The chapter presents a reading of probably the most celebrated ship-poem in existence, written exactly one hundred and fifty years ago by a teenaged boy in provincial France who had never seen the sea. The poem, in which the boat ‘speaks’, is read as unusually brilliant homework, as autobiography, as showing-off, as prophecy, as an account of empire. The Pyrrhic continuance or persistence of the drowning boat is read as an image of literature itself.
One doesn’t think of Rainer Maria Rilke as writing poems on sociological or documentary themes, on subjects that might otherwise reside in newspapers and books of social history, anything like emigration or poverty or unemployment. To some extent, one would be wrong. From the vantage point of a Swiss-managed Neapolitan luxury hotel, the poet describes the phenomenon of industrial-strength emigration from Southern Italy at the opening of the twentieth century. Is this an exercise in the macabre, the heartless, or something somehow strangely prophetic of Rilke’s own future career?
I have explained how the idea for these talks and this book first came to me, sitting on the little sofa-raft in our room in Hamburg one evening in the summer of 2017, and suddenly having an overwhelming sense of Rilke’s ‘Auswanderer-Schiff’; thinking ‘more boats, more boats’; and quite quickly coming up with the rest of the ...
Montale, in the 1930s, was between wars but also between women. His ‘hermetic’ style shimmers between suggested meanings or implications. ‘Boats on the Marne’ sounds like a pleasure-outing, a Sunday sail or row, and begins with ‘happiness’ but ends with ‘floating’ (like a corpse?); begins with an upside-down sun, and ends among the stars. A poem whose thought takes the characteristically Montalean form of a cyclone, opening and opening.
The fourth and last of these poems is the newest, and dates from 2015. ‘The World’ is shown to be an actual ship, a privately owned and managed luxury liner kept in continuous, obscene movement around our planet. Hence its name. Solie’s speaker (male, unnamed) is a co-owner and passenger-cum-inmate. His speech or pitch runs in parallel to the ship’s unceasing progress. Alas for both, it is shown to have the unhappy, destabilizing knack of puncturing itself, of turning down, of emerging into profound, unhappy, unanswerable questions.
