivered at last from this terrifying vision, I might sing out in praise and jubilation unto approving angels; that no single tone shall fail to sound due to a slack, a doubtful or a broken string when clearly struck by the hammer of my heart; that my joyful face might stream with radiance and these hidden tears at last erupt in blossoms fully blown, I must learn to hold these nights of anguish dear! O Sisters Of Lament, why did I not kneel more lowly to receive you- surrender myself more fully to your loose and flowing hair? We are wastrels of our sorrows, gazing beyond them into the desolate reaches of endurance where we seek to know their ends. They are but our winter foliage, our somber evergreen, a single season of our inner year; nor season only, but land, colony, storehouse, floor and residence. It is certain, alas, that we are strangers to the alleys of the City of Sorrow, where in the falsified silence born of continual clatter, the mold of emptiness ejects a strutting figure: the gilded din, the exploding memorial. O, with what finality would an angel trample to dust their marketplace of consolation, bounded by the church with its off-the-rack indulgences: as tidy, dull and shut tight as a post office on Sunday. Outside, always, curls the edge of the carnival. Swings of freedom! High divers and dedicated jugglers! And cosmeticized fortune's metaphoric shooting gallery whose tin targets clang and spin when struck by some marksman's chance shot- who, dizzy with applause, seeking further luck, stumbles down the midway where diverse attractions seduce, drum and hawk their wares. For adults only-a special attraction: graphic reproduction of currency! Titillating! The sex life of money, in the nude, gonads and all, before your very eyes- educational and guaranteed to enhance your virility.... Beyond the last billboard- plastered with ads for "Deathless," the bitter beer, sweet to those who drink it (so long as they nibble fresh distractions between sips)- behind the billboard, just to the rear: the real world. Children play and lovers touch, off to the side, intent in the thin grass, while dogs do as nature bids. A youth is drawn further on, enamoured of a young Lament. Into the fields he follows- "Beyond," says she, "far distant do we dwell!" "Where?" he inquires, by her bearing swayed. Her shoulder, her neck, bespeak a noble origin. Anon he leaves her; turns...waves. What's the use? She is a lament. Only those who died young, in the primordial equanimity of their weaning, follow her lovingly. She waits for maidens and befriends them, gently shows them her attire: pearls of sorrow and veils fine-spun of patience. Alongside young men she walks in silence. Beyond, in the valley where they dwell, an elderly Lament fondly indulges a youth who questions her. "Once," she tells him, "we were a great family, we Laments. Our fathers worked the mines of yon mountain range. Among men you still might find, at times, a polished lump of original sorrow-or a nugget of petrified rage from the slag of some ancient volcano. Aye, from yonder range it came. We once were wealthy." And lightly she leads him through the spacious landscape of Lament, shows him the pillars of the temples and the crumbled towers from which, in olden days, the Lords of Lament so wisely ruled... shows him the tall trees of tears and the fields of woe full flowered (such woe as the living know only as a shrub unbudded); shows him the herds of grief where they stand grazing. Once in awhile a startled bird, darting through their skyward gaze, inscribes its lonely cry upon the clouds. At dusk she leads him to the graves of the sibyls and dire prophets- of all the Lords of Lament the longest lived. As night lowers, their steps slacken and soon, rising like the moon, the Guardian Sepulchre is seen, kin to the Sphinx of Nile fame, lofty in cavernous countenance. They marvel at the regal head which silently presents the human face to be weighed upon the scale of the stars, eternally. His sight cannot grasp it, giddy still from early death, but her's startles an owl from behind the rim of the crown, who brushes the rounder of his cheeks, leaving a faint impression upon the new hearing born of his death; an indescribable outline scrawled as though across the leaves of an open book. And higher, the stars. New. Stars of the Land of Lament. Slowly the elder names their names: "Look there: the Rider, the Staff, and that larger constellation they call the Fruit Garland. Higher still, toward the Pole, the Cradle, the Path, the Burning Book, the Doll, the Window. In the southern sky, clearcut as the lines within a consecrated hand, sparkles the luminous M denoting Mothers." But the dead must away and silently the Elder Lament leads him as far as the Arroyo, where gleaming in the moonlight springs the source of joy. With reverence she names it, saying: "Endlessly it flows into the world of men." They stand at the mountain's foot. Weeping, she embraces him. Alone, he starts his climb up the peak of Primal Pain. Not once do his footsteps echo from this soundless path of fate. Were the endlessly dead to awaken some symbol, within us, to indicate themselves, they might point to the catkins dangling from the leafless branches of the Hazel trees. Or speak in drops of rain falling to dark earth in early spring. Then we, who have known joy only as it escapes us, rising to the sky, would receive the overwhelming benediction of happiness descending.