RILKE

Selected POe111S
RAINER MARIA
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

. . the translation does not give back the
full meaning, and he wants to show
to young people the beautiful and real
fragments o{ this massive and glorious
language which has been fused and
made pliable in such intense flame. he
. .

warms himself again to his work. Now

come evenings, fine, almost youthful
evenings, like those of autumn, {ör in-
stance, which bring with them such long
ca/m nights.ln his study the lamp burns
late. He does not always bend over the
pages; he ofien leans back, closing with-
in his eyes a line he has read over and
o ver, until its meaning flows into his
very blood.
CONTENTS
 From NEUE GEDICHTE: ERSTER TEIL

Früher Apollo 58 Blaue Hortensie 74

Early Apollo 59 Blue Hydrangeas 75

Opfer 60 V or dem Sommerregen 76

Oblation 61 Before the Summer Rain 77

Buddha 62 Letzter Abend 7 8

The Buddha 63 The Last Evening 79
Der Panther 64 Die Kurtisane 80
The Panther 65 The Courtesan 81

Die Gazelle 66 Die Treppe der

The Gazelle 67 Orangerie 82
The Steps of the
Römische Sarkophage 68
Roman Sarcophagi 69 Orangery 83

Der Schwan 7 0 Das Karussell 84

The Swan 7 1 The Merry-Go-Round 85
Ein Frauenschicksal 7 2 Spanische Tänzerin 88
A Woman's Fate 73 Spanish Dancer 89
Eine Welke 102 Ubung am Klavier 116
Faded 10
3 Piano Practice 117
Römische Campagna 10
4 Die Flamingos 118
Roman Campagna lOS The Flamingos 119

Die Parke [I und VII] 106 Der Einsame 120

The Parks [I and VII] 10

7 The Solitary 121

Die Laute 110 Das Kind 122

The Lute 111 The Child 12

3

Don Juans Kindheit 112 Der Käferstein 12

4
Don Juan's Childhood 113 The Searab 12 5
Dame auf einem Buddha in der Glorie 126
Balkon 114 The Buddha in the
Lady on a
Balcony 115 Glory 12
7

NOTES 12 9
INTRODUCTION
between "the leaves of the dark book" of German criti-
cism which has been written despite the Olympian
Lessing.
I want now to isolate my own Rilke, with a docu-
mented brief for his existence, as a man who during a

certain period of his life rode the twin fillies of the wing'd
horse, sculpture and painting, keeping a firm foot on

each, and singing, as he went, his beauti£ully £ormed and

colored sonnets, or
polishing and painting small concert

and salon pieces, sonatas in miniature. When he gallops

out of the tent into the
night of the soul in the Duineser
Elegien and into the foggy obfuscations of Die Sonette
an
Orpheus my blessing but not
my interest goes with
him, and I am, as
yet, unconcerned with his a£ter-fate.
The illusion of his
performance has been consummate,
and it is the well-nigh perfect artist o£ three books whom
I would present my to reader.
The poet of the period 19°°-19°8 seems to me, rather
arbitrarily perhaps, to be the center of a circle drawn
through three points: the painting of the W orpsweders
and the French Impressionists, the sculpture of Rodin,
and the poetry of Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme, and
other Symbolists. The poems of Das Buch der Bilder and
of the two
parts of the Neue Gedichte represent an in-

creasingly richer alloy o£ these various elements, until

finally what the poet observes of form and color is ex-

pressed in a thin, clear music which is certainly not the

German of the philologists. After he finished the last of
these books, a
great artist began to
grow dim; the power-
ful filament from which light with the minimum of heat

2
 had emanated began to
quiver forebodingly toward ex-

tinction.
In 1900 he went to W orpswede and lived for a time in
the colony of painters. The following year he brought his
wife Clara (nee Westhoff), one of Rodin's pupils, a
sculp-
tress whose masterpiece, their daughter Ruth, was
pro-
duced here, while Rilke wrote his mono
graph on the
W orpswede painters. There are
many letters covering
this period, from which the following excerpt must serve:

"Dank thun will ich euch allen und eurem Lande und
eurer Kunst" (letter to Otto Modersohn, one of the most

distinguished painters of the group).

In 1902 he met Rodin, whose secretary he later became,
and about whom he wrote a book. Hours of watching the
sculptor at his work impressed on the poet a
strong sense

of the unity of a
thing in bronze or stone. A painting can

never
possess the same vital existence as a
plastic form
standing alone in space; this viable reality is a
quality of
Rilke's best lyrics. That his association with Rodin in£lu-
enced hirn gready is shown by his many poems on statues

and architecture: two on

Apollo, three on the Buddha,
the group on the cathedral at Chartres, other pieces on

the Roman sarcophagi and fountain, and on the various

buildings and squares of several cities. The last book ends

with a
poem on the stone scarabs and another done under
stimulation of astatue of the Buddha,-although it is
true that these, as finale, have transcended in the vastness

of their conception any attempt to shut them in a half-

ounce of carved pebble or even in a ton of bronze or black
marble.
 The works conceived frompaintings or based on the
art would make a no less impressive list: the Pieta, Saint
Sebastian, the angels, Leda, a
doge, a
portrait of a
lady,
those of himself and his father, and in one
poem, "Der
Berg" (Sechsunddreissigmal und hundertmal/hat der
Maler jenen Berg geschrieben), he seems to
give a
fillip
at the art itself. In his many poems on flowers and ani-
mals there is profound evidence that he observed nature

with eyes that took note of form, color, and texture until
at last he does not so much describe the object as make
the reader see it for himself, projecting it from his own

mind, as on a screen. This power to make a headlock on

the reader and force his gaze in one direction only, Rilke
got from wrestling with the technique of the sculptors
and painters.
Let me now indicate the third point through wh ich
the circle limiting his during
art this period was drawn.
In the pages of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids
Brigge will be found several references to various modern
French poets; he made translations from Maurice de
Guerin, Andre Gide, Paul Valery, and Stephane Mal-
larme, and often the tone, approach, and feeling of his

poems are reminiscent of the best o£ French poetry of the

time.

Let the poet himself speak of his work:

Alas, those verses one writes in youth aren't much. One should
wait and gather sweetness and light all his li£e, a
long one i£ pos-
sible, and then maybe at the end he might write ten
good lines.
For poetry isn't, as
people imagine, merely feelings (these come

4
soon
enough); it is experiences. T 0 write one line, a man
ought
to see
many eities, people, and things; he must Iearn know to

animals and the wa

y o£ birds in the air, and how little flowers
open in the morning. One must be able to think baek the way
to unknown plaees . . . and to
partings lang £oreseen, to
days o£
ehildhood. . . and to
parents . . . to
days on the sea . . . to
nights
o£ traveI . . . and one must have memories o£ many nights o£
love, no two alike . . . and the screams o£ women in ehildbed . . .

one must have sat

by the dying, one must have sat
by the dead
in a room with open windows. . . . But it is not
enough to have
memories. One must be able to
forget them and have vast
pa-
tience until they eome
again. . . and when they become blood
within us, and glanees and gestures . . . then first it ean
happen
that in a rare haur the first word o£ averse
may arise and eome

£orth . . .
place to none,-and he understood the mysteries of child-
hood and the delicate nuances in the feelings of wornen.

And now he sits in an armchair, covered with rusty

green, with gray greasy hollows pressed by dozens of
heads, breathing the fumes of a tetc de moineau which
requires a
quarter-hour's stoking: this man who dines at

creameries, sickened by the smell of urine and the gray

nasty reek of potatoes in stale grease: here he sits and
dreams of Apollo, cathedrals with beautiful rose win-
dows, charming !ittle gazelIes, angels, elderly spinsters
brooding futilely in libraries, aristocratic ladies playing
the piano, and of the Buddha sitting calmly on the lotus
of contemplation.
Much has been and must
yet be written of Rilke's
technique and form, but he has packed the best analysis
of creative power in one sentence:

Y our blooo drove you not to form nor to

speak, but to reveal.
(Malte, p. 100)

I believe it was Zeuxis who painted grapes so realisti-

cally that the £inches £lew down and
pecked at the can-

vase Here was the proof of a

splendid technique! But
there was a Chinese Taoist (his name eludes me) who
painted a crane
(Grus chinensis) on an ion wall which
had been plastered with cow
dung-the picture was

done in payment of his wine bill-and then suddenly

mounted on the bird's back and ßew off into the bIue,
leaving the wall as blank and bare as the inkeeper' s face!
This was the creation of form to the nth power. And
Rilke's method of working is almost the same; he creates

6
the image of the object, stroke by meticulous stroke, and
infuses life into the resul t
by sudden revelation, the exact

essence of which is not to be pronged by any critical

scal pel.
This faculty he possesses in common with a11 poets,
but to a
greater degree than most of them. Perhaps I can

best demonstrate his peculiar application of it and at the

same time insert an
opening wedge for my pet thesis by
dissecting four of his animal poems and pointing out his
several methods of
approach.
In "Die Gazelle" (p. 66), at the first word, "verzau-
berte," one is immediately rapt into magic a world in
such sharp contrast to that suggested by the Latin name

which subtitles the poem that the very shock whets the
attention. If the rapidly succeeding images seem at first
to be entirely unrelated to
gazelle, once you have noted
and accepted the premise that the poet-after the first
direct address to the animal-is really talking over with
himself the artistic problem of the impossibility of catch-
ing the live beauty of the creature in two
rhymed words,
the rest of it will go off quite naturally, and each figure
of speech will lead the next on to the stage by the hand,
as children do at a
Sunday School cantata. T 0
proceed:
these rhymes come and go, like a
signal winking off and
on
(not bad, that, for the alternate movements of the ani-
mal's legs). Not only are the metaphors of the Iyre and
the branches rising from the gazelle' s forehead just evoca-

tive comparisons, when the musical curves of the horns

are considered, but a similar pair may very weIl have
served as the frame for the first I yre. And since the

7
 branches suggest the laurel, another essential of the song
god's equipment, Apollo might logically have been the
recipient of this !ittle monologue on the theory of poetry.
This reference continues through the love songs with
words as soft as rose petals. No one can
complain about
that; for the animal Inay have been standing conven-

iently before a
rosebush-possibly the astute curators of
the Botanical Gardens of Paris had provided an occasional
floral nibble for the occupants. But mark how the petals
fall on the tired eyelids of the reader: the poet himsel£
with his eternal books, who suddenly conjures up (ver-
zau
berte) before the mind, which sees into the li£e o£

things, this creature o£ the imagination-not at a11 like

Blake's symbolical tiger-through an odd and untrans-

latable pun. "Lauf" means both the leg of an animal and

a
gun barrel; this is merely matter
a o£ language, and the
poet didn't have to make it. But the metaphor is easily
carried on
by "charged but not fired," which makes the
gazelle stand alerdy on slender legs, Hcocked" you might
add, and ready for instant ßight. Nor is this delicate sus-

pension released by the final trope of the sonnet; for the

poem ends with the seemingly completely foreign pic-
ture of a girl bathing in a forest pool. But then a
girl,
especially aGerman girl, might weIl have as much nat-

ural modest)' as
any nicely brought-up little gazelle! And
there is a
splendid suggestion of coyness in the reßection
of the water on the half -averted face, with even a blush,
maybe. Nevertheless, the reader is not to be diverted by
the poet's caprice, and his mind instantly returns to the
animal, posed against eternity, as real and beyond change
8
 as the bison on the walls of the caves at Altamira. And
a11 this without any photographie description of the ob-
jeet. There is none of the veterinary' sexposition of the
stallion of Adonis. It is done calmly. No stars throw
down their spears. No God direets its solitary ßight. But
one has seen
agazelle that never was on sea or land:
Rilke's private little antelope, whieh now beeomes the
reader' s forever . The next time you see one, you will no-

tice that you get the same effect as from a

doubly exposed
negative, and that the poet' s
image is imposed on, and
probably completely invests, your own
picture. If this
explanation has longer
grown slightly man the fourteen
lines of the original, by achart, it shows, as the poet' s

power of eompression. His figures are not the result of

heliographie mirrors ßashing bright thoughts from dis-
tant hills; they the hitherto unapprehended
are facets of
the erystal of his thought whieh are
suddenly lighted by
a
ßuoroseope.
In "Der Panther" (p. 64) he is eoncerned with another
type of study. From the first he is dealing with nothing
but the anima!. There is onIy one
hgure of speech in the

poem. These sharp notes were written by one who had

watehed the eompaet, softly moving beasts many times.
There is the unusual observation of the nictitating mem-

brane, eommon to the cat

family, as it moves aeross the
"

Other translators have rendered this "eyelid. I

eyeball.
have interviewed three panthers about this, but have got
no results. After the dance of strength around the eircle
of the cage, no other action seems
possible. Then it is that
inside the (as Jupiter in the in
Rilke gets panther swan

9
 the Leda poem) and looks out
through the bars. Sud-
denly a
picture-he does not
say what, but one
imagines
the jungle forest and the pantheress-glides into the ani-
mal's eyes, flows through the tense
body, and ceases in
the heart. Mrs. M. D. Herter Norton calls this "one of
the most dramatic moments in poetry." This animal is by
no means Rilke's panther as the gazelle is his. This is
Rilke in a
panther, not fierce, but resigned with the sor-

row of a dumb beast. Although it is not so hard to follow

as the other animal poems, it probably represents a more

compIete embodiment of the poet's self in the object

under consideration.
When he purposes a
symbolic use of an animal, as in
"Der Schwan" (p. 70)' it is characteristic of the poet that
he does not overdo his symbolism. He does full justice to

the awkward movement of the bird on land, its cIumsy

descent into the water
(which I have rendered by a literaI
compound of three words), and finally to the majestic
natatory triumph with which the now
very dignified bird
moves-almost as if he (like the Queen of Spain) had no

legst Only as one thinks back does the full signif1.cance

of the poem take effect: one has seen a
pageant of life and
death. The piece is not so
pleasing as "The Gazelle," nor

so
moving as "The Panther," but it has its roots in a more

universal human significance.

Still another treatment of a similar subject, this time
more in the style of the painters, is found in "Die Fla-
mingos" (p. n8). The luminous colors of Fragonard, one

of the most delicate of the French painters, present the

white, black, and fruit-red plumage above the rosy stilt-

10
 legs standing in sedge the whole and thing like a
Hags:
bright Bowerbed just the outside
window-so irnme-

diately does he bring the picture before the reader. More-

over, here are two delicate glirnpses of the soft beauty of
woman: "she lay there, flushed with sleep," and the evoca-
tive name of the loveliest of the Greek hetaerae, Phryne,
who was the model for statues by Praxiteles and paint-
ings by Ape11es-a whole gallery of fine young wornen,
a11 appropriately white and rosy, and standing, perhaps,
also in water, like the flamingos. By an extension of asso-

ciation the whole festival of the birth of Aphrodite is

called forth, as the most
glamorous girl in Hellas rises

beautifully from the white sea foam . . . and a11 the old
men tremble. But the poet does not let one lose himself
in artistic and
contemplation. eroticSwiftly he haies the
reader into
passionate and a
sympathetic participation in
the futility of the caged birds wh ich waken, stretch them-
selves, and soar
through imaginary skies. The last three
lines are master
punches on a
glass chin: a fine poetic
shock. And there is nothing here about "only God can

make a
flamingo.)) There
is, I believe, in a11 Rilke no remi-
niscence of the Landseer or the Rosa Bonheur school of
faithful and sentimental animal painting. Only Whistler,
or
any one of the great Oriental artists a thousand years
ago, or Monet could have painted these birds. Here the
sensitive artist, lost in the love of living beauty, enriches
it with images from the past, then, at the first note of
suffering from his models, immediately becomes the seer

vividly presenting the inner, deeper pain which is the

essence of a11 beauty.
 Perhaps these brief studies of his several methods of

approaching a
subject will suffice to indicate that one

may expect a constant

variety of concept and treatment

in the poems. Y ou've got already a

very unusual !ittle

menagerie, as
sharply differentiated as an
ebony elephant
from Ceylon, a carnelian mandarin duck, a French bronze
stag, a Chelsea pottery poodle, a Mayan obsidian plumed
serpent, or
Lalique
a
glass colt.
This striking power of making the reader see
through
the poet's eyes is characteristic of the Neue Gedichte; but
Das Buch der Bilder although it represents Rilke as a

mature artist, is too subjective, too full of ego-lyrics. It

was written while he was still under the influence of the
folk song and the traditional pastoral poetry of Germany.
His vocabulary is limited, the verse is loose and capri-
ciously handled, with stanzas and lines of varying length,
with often a thirteen-line poem where he obviously pur-
posed three quatrains but ran over the edge; and there
are
pieces which started to be sonnets but ended one line
short or over. There is even a
poem in terza rima which
has a
single isolated line and an
interpolated quatrain.
(I have not hesitated to
reproduce this ragged effect in
some of the translations from the first book.) His figures
of speech lack the impact he developed in the later
poems. One might say that in the former the soul looks
out of itself at the world, and the poems are built on its
reaction; in the more mature new
poems a mind looks
through an
eye into the object, and the poems after
describing the external, universal attributes go into the
Ding an sich. My interest in Rilke's earlier work was

12
 stimulated largely by adesire to
get a
running start at

the hnished artist. In the Neue Gedichte he achieves a

tightness of form, a
progression to a climax, and a
greater
ability not to mold external hgures but to
puH the in-
ternal ngures out of the poem itself. Here is no
gesso
work, no
protrusion o£ added foreign matter into space
beyond the canvas, like the glass jewels on the pictures of
Carlo Crivelli; the poems have now the implicit depth
and rotundity of Cezanne' s
apples. He is no
longer a

writer of subjective lyrics, but has become a

painter and
a seer.

Rilke's hgures are his forte. They are never

dragged
along like trailers, nor fabricated to make his poetry
pretty, as are those in Shelley' "Skylark." s After a11, this
hidden poet-what is he hiding £rom?-this high-born
maiden in a substantial thousand-ton tower-this golden
glowworm in a dell of dew, admittedly a11 wet-what
have these to do with the skylark? And i£ there is any-

thing which a
skylark is emphatically not like, it is a

rose, probably pink, an undersized and sentimenta11y

flushed cabbage! This sort of stuff is an excrescence on

the legitimate body of English poetry and should be

abated. Shelley has industriously lugged in four little
similes, rolled them thin as
piecrust, and made his poem
twenty lines longer. These figures are the product of

fancy, as
Coleridge has dehned it: the silver paper, the
strung cranberries, the glass gewgaws, the popcorn balls,
the tinsei angels stuck on the Christmas tree. Rilke' s

tropes are the brown tight cones, the legitimate fmit of

a tree with roots in earth; they represent the power of

13
true
imagination which unfolds and develops from
within. Resultants of the life force which is common to

trees and poems, they are

organic and not fabricated.
And, speaking of a tree, here is a fine chance to
bring
in his first poem, "Initiation/' where the poet addresses
you-"whoever you are"-and instructs you to
go out

and erect a tree before the evening sky. "And you have
made the world." Y our own world, your representa-
tion . . . and so on, to the last poem, "The Buddha in the
Glory," where the almond is the Buddha, full, sweetly
ripening, with its very shell extending to
infinity. There
is a directness of impact in these metaphors which is far

beyond the circumlocutions of simile. Let me list other

examples of comparisons which are likewise part and

parcel of the work at hand: Apollo is the morning gazing
through the leafless trees of spring; the Buddha (p. 63)'
with a woman' s creative force, is in labor for a million
years; and the thirsty king who picks up just any glass is
likened to
destiny "wh ich also has a thirst"; the eyebrows
of the Venetian courtesan resemble the bridges arched
above the canals intimate with the sea; the balustrades
crumbling at Versailles remind the poet of the former
courtiers who bowed to the lonely king; and in another
poem the harlot waits to seize one's hand-as if to
wrap
it in a
dirty picked-up piece paper; of but the happily
conceived simile likening the Spanish dancer to a
flaring
match is perhaps his most completely unified compari-
son, for the poem is built of some half-dozen allusions to

hre. T ruly, his figures are

designed to "startle and way-
lay" the reader.
 Regarding the present translations: the earlier book
from which I have worked is written often in the folk-
song measures which have influenced every German poet
from Herder to Heine, and the poems are
slighter and
easier to
reproduce. But the two
parts of the Neue
Gedichte are mountain peaks, real and solid against
clear sky. Unfortunately, he seems to have used these as

aspringboard for a leap toward an uncertain stratosphere;

for his later books are to be followed only by inquisitive
travelers in !ittle air-tight mystical balloons. My choice
of his rhree cenrral books implies no criticism of his other
work; but he is nowhere else so finished an artist. Anyone
interested in writing will profit from a elose study of the
originals. The transmutation of German poetry into Eng-
lish verse is not
quite so
simple a matter as the kinship
of the two
languages might lead one to believe. Rilke's
vocabulary includes archaie, neologie, and coined words.
His punctuation is arbitary and often inconsistent. His
syntax leaves even his compatriots gasping-I have often
foundered completely. The often purposed vagueness of
the poems is exasperatingly creared by his overuse of in-
definite pronouns, many verbs either colorless or used in
a
secondary meaning, and his blessed relative clauses,
which have been my despair. I have not hesitated to avail
myself of his various metrical resources: variations from
the fixed forms of verse, the use of a short line in an

unexpected pI ace, ellipsis of connectives, assonance and

dissonance when an effect is required. Gfren I have been
able to
duplicate his devices; often again, I have used his
bolder technique for the rendition of perfectly orrhodox

15
 passages. For this liberty I can
plead only that Goethe' s

remark to Eckermann, in 1831, influenced me

profoundly:
"If I were
young and reckless enough, I would violate a1l
the dicta of these critical gentlemen. I would use false
rhyme, alliteration, and assonance, according to
my
caprice-but I would take care to
say so
many good
things that everyone would read and remember them."
Rilke has supplied me with the latter.
The following versions of the poems are the results o£

my anatomy lessons: drawingserode the eye, made while

attentive over
microscope,a
gazed into something rieh
and strange. Rilke is an
explosive experience. From "In-
n
itiation to the final "The Buddha in the Glory" I have
repeatedly undergone a
progressive se ries o£ emotional
effeets whieh are climactic, like those of a symphony.
And it is as music that Rilke is best approached; let the
reader give himself to the rhythm, the melody, and the
exaltation of the poems; the understanding will follow.
His very oddities should be apprehended as the dis-
sonances
employed by all the great iconoclasts from
Debussy to
Schönberg, from Cezanne to Picasso. These
three books rise to a
mighry finale of surrender, like
Beethoven' "Resignation!
s
quel triste refuge! et pourtant
c'est le seul qui me reste," to the awe o£ the last Hne, a

silent thunder-crash, a Bood of ealm and penetrating

light, worthy to stand beside

Das Ewig- Weibliche

Zieht uns hinan.
takes to which my attention has been directed by Babette
Deutsch, Jenny Ballou, and W. H. Auden. Had E. L.
Stahl of Oxford been equally explicit, I should have
atternpted to
expunge other rnistranslations or additions.
At least I hope to
please hirn by adding that I have done
the Duineser Elegien three tirnes and am
patiently wait-

ing until the holders o£ the American copyrights allow

me to hunt for a
publisher. This hope constitutes a

retraction of the unfortunate sentence on

page 2.

c. F. MAcINTYRE
From DAS BUCH DER BILDER
EINGANG
INITIATION
RITTER
THE KNIGHT
DER WAHNSINN
MADNESS
DIE ENGEL
THE ANGELS
AUS EINER KINDHEIT
FROM A CHILDHOOD
DER NACHBAR
THE NEIGHBOR
DER EINSAME
THE SOLITARY
KLAGE
LAMENT
EINSAMKEIT
SOLITUDE
HERBSTTAG
AUTUMN DAY
ERINNERUNG
MEMORY
ENDE DES HERBSTES
END OF AUTUMN
HERBST
AUTUMN
ABEND
EVENING
ERNSTE STUNDE
SOLEMN HOUR
STROPHEN
STROPHES
DAS LIED DER WAISE
THE SONG OF THE W AIF
AUS EINER STURMNACHT
FROM A STORMY NIGHT
From NEUE GEDICHTE: ERSTER TEIL
FRÜHER APOLLO
EARLY APOLLO
OPFER
OBLA TION
BUDDHA
THEBUDDHA
DER PANTHER
THEPANTHER
DIE GAZELLE
THE GAZELLE
 ..

ROMISCHE SARKOPHAGE
ROMAN SARCOPHAGI
DER SCHWAN
THESWAN
EIN FRAUENSCHICKSAL
A WOMAN'S FATE
BLAUE HORTENSIE
BLUE HYDRANGEAS
VOR DEM SOMMERREGEN
BEFORE THE SUMMER RAIN
LETZTER ABEND
THE LAST EVENING
DIE KURTISANE
THE COURTESAN
DIE TREPPE DER ORANGERIE
THE STEPS OF THE ORANGERY
DAS KARUSSELL
THE MERRY-GO-ROUND
Und das geht hin und eilt sich, daß es endet,
und kreist und dreht sich nur und hat kein Ziel.
Ein Rot, ein Grün, ein Grau vorbeigesendet,
ein kleines kaum begonnenes Profil.
Und manchesmal ein Lächeln, hergewendet,
ein seliges, das blendet und verschwendet
an dieses atemlose blinde Spiel.
And all this hurries toward the end, so fast,
whirling futilely, evermore the same.

A flash of red, of green, of gray, goes past,

and then a little scarce-begun profile.
And oftentimes a blissful dazzling smile
vanishes in this blind and breathless game.
SPANISCHE TANZERIN
SPANISH DANCER
From NEUE GEDICHTE: ANDERER TEIL
ARCHAISCHER TORSO APOLLOS
TORSO OF AN ARCHAIC APOLLO
LEDA
LEDA
DER ALCHIMIST
THE ALCHEMIST
DIE IRREN
THE INSANE
EINE VON DEN ALTEN
ONE OF THE OLD ONES
EINE WELKE
FADED
 ..

ROMISCHE CAMPAGNA
ROMAN CAMPAGNA
DIE PARKE
THE PARKS
Selbst der Frühling ist da nicht mehr gebend,
diese Büsche glauben nicht an ihn;
ungern duftet trübe, überlebend
abgestandener Jasmin
Spring itself has nothing more to give;
these bushes can no more believe in hirn;
unwillingly the gloomy, half-surviving
jasmine vine emits a fraH perfume,
DIE LAUTE
THE LUTE
DON JUANS KINDHEIT
DON JUAN'S CHILDHOOD
DAME AUF EINEM BALKON
LADY ON A BALCONY
 ..

UBUNG AM KLAVIER
PIANO PRACTICE
DIE FLAMINGOS
THE FLAMINGOS
DER EINSAME
THE SOLITARY
DAS KIND
THE CHILD
DER KÄFERSTEIN
THE SCARAB
BUDDHA IN DER GLORIE
THE BUDDHA IN THE GLORY
NOTES
 Pages 26-27, Tbe Angels-
These pathetic, anemic, epicene angels, with yellow water-

waved hair and long white robes, these angels all alike, as
they
are to be found in the paintings of the Primitives, in Blake's
drawings, or in the church windows designed by Burne-Jones,
are not
particularly impressive. One likes the seldom used irony
of the poet in recording their yearning forparenthetic sin. The

poem seems to me
important because Rilke is describing the
"broad sculptor-hands" of Rodin. And it's a grand simile that
relates the mighty rush of the angels' wings to God' s
turning
through the vast
pages of the dark book of the Beginning. But
these angels have merely the importance of rests in music.

Pages 28-29, From a Cbildbood-

Compare this memory of his mother with the Malte (p. 117):
H. . . Maman kan herein in der großen Hofrobe, die sie gar
nicht in acht nahm, und lief beinah und ließ ihren weißen Pelz
hinter sich fallen und nahm mich in die bloßen Arme. Und ich
befühlte, erstaunt und entzückt wie nie, ihr Haar und ihr
kleines, gepflegtes Gesicht und die kalten Steine an ihren Ohren
und die Seide am Rand ihrer Schultern, die nach Blumen
dufteten." There is great love in this poem, intensified perhaps
by the mother's casual and litotic "Are you here?"-as i£ she
hadn't known all along that the shy boy would be there, wait-

ing for what seems almost a secret

love-tryst. And there is
much wistfulness and suffering in the last stanza as the great-
eyed boy watches the tired bejeweled hands on the white keys.
See also the other poems on music, "The Last Evening" (p. 79)
and "Piano Practice" (p. II7)'
Pages ]0-]1, Tbe Neigbbor-
This is the outcry o£ an exile who feels himself pursued,
almost "picked on," by the music of an
equaIly lonely man.

Cf. "Ich sitze hier in meiner kleinen Stube. . . Ich sitze hier und
bin nichts... fünf Treppen hoch, an einem grauen Pariser

130
Nachmittag. .." Malte (p. 29). "The heaviness o£ things
[Dinge]" is one o£ his ma jor themes. This poem gains in the
original by the proximity o£ "Menschen bei Nacht" and the
blind man in "Pont du Carrousel," two
pro£oundly lonely
poems.

Pages 32-33, Tbe Solitary-

This belongs to the same
group. Rilke had made several
journeys to
foreign lands: Italy, in 1897, 1903' 1904; Russia, in

1899. Later travels included Sweden, in 1905, and Egypt, in

1910. My point is that the solitary traveler is just the man who
would be most
exposed to the museums, galleries, cathedrals,
city squares, and so forth, which Rilke describes in so
many
poems. He has eaten his bread in tears and is not unaware o£
the powers o£ heaven. One almost sees the "full days" like
wooden mugs o£ beer on Swedish tabIes, contrasted with the
inner life o£ the poet to whom only the £ar-away is filled with
realities, which I take to be implied by "Figur." The whole
poem is a fine example o£ the Zwiespalt, the dichotomy which
Rilke, like other poets, feIt in his relation to
ordinary life.

Pages 34-35, Lament-

In a similar mood of perplexity about the world, he turns to

the stars with the same assurance as did Ptolemy (in the Greek
Anthology), Dante at the ends o£ the three parts o£ the
C omed y, and the serene
philosopher o£ Königsberg. This is one

o£ a
group o£ poems (from which I have done six) which reveal
his misfitness for life and his ingrained melancholy.
Pages 36-37, Solitude-

After its topic sentence, this piece works principally with rain
and its effect on
peopIe in the gray ho ur of dawn; but the
identity of rain with solitude is finally established in the
splendidly isolated last line, itsel£ a mute
symbol o£ loneliness.
At the beginning o£ the nineteenth century, the Romantics in
a11 countries wrote about their individual soIitude. Rilke makes
it universal: Everyman's loneliness, even, or
especially, in the
city. For contrast, compare Shelley's "Euganean Hills" and the
many rather futile and wishy-washy poems o£ Waldeinsamkeit
from the Germans.
first stanza. Line 5 has three al rhymes; and four
g' s are heard
in the second stanza. Notice the gilbenden and gelben rhymes.
In line 9 are four initial w's and six hard monosyllabies, three
ending in a vowel and r. That's hard to beat.

Pages 44-45, Autumn-

A consoling assurance that the apparent destruction of things

is but part of the etemal order. It all happens in the hands of
God: those "broad sculptor-hands." One is reminded here o£ a

Buddhist story in which Hannuman, the monkey son of the

wind god in the Hindu pantheon, wagers the Buddha that he
can
leap out o£ sight. He takes a
deep breath and makes a

mighty spring. Returning, he teIls the Buddha o£ five gigantic

red sands tone
pillars which he has seen and marked at the very
outer rim of space. Quietly Sakyamuni shows the Haliburton
monkey his hand, with little scratches on the fingers, and asks,
"Did they look anything like these?" The story is better than
the poem.

Pages 46-47, Evening-

Evening is akin to autumn. In stanza
3 the reader again feels
himself in the situation presented in "Autumn Day" (p. 38),
but here is a
typical Rilkean chance to
amalgamate onesel£ with
the symbols of stone for the earth and stars for the sky: a

cosmic unity in place o£ the con£usion and fear o£ human

existence.
Pages 52-53, The Song of the Waif-
I have skipped a section of long poems whieh are not
partieu-
lady noteworthy, to an
example from "Voiees," a
group whieh
ineludes songs from earth' s disinherited: the beggar, the blind
man, the drunkard, the suieide, the widow, the idiot, the
orphan, the dwarf, and the leper. Who can beat this Homerie

catalogue of life's unfortunates? This is an erratic pieee o£

rhyming, but the plangent note of desolation is eomparable to

that in Theodor Storm's "Waisenkind," whieh is quotably

succinct:
Pages 58-59, Early Apollo-
When one remembers the expressionless, not to
say dumb,
faces of early Greek sculpture, he is surprised that such a

prophecy can be evoked from the unanimated features of the

gode But here it is: perfect
a little history of the development of
the Greek lyric after Apollo awakens and becomes, in addition
to
being a solar deity, a culture god, the god of song. One
recognizes again the poet's favorite rose
petals. In the original,
g's and k's give coherence to the octave; the sestet is tightened
by several b' s.

Pages 61, Oblation-

This links the poet' s cult of childhood with a delicate trouba-

dour love and the symbols of Christian worship. The glistening
of water is a motif to be found repeatedly in his later verse.

62-63, Tbe /Juddha-

Pges
The first of three poems on this subject. I have used two. This
poem, much lower in key than the one he chose for the last of
his book (p. 125)' was written in Paris in 1905, (Cf. Briefe, 1902-
1906, pp. 262 ff., 274 f., 290, 3 21
.) According to a note
given me

by Frau Ruth Sieber-Rilke, her mother remembers that this

poem is about a statue in Rodin' s
garden at Meudon. (Cf.
Gesammelte Werke, IV, 408.) I made a futile pilgrimage there;
the garden had been stripped. In the Rodin Museum in Paris
the statue had lost its importance because of comparison with
the many others.

Pages 64-65, Tbe Panther-

Perhaps the best of his several poems on animals in captivity.

Line 3 is typical of his capricious versification: "Stäbe gäbe,"
which I have feebly reproduced. Line 9 refers to the nictitating
membrane.

Pages 66-67, Tbe Gazelle-

See the Introduction for a full discussion. This seems to me

to be one o£ the key poems for understanding his technique.

Pages 68-69, Roman Sarcophagi-
This, another museum
piece, shows his interest in carved
stone, his desire to connect even dead matter with life, and his
use of water as a
symbol of the enduring essence of the world.
(Cf. pp. 61, 105, above, and Die Sonette an
Orpheus, Pt. I, x.)
Pages 7011, Tbe Swan-

A fine example of his symbolism. The swan

represents both
life and death. As he enters the water, we are
put under the
speIl of a
truly Rilkean moment: the entrance of an awkward
being into that mystery in which it not
only becomes more

beautiful, but in which its forward movement seems to be the

mature fulfillment of the meaning o£ life. I have reproduced in
line 6 his own
purposely clumsy phrase to
represent this transi-
tion.
Pages 76-77, Before the Summer Rain-

An indication of his interest in parks and childhood. Notice

the darkness and melancholy with which he invests even the
living rain. And the bird's reminding him of the saint is price-
less. In the sestet he uses the future, the present, and the past
tense in his verbs and somehow achieves an effect of time's
having been reversed in its motion until it leads one back into
memories of childhood. In Malte (pp. 153 ff.) he does some fine
interpretations of the six tapestries of "La Dame a la Licorne" in
the Musee de Cluny. The poem will receive considerable emo-

tional glow if the faded red and cobalt blue of these tapes tri es

are remembered.
have served him. The color of the hair, the jeweled hands strok-

ing the dog, the slender brows, are there; but the women look
so
stupid that it' s
impossible to
imagine eimer of them indulg-
ing in a little dramatic monologue about hersei£. The compari-
son of the eyebrows with the bridges, the "commerce" between
her eyes and the sea which is the life-blood of the
city, are other
organic figures growing from the very stuff of the subject-as
if sculptor
a
pinched a
lump of clay from part of his modeling
and applied it to another place: it's all of a piece. And "com-
merce" has to me, at least, something of a play on words. The
octave of this sonnet rhymes a bbb a ccc and runs over into the
sestet in the original. Burckhardt in his Renaissance has an

interesting seetion on this part of Venetian life.

Pages 82-8], The Steps of the Orangery-

The Orangery lies between two
great stairways ca lIed the
Cent Marches (it somehow pleased me find
to that they have
103 and 105 steps, respectively). Tbe balustrades really seem

very insignificant and the broad stairs very lonely. The force
of line 8 can be feIt only by standing below and looking up, as

the poet of course did. Then one

forgets the palace on the
terrace, and the stairs lead to the sky. The play o£ thought
here is admirably carried out: the lonely stairs and the aged
king, the crumbling (bowing) balustrades and the nodding
courtiers, and the king and stairs both climbing "by the grace
of God." There are thirteen long i's in the first six lines of the
original. Any other poet would have made a sonnet; Rilke
knows when he is through.
Pages 84-87, The Merry-Go-Round-
Tbis merry-go-round is still in use. It is a
primitive contrap-
tion under a tent
among the chestnut trees of the garden. Tbe
motive power is supplied by a hulk of a man who grinds a
large
wheel. W orst of all, there is no
organ and the animals do not

rise and fall on cams. But the children seem not to mind such
minor defects. The names o£ the steeds are
fascinating and de-
termine the popularity of the mounts. The horses are
painted
with cheerful names: Bijou, Felix, Charlot, PapilIon, Gamin,
and Coco. Three, probably triplets, are ca lIed Loulou, Lolo, and
Lulu. I suspect recent
tampering in the names of Mickey,
Donald, and Epinard. But children refuse to be bamboozled; I
have never seen
anyone on this last poor creature, named after
the Ioveless vegetable. There is a
giraffe ca lIed Fatima. The two

stags, Rapide and Pied Leger, have dilapidated anders mauled

by hundreds of hands. The lions, black Brutus and red Sultan,
are
splendidly carnivorous, with fine great teeth and drooling
tongues. The grand white elephants which seem so
large in the
poem and bob magically up and down are
really two smalI,
lovable, roly-poly calves called Rizi and T oby. Oh, yes, and
there are two old, red, moth-eaten camels, Simoun and Siroco,
whom the children will not ride for love or
money-the humps
refuse to conform to childish anatomy; the animals have an

eternal hungry look, and seem to have perpetual snufHes. I have

been past this place on dozens of autumn and winter after-
and there is always a crowd of children and
noons, a
sprinkling
of mothers grouped here. A brown ground-swirl of leaves serves

for a carpet. The man who takes the tickets is very genereus in
helping the younger children to
spear the brass rings which give
free rides. An air of sweetness and naivete pervades the place;
a ride costs
50 centimes; I once rode one of the poor, lonely, old
camels myself. The movement of the verse as the girls "glance
here and there and near and far away" does something toward
reproducing the easy bounding motion of the original. In at
least two of the poet's letters he says that this poem was almost
the only one which was sure of enthusiastic reception when he
read it before an audience. I have been criticized for not rhym-
ing the refrain. In German thc last syllable carries the accent,
but there' s
very litde to be done with a
dactylic word in

English.
Pages 8, Spanish Dancer-
Rilke saw this dancer at the christening party o£ Zuloaga's
daughter, Ruth Sieber-Rilke teIls me. One is reminded o£

139
Sargent's "Carmencita," the dancer in the yellow dress. I have

got the nine k sounds of the original in the second stanza.

These prepare the reader for the unmentioned castanets.

Klap-
pernd and Schlange really combine to
Klapperschlange, which
." "
IS ratt I esna k e.
immortal cygnets, who sprawl among the Howers. Mother and
the father-bird stand in much the
photographs posture of those
of grandparents.
our But emphasis, after the
all, is on the results
of the union. Correggio takes the affair at
high tide in his soft-
est, most
voluptuous style; the whole thing is Huffy and fuzzy,
all flesh and feathers. Of the statues, one can
hardly es cape that
in Florence by Ammannati, which is indebted to the female fig-
ures of the Medicean tombs-the Leda has a
silly face and a
muscular, stringy thigh; it is an unpleasant piece of work. The
smaller figure in the Archaeological Museum at Venice is

frankly bawdy and very amusing. But the presence of the story
in one o£ the details o£ the famous bronze Jubilee Doors of St.
Peter's gives one an
unholy shock, and the brisk treatment of
the event makes one feel rather more
kindly toward the frigid
baroque barn behind the doors. One wishes that Dante had put
Leda in his seventh circle, where she richly belonged for having
violated nature. Now consider how the story has fared in the
literature of our time. In Faust 
Part 11, lines 6903-6920, Ho-
munculus relates the dream he is reading in Faust' s mind. There
is a deal of life flame in the noble body, of rustling, Huttering,
and splashing, but the gentlemanly little manikin draws a thick
curtain of vapor over the finale as if the tableau were
being pre-
sented to a
parlorful of Backfische in fluffy white gowns with
pink sashes. After all, Goethe is pretty much eighteenth cen-

tury. But may I present a line-for-line translation from a

poem
on the subject from Divertissements by Remy de Gourmont?
The bird came nearer, beautiful, ardent, and dreaming.
The bird neared, beautiful, ardent, with an air
So regal and vigorous that Leda was charmed
And regretted in this illusion of her flesh
Not being a swan herself that she might be loved

Under the shadows, among the pleasant soft grasses.

In the shadows, among the soft grass and the lilies,

Leda gives way to the weight of this arrogant bird,
All dripping yet with the waters of Simois,
And her startled body, shivering, resigns itself
Notice that both these poets-and Yeats, too-put the empha-
sis on the woman and her reactions, whereas Rilke spends most

of his lines on the bird. Isn't there a fundamental difference

here, and is not Rilke' s sensuous
handling-if such it be-more
akin to the manner of the Greeks, childlike and unashamed? I
have gone into this perhaps at too
great length because an un-

derstanding of his point of view seems worth the trouble.

Pages 96-<;7, Tbc Alcbemist-

(I have skipped a dozen Biblical poems here.) A few years

ago gold was
actually produced from base metals-and in Ore-
gon, of a11 places! The "glass pear" is, of course, the retorte

There is a
bigness of the sweep of time in this, which is Rilke
at his best: after the aeons, an ironic tapering off to the tiny
crumb of gold.
Pages 99' Tbe lnsane-

A poetic interpretation of dissociation. The short fourth and

fifth lines of the second stanza are
typical iconoclasms. It would
have made a better twelve-liner. (Cf. "Madness," p. 25')
Pages 100-101, One of tbe Old Ones-

Let me
quote from Malte (p. 248): "Diese Stadt ist voll von

solche, die langsam zu ihnen hinabgleiten. Die meisten sträuben

sich erst; aber dann gibt es diese verbleichenden, alterenden
Mädchen, die sich fortwährend ohne Widerstand hinüber-
lassen, starke, im Inneresten ungebrauchte, die nie geliebt
worden sind." Typical of his interest in the underprivileged.
(Cf. the next
poem.)
Pageslo2- 10
3,Faded--
This is a tender and accurate
study of an old maid who must

now resort to artificial perfumes to

replace the loss of her youth-
ful blooming fragrance: a loss which is symbolical of the fading
of her personality until she seems
merely the old aunt of the
girl she once was. I have observed this tragedy many times.
Pages 1°4-1°5, Roman Campagna-
In the second quatrain the sonnet form is violated; it con-

sists of two sets of couplets. Fermen is a word made by Rilke

from the French ferme. The poem is almost humorous in its

conception of the personified road, fearful of the windows, yet

doomed to have them always at his neck. Compare M.D. Her-
ter Norton) Letters to a Y oung Poet, page 42, where it reads:
"Waters unendingly fuIl o£ life go over the old aqueducts . . .

and dance in the many squares over white stone basins."

Pages 106-109, Tbe Parks-

The poet is definitely interested in parks, for he had wan-

dered in many and lived on the estates of various friends and

patrons. Much of the material in the seven
poems of this set

was
gathered from Versailles. He speifically mentions the
T apis vert, the smiling Dianas, the stairs and the Naiads, and
he seems to have looked at these studies through the eyes of
Watteau and Fragonard, for he uses their very tones: silver,
rose, gray, white, and blue. The end of VII, where the swarm of

gnats blots out the world behind one's back, is one o£ his grand-
est moments. It is as if Shiva the Destroyer were
right behind
one.
the series of plays and poems on the subject. It's sad to think of
this splendid boy growing up only to be crushed under vindic-
tive marble.
Pagcs 120-121, Tbc Solitary-
Not to be con£used with an earlier poem o£ the same tide.
One has only to contrast the two
poems to see how far on the
Via Dolorosa the poet has come. Here he longs for something
beyond the usual ivory tower of romantic escape. All this is in
harmony with the motif of the last part of his book: lonelil1ess,
detachment, wistfulness for a
place beyond mortal suffering,
past the changes inherent in the universe, beyond even the
white face of love. I have attempted to
represent this in the
poems chosen from his finale. It seems to end in a Buddhist
annihilation or an
absorption into something which might be
called God. This poem has to be grown into and requires orien-
tation in the sacred books o£ the East i£ the vague symbols are

to be felt-they cannot be explained. It should be read in con-

nection with the last poem. The irydividual is striving to

pass
out o£ space into something whicl1 is either nothingness or a

divine whole.
Pages 124-125, The Scarab-

This penultimate poem of the Neue Gedichte is another piece

conceived in a museum; for as
yet Rilke had not been in Egypt.
But he has changed a casual experience into an
important part
of bis book by linking the motifs of time and space and leading
to his cIimax in the last poem. The little stone beetles become
the symbol of a
heavy and eternal vastness.
Space, like an em-

bodied postulate, rests on their wing shards.

Pages 126-127, The Buddha in the Glory-

Her mother' s recollection, Ruth Sieber-Rilke tells me, was

that "one o£ the Buddha poems was written about the great
statue in the Völkerkunde Museum in Berlin. This must be the
"
last poem, 'Buddha in der Glorie.' In an
early preparation for
this poem (p. 63)' the Buddha is shown as unaware of the pres-
ence of his worshipers. Here he is apotheosized; he becomes the
center of all space and time. The figure of the self-enclosed,
ever-ripening almond is daring but exact: the Buddha thus is
made the seed of all existence. The shell is in infinity, and time
is struck in a full final chord by "something more
enduring
than the suns."
c. F. MACINTYRE onee
suggested that he was an inde£ati-
gable translator partly because of the international inter-
ests of his family: his mother was a student of Latin and
Greek, and his father was
deeply interested in France and
Egypt. Much of Maclntyre's life had been spent abroad,
in various parts of Europe and in Mexico. German was his
second language, and he took his Ph.D. at the University
o£ Marburg. (There he began his translation of Faust,
Part I, which first won him notiee as a
translator.) He

spent his last years in Paris and devoted himself to trans-

lating, in support of which he received Guggenheim and

Fulbright grants.
Maclntyre was also known for his original poems, of
which several volumes have been published: Ca/es and
Cathedrals, The Rlack Rull, and Poems. The University
of California Press volumes (bilingual editions) translated

by Maclntyre include:

DUINO ELEGIES by Rainer Maria Rilke $ I .00

FRENCH SYMBOLIST POETRY $ I .50

THE LIFE OF THE VIRGIN MARY by Rainer Maria Rilke

$2.5°
ONE HUNDRED POEMS FROM LES FLEURS DU MAL by
Charles Baudelaire $ 5.00
SELECTED POEMS by Stephane Mallarme Cloth,
$3.50; Cal 9, paper $ .50 I

SELECTED POEMS by Rainer Maria Rilke $ I .50

SELECTED POEMS by Paul Verlaine $1'50
SELECTIONS FROM LES AMOURS }AUNES by Tristan
Corbiere $3.75
SONNETS TO ORPHEUS by Rainer Maria Rilke $ I
.50
Ullk€