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Steven
E. McDaniel
PREVIOUS
ISSUES:
The Art & Craft Of Poetry
~
Rumi
An Introduction
THE
BEAUTY OF RILKE: TOWARD THE INFINITE LIGHT
Steven E. McDaniel
The 20th century brought us an array of powerful
poets that stands unequaled in any other time. The deep,
shadow-bruise of two world wars, the perceived threat of the
industrial Man and the control by the rich over the mechanical
clones of the working class coupled with the specter of the
atomic age, all fed the yearning souls of many writers. The
awful desolation and disillusionment of the times pushed
artists to reach higher toward the divinity of a concrete
meaning in our lives. This unusually intense movement toward
the sanctity of order amidst such chaos is unprecedented in
history as much as the pronounced acceleration of information
in this age of computers and digital technology.
When we think of the royalty of poetry who lived in the 1900’s
we naturally migrate to T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and
a few others. The early Eliot warned of the hollow, habitual
thinking, industrial man that humanity was fast becoming. He
warned of the illusion of the lost and found, and its ultimate
desolation, and he paved the way toward a true perception as
to what is authentic in our lives. Later, the elder Eliot
came to the river of light and drank like a wise Buddha
negating knowledge for actual being.
Easily, we also think of Yeats and his incredible blast of
presences and magic, as some of the wonderful gifts he gave
his readers. Many of his works will rob the breath, as they
are truly breathless with visions and spirits. Then there is
the old sage of insight, Wallace Stevens, whose metaphors of
light inspire one to see without blinders. And don’t forget
Dylan Thomas whose power of paradox and contradiction, fused
with vision and biblical oratory, inspired an entire
generation of poets to read poetry aloud. His command of the
English language was nothing less than blazing transcendent
bodies of artistic works that have no parallel. And the poems
were as melodious and rolling as the hills of Wales where he
spent much of his life. On and on, great poets lifted, like
cream, to the top of humanity’s milk. Astounding poets, such
as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, D.H. Lawrence, Pablo
Neruda, Kenneth Patchens, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsburg,
Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Garcia Lorca and others graced
the age. At their best, the voices resound like a chorus of
similar, uplifting music. But there was one poet, one
incredible, magnificent writer who wrote, much of the time, as
if he were writing from the hand of God. One poet who stands
out much like Beethoven stands out in the 19th
century: his name is Ranier Maria Rilke.
 
 Rilke
is the finest of the German language poets of recent times
and, perhaps, he is the greatest poet of the 20th
century. Many scholars and renowned poets share this view
that some might consider, certainly, an ostentatious opinion.
But the understanding that Rilke stands supreme is for good
reason. No other poet went to the depths of solitude nor was
able to put the sacred muse into words as deeply as Rilke. He
is the poet of poets and a true conduit of the immense
silences of light. His poetry is full of trap doors that
open to the edgeless sky. Immortally, beyond the senses,
Rilke mapped the way out of the senses into the throes of
intuition and truth. His work, like the spirit of life
itself, is a dramatic, creative act, and leaves one standing
in awe and surprise time and time again. His poetry teaches
mysticism and allows readers to behold his intimate journey as
their own in grace and poetic beauty. Rilke’s works, quite
simply, are remarkable in their expressions of the scope and
depths of the inexpressible.
Rilke was born
in Prague in 1875. He spent time in Germany and many other
countries, and although he wrote in German he considered
himself, vehemently, an Austrian and detested being called
German. Because Rilke, as a child and an adult, moved
often he never felt a certainty about a real home. This
probably helped fuel a deeper search in his soul for an
ultimate home, or place of no place, far beyond the external
world of measures he and other great writers and mystics have
alluded to with their works. His father was a failed military
career man and subsequent railway official and his mother was
an adoring but over-bearing primary figure in his early life.
Rilke became a man of deep introspection and solitude. His
spiritual affections led him to live many years mostly alone
and in remote settings in Russia and elsewhere. Friends and
patrons offered up many of these secluded settings whereas he
ultimately left his wife and daughter and other close
relationships although he regularly maintained correspondence
with a number of literary interests. World War 1 affected
Rilke deeply, as it did many artists of the times, and he
seemed to leave the outside world for the solitude of his
inner reflections. He hated being trapped in Germany, by
circumstance, throughout much of the war.
A big turning
point came early in Rilke’s life when he was a secretary for
the famous French sculptor, Auguste Rodin. He was guided by
Rodin who told him that to be a better poet he must find God
in the simple things of the world, to write more about the
vast in the small, and find an empirical union with the
object. In some ways, he began a new, spiritual quest by
abandoning his inspirational emotions for the higher art of
universal meaning and truth in the things of the world. Rodin
was instrumental in his example of, every day, making his
world with the tools of discipline, hard work and
introspection. Rilke’s subsequent collection, New Poems
attested to this rising transformation within him.
Another instrumental influence on Rilke’s life was his first
love affair with the older, Lou Andreas Salome, a leading,
world therapist and protégé of Freud. Her mentoring of Rilke
with her deep insights of human analysis helped set the stage
for the blossoming of this remarkable poet.
 Many
of Rilke’s works were created with amazing bursts of creative
energy. Then, there would be long lulls as if a storm were
brewing a flood. Time and time again Rilke would stir into a
blazing lightening-rod of divine insight where he would write
most of his collections in relatively small durations measured
in days. A couple of exceptions include The Book of Images
written over a period of about eight years (1899-1907) and
the incredible Duino Elegies that took twelve years to
write. Yet, most of the second half of the Duino Elegies
and the entire writing of The Sonnets to Orpheus
were “dictated”, as Rilke called it, in a matter of weeks.
These are two of the most amazing poetry collections ever
written, as Rilke seemed to transcribe the poems from a deep,
mystical state. Rilke’s very first larger collection of
poems, known as A Book for the Hours of Prayer (Bly)
and more recently published as Love Poems To God
(Barrows) shows the magnitude of the man as a young poet.
“I love the dark hours of my being
in which
my senses drop into the deep,” and “In
the silent,
sometimes hardly moving times when
something
is coming near, I want to be with those
who know
secret things or else alone.”
Other Rilke
works include the prose writings of The Lay of the Love
and Death of Cornet Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids
Brigge (his only novel) and others. His Letters To A
Young Poet is a prose classic and a must-read for aspiring
poets.
Rilke has been
criticized for being too introverted; or inward, as the trend
of the 20th century leaned to the extraverted
insights unleashed from the outer experience. And even though
Neruda was critical of Rilke’s complete aversion to the
politics of the world, he later recanted, as have most
critics. After all, Rilke was dealing with a higher politics
of experience, revelations and awakening, and many on levels
that requires its readers to be as deep as the writer in order
to really understand the works. But this is true of all
poets. A poet is only as good as his audience. But Rilke’s
work is much too amazing for any intelligent, adverse
criticism for he speaks too eloquently to the inward silence
in us all.
Major
translations of Rilke’s works include various editions by
Edward Snow, Robert Bly, Franz Wright, Stephen Mitchell, and
others. I highly recommend, ‘Ahead of All Parting: The
Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke by
Mitchell as a companion book for all poets and true lovers of
poetry. This collection includes the complete Duino
Elegies and Sonnets To Orpheus, and other
selections.
Personally, I
feel the The Duino Elegies is Rilke’s greatest works.
It reads like many poems contained in one and it is a movement
inside and toward spiritual realization on a scale so
extremely rare in poetry. The collection is, truly, a most
solemn prayer encompassing a vision of the unseen beauty
behind all beauties. Because of the scope of this work,
unprecedented except for the writings of perhaps, Wordsworth,
Blake, and Whitman, I am going to give an unusual, succinct
and highly edited account of the ten elegies. I urge you to
read, or re-read this man’s work in its entirety. Please do
not rob yourself any further of the best of the best poetry
ever written. In hopes of inspiring those who are not very
familiar with Rilke, and for those looking for deeper insights
not previously revealed, I begin a most audacious attempt to
bring some light upon this great body of poems. So, we begin
. . . toward the infinite light.
The first of
the ten elegies begins with Rilke asking “Who, if I cried out,
would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” He goes on to
write further in the stanza, “I would be consumed in that
overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the
beginning of terror . . . and we are awed because it serenely
disdains to annihilate us.” Immediately, Rilke surrounds us
with a great truth: that the power of the unseen, our creator
and destroyer, is our paramount beauty and source. To be our
beauty and our annihilation, as one power, leaves us with
nothing less than awe, wonder and a startling sense of fear in
our observations. Rilke moves on to deep insights about what
animals know (he dances in and out of these themes in much of
his works) and what we can learn from them. He speaks of our
longing for understanding, for the immortal life beyond the
living, and our seeing beyond death with praise for the simple
light of things. And he reveals how there is a great height
and inspiration in the loss of a beloved that allows us to go
far beyond the metaphors of our lives, and to find the truth
of love with, ultimately, no object. He implores us to
embrace our death and sufferings as necessary and beautiful
for they direct us to God, the source of all beauty.
“Voices. Voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have
listened, until the gigantic call lifted them off the
ground.” Rilke invites us, “ To listen to the voice of the
wind and the ceaseless message that forms itself out of
silence. It is a murmuring toward you now from those who died
young.” On he writes, relentless in his haunting pursuit, “We
for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit’s growth .
. . could we exist without them?” Yes, those who died young,
“Carried off no longer needing us . . .weaned from earth’s
sorrows and joys, as gently as children.” This and much more
in just his first elegy!
Throughout the
Duino Elegies, Rilke talks of angels and to the
angels. In the Second Elegy he chants, then urges, almost
pleading, “But if the archangel, perilous, from behind the
stars took even one step down toward us: our own heart,
beating higher and higher would beat us to death. Who are
you?” Rilke implores this invisible presence to reveal itself
although it has the power to annihilate us with its mere
presence, as it must for us to be our truth. He goes on to
lament and rejoice that image and world comes and goes as we,
too, vanish as candles into a bigger light. “When moved by
deep feeling, (we) evaporate.” Rilke mourns, and yet,
rejoices in his catharsis, that “Everything it seems wants to
hide us” from our realization of truth, and he begs us to
prove our truth of being. “You hold each other. Where is
your proof?’ He takes us to what never vanishes; yet it is
unseen and cannot be proven by the transitory image of things,
but by its invisible presence of a feeling within. This is
the inner union of life and death, of all that disappears into
the infinite light. It is the light of our souls. Not as the
narcissistic rant of reductionism into nothingness, but of the
unending life-energy at the end of the organic, living tunnel,
of the absolute everything in presence, understanding and
grace. Rilke astonishes us with his insights, “ For our own
heart always exceeds us . . .and when we can no longer follow
it, gazing into the images that soothe it . . .it achieves a
greater repose.” Rilke tells us clearly that our hearts are
of a peace much bigger than us, and he guides us to think
deeply but more, importantly, he lets us feel the traversed
distances of God at peace inside us. Ah, deeper than the
oceans or the vast voids of space, he grows you round the very
depths of your own longing heart. He plunges you into
yourself and warns of the false self-deluded with judgment and
the habitual, thinking mind. His dissection of love and
lovers, with their spiritual and perilous ramifications, is
explored in the Third Elegy with Rilke, again, moving toward
his beauty and terror as one. “Oh, gently, gently, let him
see you performing, with love, some confident daily task,-
lead him out close to the garden, give him what outweighs the
heaviest night . . . Restrain him . . .” Rilke’s very words
explain his own moving passion for the seas of truth, “But
inside: who could ward off, who could divert, the floods of
origin inside him?”
In the Fourth
Elegy Rilke delves further with powerful metaphor. “We are
not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn us like migratory
birds.” He compels us to take a thorough look at our human
condition. “Conflict is second nature to us. Aren’t lovers
always arriving at each other’s boundaries? Although they
promise vastness, hunting, home.” Again, he asks the
questions rapt in answers. He takes us to the depths of our
pain always longing for love and truth. “We never know the
actual, vital contour of our own emotions” only to pivot his
stance with certainty, “I won’t endure these half-filled human
masks; better the puppet.”
Rilke
challenges our so-called reality, the shallowness of our
living, and he gives spiritual credence to the insights of the
dying process. “The dying must notice how unreal, how full of
pretense, is all that we accomplish here, where nothing is
allowed to be itself.” He laments the loss of childhood, its
meaning, and he questions deeply what has been done to murder
the innocence of the world - where, now, only angels sing.
“Who shows a child as he really is? Who sets him in his
constellation and puts the measuring-rod of distance in his
hand?” And from the Fifth Elegy he writes further about the
process of lost innocence and how we build our defenses even
with a common smile.
“You little
boy, who fall down a hundred times daily, with the thud that
only unripe fruits know . . . a loving look toward your seldom
affectionate mother tries to be born in your expression; but
it gets lost along the way, your body consumes it . . . and
nevertheless, blindly, the smile.” Rilke drives home how love
denied sets us up for the longing of our roots and how our
bodies act as the consumers of our pain to bear the awful toll
of separation. Further, in the 5th Elegy, he
dissects the sleeping and awaking to abruptly hover, “And
suddenly in the laborious nowhere, suddenly the unsayable spot
where the pure too little is transformed incomprehensibly . .
. ,” always invoking the angels to listen to his pleas.
In the Sixth
Elegy, Rilke considers a simple fig tree and how, “Almost
without awaking it bursts out of sleep into its sweetest
achievement. Like the god stepping into the swan.” He laments
the terrible hesitations of humanity in comparison. “We
linger, alas, we, whose pride is in blossoming, we enter the
overdue interior of our final fruit and are already
betrayed.” Again and again, Rilke shows us to, simply, look
around and see what nature has to teach us. He returns,
continuously, to his woven themes of those who died young and
likens them to heroes who, “Plunge ahead in advance of their
own smile,” as if they are the brave ones trying to speak to
us a truth from the other side. The hero of those who die
young are united in Rilke’s understanding and they move in
“continual ascent’ not inspired by permanence. And he writes,
“Fate . . . grows inspired and sings him into the storm of his
onrushing world.” Eloquently, Rilke has merged the dying
young, archetype hero and God into one. “I hear no one like
him. All at once I am pierced by his darkened voice, carried
on the streaming air. Then how gladly I would hide from the
longing to be once again.” Rilke ends the Sixth Elegy with how
mothers are the “Sources of ravaging floods . . . from the
highest rim of the heart: sacrifices to the son . . . for
whenever the hero stormed through the stations of love, each
heartbeat intended for him lifted him up, beyond it: and
turning away, he stood there, at the end of all smiles,
-transfigured.” Rilke is relentless in his deep surgery to
uncover our pretense and inflect the god in us all, that
ultimate hero in which humanity births from the very freedom
we long for, choosing ultimately to ascend beyond the doubting
mire and into the revelation of waking sleeps.
Now, remember
that the Sixth thru the Tenth Elegies along with the entire
Sonnets To Orpheus were written in an incredible burst of
insight over a period of just a few weeks. We see in the
Seventh Elegy a passionate intensity rising like a full moon
over a dark forest. Once more, Rilke uses the metaphor of a
bird’s cry and beckons us to hear our own voice. “Be the
nature of your cry . . . cry out as purely as a bird . . .
that he is a suffering creature and not just a single heart
being flung into brightness, into the intimate skies.” Rilke
writes to embrace pain and all that happens as a result in the
process. “Oh to be dead at last and know them endlessly, all
the stars: for how could we ever forget them!” He speaks
clearly that the very stars and their immense illumination is
the simple truth of who we actually are behind the backdrop of
our longing. He begins to rejoice in his own vision and of
being in that vision of clear insight: “Children, one earthly
thing truly experienced even once, is enough for a lifetime .
. .truly being here is glorious.” And with great mystical
understanding, Rilke teaches us to beware of this incredible
joy of being without doing the important work of transforming
it into meaning. “We want to display it, to make it visible,
though even the most visible happiness can’t reveal itself to
us until we transform it, within.” He is speaking to his own
listening, and to God, as if in a deep spiritual prayer:
“Nowhere, Beloved, will world be but within us. Our life
passes in transformation. And the external shrinks into less
and less.” Here, Rilke speaks of another profound truth: that
the world, alas, the universe, is within us and slowly as we
age with wisdom the external shrinks back into its original
place within! And that all, “Passes into the invisible
world,” inside us. He aptly warns, “Many no longer perceive
it, yet miss the chance to build it inside themselves now,
with pillars and statues; greater.” Rilke, like Jesus and
others, is telling us the kingdom of all is not out there- but
inside us all, and that we must do the work to find it, to
build upon it, and claim it again as our towering home. The
Seventh Elegy concludes with Rilke “wooing” the angel as if
beckoning for even more understanding and light.
The Eighth and
Ninth Elegies are the most profound. In the Eight, Rilke
writes about how we cage ourselves with thought and object
unlike nature (and our true nature): “With all its eyes the
natural world looks out into the open. Only our eyes turned
backward, surround plant, animal, childlike traps, as they
emerge into their freedom.” He explains how we take the very
young child, “And force it around, so that it sees objects-not
the open, which is so deep in animals’ faces. Free from
death. We, only, can see death: the free animal has its
decline in back of it, forever, and God in front, and when it
moves, it moves already in eternity, like a fountain.” Rilke
again laments the loss of true nature and the child in us all-
the child in the natural, heavenly state of pure consciousness
without the concept of time past. He laments how we long for
the child who, “Without is desire and endlessly knows,” and
how lovers get close to this truth. “But neither can move past
the other, and it (love) changes back to world. Forever
turned toward objects . . .,” He continuously teaches us what
the animals innately know whereas we gain and lose this truth
projecting our presence to past and future, continuously.
Yet, he foretells a certain sadness in animals, as well. “For
it too feels the presence of what often overwhelms us; a
memory . . .”But Rilke quickly shifts back into the greater
light: “Oh, bliss of the tiny creature which forever remains
inside the womb that was its shelter, joy of the gnat which,
still within, leaps up even at its marriage: for everything is
womb. And look at the half-assurance of the bird, which knows
both inner and outer, from its source . . .” Rilke concludes
the Eighth Elegy with this question, “ Who has twisted us
around like this; so that no matter what we do, we are in the
posture of someone going away? . . .so we live here, forever
taking leave.”
In the Ninth
Elegy all mystical doors fly open. Rilke delves, at last,
into why we are really here. “Why, be human?” Rilke asks.
“Oh, not because happiness exists . . . but because truly
being here is so much; because everything here apparently
needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps
calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.” Rilke cries out
for us to be, “At one with the earth, if only once,” and that
our deepest meaning is entwined with our, “Long experience of
love, -just what is wholly unsayable. But later, among the
stars . . .” He brings it home that we must find the true
voice behind all words, that the objects and, indeed, our very
experiences are but metaphors and symbols to be unraveled in a
supreme act of realization. He disentangles the process,
“Isn’t the secret intent of this taciturn earth, when it
forces lovers together, that inside their boundless emotion
all things may shudder with joy?” Love, the utmost character
of God is inherent in the simple acts of being human. “Here
is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland. Speak and
bear witness. More than ever the things that we might
experience are vanishing; for what crowds them out and
replaces them is an imageless act.” Profound, in that Rilke
is stating that our own acts of love are what replace the
seemingly vanished objects and world as the pronounced Being
of ultimate reality. He moves on to praise the “world to
angel” of this divine, transcendent understanding, but that
God is mostly impressed with our truth of the simple things.
“Tell him of things. He will stand astonished . . .the
unsayable one.” And in, perhaps, the most startling stanza of
the entire Duino Elegies, Rilke addresses the very
Earth:
“Earth, isn’t this what you want: to
arise within us, invisible?
Isn’t it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday? O
Earth: invisible!
What if not transformation, is your
urgent command?
Earth my dearest, I will. Oh,
believe me, you no longer
need your springtimes to win me
over- one of them,
ah, even one, is already too much
for my blood.
Unspeakably I have belonged to you,
from the first.
You were always right, and your
holiest inspiration
is our intimate companion. Death.
Look, I am living. On what? Neither,
childhood nor future
grows any smaller . . .
Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.
This incredible
passage unravels a great mystical truth: that the true nature
of the world (all perceived objects) is Invisible, and
present. Reality is falsely ‘seen’ as separate objects in
time whose truth is in transformation back to the vast sea of
the Unseen presence within. Further, it is our work to find
this amazing truth and to carry it inside like a blossoming
rose in a newfound voice of beauty. Rilke parallels the
metaphor of the earthen springtime to show us we are here, not
to remain comfortable and stagnant, but to transform ourselves
like Nature and her ultimate movement toward the vanishing.
It is no mistake that Rilke speaks of death as our holy
companion only to allude quickly to the (childhood) past, and
then the future and that they are the very twins of death.
Yet, united, they grow into a super abundant being of the
heart.
In the Tenth,
and last, Elegy, Rilke relaxes and reflects in bliss and
tears, “Let my joyfully streaming face make me more radiant,
let my hidden weeping arise and blossom.” He praises
suffering as God’s great teacher; our shit, the fertilizer,
that grows green the fields of life. “How we squander our
hours of pain. How we gaze beyond them into the bitter
duration to see if they have an end. Though they are really
our winter-enduring foliage. . place and settlement,
foundation and soil and home.” He sees the beauty in all
things: the dogs, the children, and the lovers. He reflects
again, with a new light, on those who died young and who
follow the beauty of sorrow and lament, “The vast landscape of
Lament,” a land of, “The tall trees of tears and the fields of
blossoming grief (the living know it just as a mild green
shrub).” Here, Rilke tells us like Emerson once said, “A fool
and wise man do not see the same tree.” More and more the
remaining passages become magical, “In the twilight, she (the
angel of Lament) leads him out to the graves of the elders who
gave warning to the race of Laments.” This is the earth, in
deep sorrow and mourning that beckons to be transcended to
light. But finally, “They look in wonder at the regal head
that has silently lifted the human face to the scale of the
stars, forever . . .
Where shimmering in the
moonlight
is the fountainhead of
joy. With reverence
she names it and says: Among
men it is a mighty stream
. . . alone
he climbs on, up the
mountains of primal grief . . .
and we, who have always thought
of happiness as rising,
would feel the emotion
that almost overwhelms us
whenever a happy thing
falls.”
Alas, Rilke
connects all the symbols and metaphors into the simple act of
raindrops weeping into the earth in springtime: all in the
name of growth. In the growth-grief of our longing is the
mountain to be traversed to our ultimate origin born out of
the graves of all who have lived and died. There, in the
silence of our true being, the human condition is transcended
into the stars. This transcendence, the source of all joy is,
in the final analysis, no greater than the pain and power of
our emotion, “Whenever a happy thing falls.” All is,
ultimately, the oneness of God, as we stand breathless in our
divine beauty of being here.
Rilke died of
leukemia in 1926, four years after completing the Duino
Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus. He wrote the
following epitaph on his gravestone in Switzerland:
Rose, oh pure
contradiction, joy
of being No-one’s sleep
under so many lids.
Letters to the editor:
lighthousecolumn@yahoo.com
Steven McDaniel is an
award-winning video producer, writer and graphic artist. His
upcoming documentary project on the mystic Richard Francis is
slated for production in Spring 2008.
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