The Interim II: 1914–1922

This chapter continues the examination of Rilke’s ‘interim’ work with a focus on his responses to German literature, which he began to read in a more systematic fashion at this time, moving away from the French tradition which he had virtually made himself part of in Paris. Although the First World War stifled Rilke’s writing, he remained committed to a poetics of experimentation. The chapter looks in detail at his relationship with the poetry of Hölderlin, which was edited fully for the first time in these years and, within the context of the war, goes on to deal with the ‘phallic’ ‘Sieben Gedichte’ and other poems including ‘Der Tod’, ‘An die Musik’ and ‘Laß dir, daß Kindheit war…’ ending with ‘Solang du Selbstgeworfnes fängst…’ as a prelude to the Duineser Elegien.

Chronology of Translations

This chronology is based on the information in SW VII, supplemented by that in Chronik. Although a chronological ordering has been attempted, dates are often too uncertain for it to be more than approximate. The main intention is to lay out simply the continuity and distribution of Rilke’s activity as a translator. Publications in Rilke’s lifetime (or just after) are given in square brackets. The asterisked poems are sonnets....

Duineser Elegien

Rilke regarded the Elegies as his magnum opus, and this and criticism’s readiness to adopt his judgement have not only obstructed appreciation of Rilke’s other work but made it hard to read the Elegies themselves. We need to learn to read them again, which to an extent means reading them against the grain. It is as a precarious structure, rather than as a monumental one, that they have their meaning. This chapter offers a reading of each elegy in turn, attending to the rhythms, movements, and poetic logic of the poems—in short, the language out of which they are made—more than to their ‘argument’. A focus and starting-point is the elegy itself: elegy as classical form points to art as what shapes life and attempts to give it meaning; elegy as lament points to life as what is resistant to art and in its transience always escapes its structures.

The Interim I: 1907–1914

This is the first of two chapters looking in detail at the fascinating but uncollected and often unpublished verse Rilke wrote between finishing Malte (and slightly before) and completing the Duineser Elegien. This chapter takes us up to the First World War and to the poem ‘Wendung’. Rilke himself tended to disregard this work because it seemed incidental to his main intention of writing the Elegies, and until recently most critics have followed him. The prime aim is to draw attention to a number of important poems, some of which still disturb the general view of Rilke that stems from his better-known works (poems such as ‘Der Geist Ariel’ or the Gedichte an die Nacht). It provides readings of these, and also deals with translations from the period, especially of Shakespeare’s third sonnet, of Leopardi’s ‘L’Infinito’ and of some of Mallarmé’s sonnets. There emerges a glimpse of an alternative Rilke, of the poets he might have become had he not fixed his sights so resolutely on the Duineser Elegien.

Neue Gedichte

This chapter attends to the idea of ‘thing-poetry’, but less as a poetry about things than as poems which aspire to the condition of things. Rilke’s new material sense of poetic language, under the influence of Rodin, is given special attention, his deliberate efforts to come to terms with the specificity of language, his awareness of it as a medium that is ‘obstacle and vehicle’ (W. S. Graham) at once. Rilke’s use of the sonnet is important here, and a sign of Rilke’s new consciousness of poetic tradition. In this context there is a comparative reading of Rilke’s sonnet ‘Leda’ and Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’. For the first time translation becomes an integral part of his work (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese). This is looked at, along with the influence of Baudelaire, who shaped Rilke’s whole experience of Paris, and whose importance, though acknowledged, has still not been given the attention it deserves.

Rilke’s Openings

Reading meant a great deal to Rilke, and though he sometimes let himself slip into the thought that art is only of good to the artist and not to anyone else, or supposed that art was not at all concerned with having an ‘effect’, his poems contradict this in the apparent requirements they make of their readers. This introductory chapter on reading Rilke takes a cross-section of the work by focussing on the opening poems to the key collections from Larenopfer onwards. It appears from these poems that Rilke sees reading as an existential act involving risk and the exposure to change, and this is further supported by reading a handful of poems explicitly to do with reading. As well as giving interpretations of major poems such as ‘Archaïscher Torso Apollos’, this chapter thus prepares the ground for a reading of Rilke as a whole and reflects on the particular experience of reading Rilke.

Tender Taxes and Other Departures

The poems 1922–1926 are a body of work that has not received as much attention as it should. The most significant development is that Rilke, partly under the influence of Valéry whom he continued to translate, begins writing a large number of poems in French. What exactly does this turn to French mean? The main focus is on the Quatrains valaisans and the informal cycle of landscape poems in German related to the seasonal cycle, both of which are attempts to write a modern version of pastoral. This chapter makes the case for taking Rilke’s French poems seriously and for seeing them as enabling him to do something different from his German work. It explores a lightness and song-like quality in Rilke’s writing as the inheritance of the Sonette, while also attending to the German poems and the interactions between the two.

Die Sonette an Orpheus

The slightly critical treatment of the Duineser Elegien makes way for a reading of the Sonette an Orpheus as Rilke’s major work, though the intention is not simply to depose one in favour of the other. Rather it is to suggest how each enabled the other. This chapter examines the circumstances of the Sonette’s composition and its relationship to the genesis of the Elegien, and then goes on to read the Sonette as a tombeau or ‘tomb-poem’, with reference to Rilke’s translation of Mallarmé’s tombeau for Verlaine. The question the poems address is how to make a memorial for someone whose form of expression, dance, leaves no traces. Rilke’s return to the sonnet is also looked at in the light of the attempt to write a memorial. As against the Neue Gedichte, it is now the fluid living body, dance, that provides a model for poetry, rather than sculpture.

Rilke’s Requiems

This chapter, like Chapter 1, deliberately disrupts the chronological order, taking together Rilke’s four requiems: ‘Requiem’ from the Buch der Bilder (written 1900), the two famous poems published as Requiem (written 1908), and ‘Requiem auf den Tod eines Knaben’ (1915). At about the half-way point, this is a place to think about Rilke’s work synchronically as well as diachronically, to focus on a particular theme and a particular form, and to look back as well as forward. It also provides a counterpoint to the chapters on the Duineser Elegien (mourning-poems, but not for anyone’s death) and on the Sonette an Orpheus (written ‘as a memorial’ for a young acquaintance).