Rainer Maria Rilke
Excerpts from the
Duino Elegies, translated by John Waterfield
THE
FIRST ELEGY
Who, if I cried, would hear me, of the angelic
orders? or even supposing that one should
suddenly
carry me to his heart – I should perish under
the pressure
of his stronger nature. For beauty is only a
step
removed from a burning terror we barely
sustain,
and we worship it for the graceful sublimity
with which it disdains to consume us. Each
angel burns.
And so I hold back, and swallow down the
yearning,
the dark call heard in the cave of the heart.
Alas,
who then can serve our need? Not angels, not
human
beings; and even the sly beasts begin to
perceive
that we do not feel too much at home
in our interpreted world. Perhaps we can call
on
a tree we noticed on a slope somewhere
and passed in our daily walk – the streets
of a city we knew, or a habit’s dumb fidelity,
a habit that liked our space, and so it stayed.
Oh, and the night, the night – when the wind
full of emptiness
feeds on our features – how should she not be
there?
– the long desired, mild disenchantress,
sure disappointer of the labouring heart.
Is she kinder to lovers perhaps? No, they hide
from her,
seeking security in an embrace.
Haven’t you grasped it yet? Throw from
your arms the nothing that
lies between them
into the space that we breathe as an atmosphere
–
to enable the birds, perhaps, in new zest of
feeling
to hurl their flight through the expanded air.
Yes, the springtimes needed you. Stars now and
then
craved your attention. A wave rose
in the remembered past; or as you came by the
open window
a violin was singing its soul out. All this
was a given task. But were you capacious
enough to receive it? Weren’t you always
distracted with expectation, imagining
these hints the heralds of a human love? (Where
will you keep her,
the loved one – you with your vast strange
thoughts
always coming and going, and taking up too much
houseroom.)
If you feel longing, though, sing of the
lovers, the great ones;
who has adequately immortalized
their alchemy of the heart? The unrequited -
you envied them almost,
finding them so much more
loving than the physically
satisfied. Begin, then,
the praise of what can never
be praised enough.
Consider: the hero maintains
an identity,
even his last stand merely a
last occasion
for self-assertion – a kind
of ultimate birth.
But lovers Nature takes to
herself again
as if she lacked resources
to do it a second time:
exhausted and fulfilled.
Have you pondered enough on
Gaspara Stampa – that any girl
whose lover jilts her can
take that life as a model
and think: I could be
like her?
Shouldn’t at last these
ancient familiar sorrows
bear feeling fruit in our
lives? Isn’t it time
to free ourselves from the
loved one, and bear the tension
as the arrow endures the
tensed string – to gather its forces
and spring to a state of
being that is more
than it could ever be? It is
death to stand still.
Voices; voices, and echoes.
Listen, my heart, as only
saints listened of old, till
the giant summons
lifted them from the ground
– but they went on kneeling,
impossibly, and stopped the
ears of the heart.
That was their way. Don’t
think, though, that you could endure
God’s
voice – far from it. But listen for the whisper,
the wind that breathes out
of silence continuing news.
Those who died young: their
fate a picture
you saw on speaking tablets
at Rome or Naples
or in Santa Maria Formosa,
where a few bare words
spoke volumes.
What do they want of
me? That I should gently
undo the apparent injustice
of their deaths:
that last hindrance to their
spirits’ progress.
Strange it is, to inhabit
the earth no longer,
to have no more use for
habits hardly acquired –
roses, and other things of
singular promise,
no longer to see them in
terms of a human future;
to be no more all that we
nurtured and carried
in endlessly anxious hands,
and to leave by the roadside
one’s own name even, like a
child’s broken doll.
Strange, not to have wishes
any more.
To see, where things were
related, only a looseness
fluttering in space. And its
hard, being dead,
and takes much difficult
recapitulation
to glimpse the tiniest hint
of eternity.
The living, though, are too
ready to posit a border
between two states of being:
a human mistake.
Angels, it’s said, are often
uncertain
whether they traverse the
living or the dead. The eternal current
pours through both worlds,
bearing all ages with it,
and overpowers their voices
with their song.
They finally need us no
longer, the early departed:
they grow beyond earthly
things, as a child mildly
outgrows the mother’s
breast. But we, left standing
before closed doors – we
from whose living sorrow
blessedest growth can spring
– where should we be
without them?
Think again of the story
how at Linus’ departing a
boldly tentative music
pierced, for the first time,
the soul’s blank grief;
and in that startled vacuum
from which an almost godlike
boy exited for ever, the air
fell
into that intermittent pure
vibration
which for us mortals is
rapture, and comfort, and help.
To
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O trees of life, when is
your winter season?
We are divided. Lack the
knowledge of
migrating birds. Belated and
outstripped,
we hurl ourselves suddenly
on the wind
to tumble on a pond of
misconceptions.
Both growth and withering
present to our minds.
And somewhere lions wander
in their glory,
and know in all their days
no dearth of power.
We, though, where we intend
one thing, and mean it,
are vexed by shimmering
alternatives.
Enmity’s near to hand. Don’t
lovers always
come upon fences in each
other’s souls
where they expected hunting,
home, and freedom?
Then briefly a design that’s
based on contrast
comes into focus, carefully
prepared
for us to see. (They take
some pains with us.)
We do not know the contour
of our feeling:
only the thing that moulds
it from without.
Who has not sat expectant
before the curtain of the
heart’s theatre?
And up it went. A scenery of
farewells.
Easy to picture. The
remembered garden,
the backdrop faintly
stirred. Then came the dancer.
Not him. I’ve had
enough. For all his footwork,
he is a fraud, a bourgeois
in disguise,
and passes through the
kitchen to his dwelling.
I cannot take these
half-invested masks.
Better the puppet. That is
full, and honest.
Out with pretence. I can
accept the wires,
the stuffing and
integuments, that face
of mere appearance. On with
the show. I’m here.
If all the lights go dim,
even if they tell me
the play is over, and only
emptiness
drifts from the stage on the
sickening grey air,
if none of my mute ancestors
remain
to sit with me, no woman
that I loved,
and even the squinting
brown-eyed boy is gone
who died so young, I’ll stay
here just the same.
Am I not right? My father,
you whose life
tasted so bitter where it
mixed with mine
as I grew on, the cloudy
fermentation
that was my destiny teasing
your palate
with a suggestion of strange
futures – searching
my eyes upturned to yours
opaquely, troubled
by what you saw and what you
did not see –
you who, now dead, are
present to my soul
and fearfully share my hope,
surrendering
serenity such as the dead
must have,
all that serene kingdom
surrendering
to share my little life, am
I not right?
And you, am I not right, you
who once loved me
for the poor bud of love you
saw in me
and thought was yours, which
I outgrew, because
the space I saw and
worshipped in your faces
opened on cosmic distances
where you
were visible no longer – am
I not right,
to sit just now and then, to
watch the show? No –
to gaze rather with such
strange constancy
that in the end, to
compensate my gazing,
an angel must descend to
tread the boards,
snatching the puppets into
his hands.
Angel and puppet: that’s
something like a play.
Then comes together all that
we put apart
by our existence, and our
seasons grow
to complete fullness in the
round of time.
Above us then we sense the
angel playing.
Look, surely the dying must
suspect
how full of sham are all our
ventures here.
Nothing can ever be itself.
Oh, hours of childhood,
when behind the presented
figure more
than just the past was, and
no future either.
We grew, of course, and
sometimes tried so hard
to grow up quickly, half in
will to please
those who in adulthood had
nothing else.
And yet were happy in our
solitude
with the experience of pure
duration,
stood in a space between the
world and our toys,
upon a spot established from
the beginning
to be the locus of a real
event.
Who will depict a child just
as it stands? – place it
within its constellation,
give it the measure of distance
into its hand? who make the
death of children
out of grey bread, which
hardens like a stone,
or place it in the cherry
mouth as it were the core
of a shiny apple? Murderers
are
easy to fathom. Only this:
to take on death
completely, before even life
begins,
contain it lightly and
without complaining,
bereaves description.
To
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That I may one day, leaving the
vision of terror,
sing praise and glory again to
assenting angels.
That of the heart’s clearly
smitten hammers
none may fall weakly on flat,
doubtful
or unsettled strings. That my
streaming countenance
make me shine. That my hidden
weeping flower.
How dear you will be to me then,
nights of affliction.
Could I have taken you to me,
comfortless sisters,
more kneelingly – could I have
lost myself more
wholly in your loosened hair.
We, the wasters of sorrows.
How we look out on their sad
prolongation, wondering
if they will ever end. And yet
they are
our lasting winter foliage, our
dark evergreen of the senses,
one of the seasons of the inward
year – nor just a
season merely, but bedrock,
settlement, home, and dwelling.
Strange, though, are the streets
of the City of Pain,
where in the false silence of
mere noise
bursting out of the moulds of
vacuity
the gilded monument boasts its
tinsel glories.
Oh, how an angel would trample
to nothing this mart of distraction,
which skirts their church – a
developer’s property,
clean and closed as a shopping
centre on Sunday.
Beyond it a whirl, the fair’s
fringes. Dippers
of freedom! Tumblers and
jugglers! – all on the make.
And the shooting gallery’s
pretty incentives, where
the target twitches and offers a
tinny sound
when the lucky man hits. Lauded,
applauded, and wholly
fortuitous, he staggers on, for
booths
that pander to every taste
solicit his custom
with a roll of drums. Then, for
adults only,
there’s a quite special show,
and it isn’t just entertainment:
the mating of money, for
anatomical viewing,
the sexual parts, the whole
process made plain.
You too can learn to breed... An
instructive display.
Beyond that, behind the last
hoarding, plastered with posters
that advertise their so-called
“Deathless” beer
(a bitter beer that tastes sweet
so long as the drinker
keeps chewing the pellets of
ever novel amusements) –
right there, behind the
hoarding, is the real thing.
Children are playing, and
thoughtful lovers embrace
on the pitiful grass, some
distance apart, and dogs
do as their nature instructs
them. Perhaps the boy
wants to go further. Perhaps he
has fallen in love
with a young Sorrow. He follows
her into the fields. She says –
Far. Far away. Out there is the
place where we live.
And he follows. Something has
stirred him. Her neck,
her shoulder –
she comes of high lineage,
surely. But he leaves her,
turns, waves – what’s the good?
She’s only a Sorrow.
Only the young dead, in the
first condition
of timeless serenity, the time
of weaning,
love her and follow her
willingly. Maidens
she waits for and befriends.
Softly shows them
what she is wearing: pearls of
pain, and the fine
veils of patience. Youths she
accompanies
silently as they go.
Out there, where they live, in
the valley, one of the ancient
Sorrows answers the youth when
he asks her – We
were once a great race, we
Sorrows. Our ancestors
worked the big mines up on the
mountain. You find
sometimes a piece of primitive
polished pain
or the frozen magma of ancient
rages even
in your world. Yes, that’s where
it came from. We used to be rich.
And she leads him gently
through Sorrow’s wide domain –
shows him the temple columns,
and the ruins
of mighty castles, where once
the Lords of Sorrow
wisely governed the land. Shows
him the lofty
trees of weeping and meadows of
blossoming heartache,
shows him the beasts of sadness
where they graze – and sometimes
a bird takes fright, and,
skywards skimming their upturned gaze,
traces
the visible image of its
desolate cry.
At evening she brings him to the
ancestral graves
of Sorrow, where the Sybils lie,
and the Lords of Warning.
Night comes on, they wander
further, and suddenly
rises moonlike before them that
ancient form
that watches over the dead.
Brother to that on the Nile, the
lofty Sphinx:
that blind face of hidden
chambers.
And they marvel at the crowned
head, which has set for ever
the human face on the balance of
the stars.
His sight fails, and cannot
grasp it, fainting
in the first state of death. But
their gaze startles
the owl from behind the royal
circlet, who traces
a curve in her flight along the
slope of the cheek
where it shows ripest and
fullest –
softly inscribes on the dead
boy’s inner hearing
as over an open double page
the indescribable outline.
And higher, above them, the
stars. New ones. The stars
of the Land of Pain. Slowly she
names them. – Here,
look: this is the Rider,
this the Staff, and that fuller
constellation they call the
Fruited Garland.
Then, towards the pole, the
Cradle, the Path, the Window,
the Burning Book, the
Doll; and in the southern sky
shining as if on a hand upheld
in blessing
the clear shape of an “M”,
that stands for the Mothers...
But the boy must go on. In
silence the ancient Sorrow
brings him to the ravine,
where a whiteness gleams in the
moonlight: the Source of Joy.
Reverently
she gives it its name. – In the
human world, she says,
it is a stream that bears you.
They stand at the mountain’s
foot.
And she embraces him, weeping.
Alone he climbs, till lost to
sight, in the mountains.
Out of the blankness of fate his
steps return no sound.
*
But if they wished to waken a
likeness in us, the endlessly dead,
perhaps they would point to the
hazel’s empty catkins
that hang in the dry wind; or
else the rain
that moistens earth’s dark soil
in the early year.
And we, who think of happiness
ascending,
would with consternation
know the rapture that almost
overwhelms us,
when happiness falls.
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