The Orphic Voice, page 29
Can this be in any sense regarded as fit circumstance for heroic epic? Wordsworth turns the question over in his mind more than once. By the time he could begin seriously on his “inquisition,” his more bustling days were already over. “The Recluse, At Home in Grasmere” (as the title runs of the only fragment of that central work which exists),17 the poet in domestic retirement surrounded by those quiet hills—is this a setting for deeds of intrepid adventure? In that same fragment Wordsworth asks himself this question, and seems almost to answer it in the negative. From line 703 onward he describes how his temperament since childhood was passionate for adventure; it is good for us to be reminded of this lest we make him into a pastoral softy in our minds. Then he says,
Yea to this hour I cannot read a tale
Of two brave Vessels matched in deadly fight,
And fighting to the death, but I am pleased
More than a wise man ought to be. I wish,
Fret, burn, and struggle, and in soul am there.
[720–24]
Later, he seems to relinquish hope of an epic strain, and to resign himself to something different.
Then farewell to the Warrior’s schemes, farewell
The forwardness of Soul which looks that way
Upon a less incitement than the cause
Of Liberty endangered, and farewell
That other hope, long mine, the hope to fill
The heroic trumpet with the Muse’s breath! [744–49]
Yet this is not a farewell to utterance, for there follows the line, “A voice shall speak, and what will be the theme?” and then immediately begins that passage we have already looked at, which Wordsworth used later to introduce The Excursion, the great Miltonic statement “On Man, on Nature and on Human Life.” That in itself suggests that epic has not really been renounced; the real aim emerges from a slightly earlier passage in The Recluse fragment which we will now look at, and from the parallel discussion in Book I of The Prelude. To turn to the exploration of the mind is not to renounce epic, but to reinterpret it. At line 732 of The Recluse the poet has this to say:
That which in stealth by Nature was performed
Hath Reason sanctioned. Her deliberate voice
Hath said, “Be mild and cleave to gentle things,
Thy glory and thy happiness be there.
Nor fear, though thou confide in me, a want
Of aspirations that have been, of foes
To wrestle with, and victory to complete,
Bounds to be leapt, darkness to be explored,
All that inflamed thy infant heart, the love,
The longing, the contempt, the undaunted quest,
All shall survive—though changed their office, all
Shall live,— it is not in their power to die.”
Wordsworth saw in his poetry, if not so clearly in his prose or letter-writing mind, what was at issue. There is no farewell to epic as such, only to earlier forms of it which need now to be changed and renewed, a vision closely linked to that which Milton expressed in Book ix of his epic, where he speaks of his subject as
Not less but more heroic than the wrath
Of stern Achilles in his foe pursu’d
Thrice Fugitive about Troy Wall; or rage
Of Turnus for Lavinia disespous’d . . .
Not sedulous by Nature to indite
Wars, hitherto the only Argument
Heroic deem’d, chief Maistrie to dissect
With long and tedious havoc fabl’d Knights
In Battles feign’d; the better fortitude
Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom
Unsung; or to describe Races and Games,
Or tilting Furniture, emblazon’d Shields . . .
Not that which justly gives Heroic name
To Person or to Poem. Me of these
Nor skill’d nor studious, higher Argument
Remains, sufficient of itself to raise
That name . . .
[14–18, 27–34, 40–44]
Heroism and epic must be taken forward, as Milton and Wordsworth both saw. The references in each to predecessors are to be interpreted not as rejections but as recognition of the ground, now no longer adequate, from which advance is to be attempted—but advance in the same terms. To work a change upon heroism is not to lose it, nor epic either. It is as Wordsworth so finely says, a change of office, no more; it is not in their power to die. And he sees his task in marvelous, almost Malory-ish terms of high prowess, “the dauntless quest,” “darkness to be explored.” It fits with the passage to come later where he declares the nature of his quest, “into our minds, into the Mind of Man,” that brief phrase expressing in itself the personal heroic quest and its universal significance for universal humanity; now he says
For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
Deep,— and aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil.
It is a geste, this exploration of the mind, and because the poet is to pursue it in his own mind he is at once the hero and the setting of his own epic, though always in relation to, interpreted by and interpreting, the natural universe. That is why there is that sense of bracing oneself for momentous enterprise in Wordsworth’s poetic statements of program. Mary Moorman says, very finely, that he was about to embark upon “the loneliest adventure ever undertaken by the human mind” (William Wordsworth, chap. 11).
Already in the figures which Wordsworth has been using to describe his research there appears the image of a dark and hazardous journey, downward and upward. When, in Book I of The Prelude, he is considering possible epic subjects, the sequence culminates in a hint of the form such a journey might take and the means by which it could be accomplished. This is that “last and favourite aspiration,” the philosophic Song of Truth, which we have mentioned already. Now we need to look at these lines rather more attentively:
With meditations passionate from deep
Recesses in man’s heart, immortal verse
Thoughtfully fitted to the Orphean lyre.
The deep recesses of the heart, the workings of the heart, one might say, as if they were mine-workings—into them the journey is to take place and out of them are the meditations to come. And the instrument is the Orphic power of poetry. Milton had used the same image in Book III of Paradise Lost to describe his own poetic experience in that poem:
Through utter and through middle darkness borne,
With other notes then to th’ Orphean Lyre
I sung of Chaos and Eternal Night,
Taught by the heavenly Muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend,
Though hard and rare. [16–21]
We see now what we have come to. This is the second figure of the Orpheus myth, the descent into hell in search of Eurydice and the return, baffled yet not perhaps wholly so. Wordsworth takes from Milton the hint that this is the means by which to interpret this journey he has to make into the mind.
The figure does not move from Milton to Wordsworth in order to stop there, however. The Orphic voice goes on, as the Orphic research does. A hundred years after Wordsworth, in 1907, the next Orphic voice is saying in a letter, “but if I go on writing now, I must go up to the stars and down to the bottom of the sea.”18 There is adventure and exploration of the universe in that image, but this poet has moved the Orphic journey one stage further on. For if the second Orpheus figure, the Eurydice one, is a journey, so is the third, in a sense—only a posthumous one, for after Orpheus had been torn to pieces by the women, his head and lyre make a journey down river to the sea, and the lyre goes up among the stars. Wordsworth in one of his shorter poems picks up the first Orpheus image, as we shall see, but moves on in another to the Eurydice figure, which he abides under. His successor makes an early and significant halt at Eurydice also, in a lyric, moving on to all three figures in his major Orphic work. But it is the last figure, I believe, which is his real working instrument of interpretation, therefore also the one by which he is most nearly interpreted, and that is why his vision of the journey entailed by the modern Orphic research takes the form it does. This poet is Rilke.
Rilke is as well-known and as little-known as is usual with a German-speaking poet who has been widely and rather variously translated into English and whose name moves in and out of discussions of modern literature, with, in most minds, only a rather vague image following. I want therefore to say a little about him, now, at this point of his introduction into our inquiry. For although a century separates him from Wordsworth, the pattern he follows and the research he pursues are close to Wordsworth’s, and we shall need Rilke with us from now on.
Biographies, commentaries, and critical works on Rilke there are in plenty. All I mean to do here is to give a minimum of indications about him as an Orphic voice, making no pretense at any kind of more general summing-up. Born in Prague in 1875 and dying in Switzerland in 1926, he was from the beginning a hypersensitive being and apparently without the robust stamina a poet needs. His childhood was enclosed and unhappy, although later he looks back to it as a singular source of inspiration for poetry.19 His adolescence in a military academy was unhappier still, accounting in part at least for his convulsive determination to get himself exempted from military conscription in the first World War.20 His lyric output, from the first collection in 1895 to his death, is immense; there is also a certain amount of prose, and Rilke is one of the world’s classic and voluminous letter writers. He married in 1901, but left his wife and daughter before long for the self-realization in solitude which he sought. Where Wordsworth became, of his own choice, the Recluse at home in Grasmere, Rilke became a recluse at home nowhere, wandering over Europe more or less incessantly, from Spain to Sweden, from Denmark to Italy, going as far afield as Russia and North Africa and Egypt, and sojourning for longer or shorter periods in various cities, Rome, Munich, Paris, where he was for some time Rodin’s secretary until they quarreled, or else in isolated chateaux lent him by aristocratic friends. One of these abodes, Schloss Duino, gives the name to the Duineser Elegien. All this while he is a being bent long and lovingly over things, “things that impart themselves so uninterruptedly and sublimely,” “I really can’t use any human models at all yet . . . and shall be occupied with flowers, animals and landscapes for years to come”;21 and he is equally bent in anguish over his own self, bodily and spiritual, over his poor health, his incapacity to work at his poetry, his prolonged periods of inner drought and frost. The latter is largely the theme of his letters, the former that of his poems, with, also, a continual circling around religious or more specifically Catholic themes, springing from an uneasy relation to the religiosity of his mother, never wholly resolved.
This is a poet who has all the Orphic characteristics, in embryo. We find him with a passionate interest in things inorganic and organic, and a desire to become acquainted with the sciences that deal with them. In 1903 and 1904 he is complaining that he knows so little about stars, about flowers and animals, and about all the processes of life, and resolves “to read books on natural science and biology and to attend lectures.” Later the plan becomes more explicit: “Then, in the summer semester, I shall go to a University and study: History, natural science, physiology, biology, experimental psychology, some anatomy etc.” He adds, in a footnote, “Not to forget Grimm’s dictionary.”22 He had a deep interest and belief in life, its workings, and the human being as part of its working, harmonious and not at variance with the natural universe in which he has come to be over a millennium of time.23 He understands growth and metamorphosis— “if only we are on the track of the law of our own growth”— “Self-transformation is precisely what life is.”24 He says most beautifully that we have to reverence our own fertility, for whether it is of the body or the spirit it is all one.25 He knows about myth. The great Orphic names of the past are scattered through his letters, Shakespeare, Goethe, Ovid, Hölderlin, even Linnaeus. Yet it is only by hints and brushes; there is no study, no passionate cleaving to these as food for the growing spirit. Rilke denied himself steadily, through devotion to his poetic vocation as he saw it, the nourishment the Orphic mind needs, if we are to judge by what has gone before: the company of the Orphic ancestors, the great body of science and learning, the full involvement in life itself.
This is the man who stands alongside Wordsworth, and he makes, even biographically, an interesting comparison with him, for Wordsworth’s decision to withdraw into Lakeland seclusion in the company of first one and then two devoted women is not unlike Rilke’s pursuit of solitude and disengagement. This is how each man assessed his own poetic and physical needs and obligations. Wordsworth’s decision caused him heart-searching. There is an echo of it still in the At Home in Grasmere fragment, and a note of self-justification. (Earlier, just after his return from France, he had said, in a letter, something rather different: “Cataracts and Mountains are good occasional society, but they will not do for constant companions”; we know also how much Wordsworth’s move worried Coleridge, anxiety which was perhaps justified in the sequel.)26 There is anguish in Rilke also: “I tell you, Princess, some change has got to come about in me, all and all, all and all, otherwise all the miracles in the world are useless.” This is in a letter of December 17, 1912, to the Princess von Thurn und Taxis. Although he suffered in the regime he chose, however, he does not question fundamentally its rightness for him; he simply saw any other possible way of life in terms of greater suffering still, and a betrayal of his poetic gifts.
There need be no question here of passing judgment. The course of action taken in each of these cases was certainly decided upon in good faith and may have been inevitable. But equally, no good can come of upholding or considering as indifferent a course of action which, to judge by precedents and results, looks as if it may be dangerous. In particular, no good can come of setting it up as a model for younger poets to follow. The Orphic line matters too much for this. We shall be lost if we let ourselves be persuaded by such examples that poetry is unconcerned about what is going on in the world and in ordinary life, or that the poet’s life is wholly separated from what he has to say. Poetry is a discipline of full involvement in life, not of withdrawal from it. The opposite danger is obvious and I am not denying it—the danger that involvement in the cares of this world will choke a poetic gift through sheer dissipation of energy and time on nonpoetic matters. Goethe is the great example to the contrary here. Perhaps there are no nonpoetic matters in the universe. At any rate, the dangers of withdrawal are very real, for what the Orphic poet does with himself will be bound to affect what he has to say to us, in its completeness and perfection, and those dangers are shadowily presented in each of these last two poets of our Orphic line.
On the whole it told less upon Wordsworth. He had that in him which could contribute to an epic vocation in any circumstances—courage, toughness, the masculinity of mind which Coleridge remarks upon (at one point in his life Wordsworth thought of becoming a soldier),27 his early championing of the revolutionary cause in France, his abiding interest in politics and social questions. He has, too, the advantage that he wrote The Prelude early, carried forward by the elan of his adventurous childhood and youth which is also his subject matter, giving him a double interest from his epic capital, though with it a foreboding that he might outrun it:
I see by glimpses now; when age comes on
May scarcely see at all.
[1805 Prelude, XI, 338]
Rilke did not have these advantages. He had to struggle forward toward his Orphic achievement, which he did not reach until the end of his life. This achievement is represented by the twin works of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. When its time at length came, it was with a suddenness startling to everybody, including their author. Two Elegies had been written in 1911–12, a third in 1913, a fourth two years later. Then in February 1922, in what Leishman and Spender call a tempest of creative activity, all the remaining Elegies were either completed if they had been fragmentarily begun or written in their entirety, and in addition the whole of the fifty-five Orpheus sonnets, all within three weeks.28
When I say that Rilke was unlucky in having to struggle to his Orphic work at the end of his life, I do not mean simply that his effort and suffering were much prolonged: that is an ordinary human lot. He was unlucky because by the time he reached his mythological endeavor, scarcely anything but fragments was possible. He had been self-isolated too long, and in his isolation he had grown or ingrown into preoccupation with peculiar themes which in the Elegies are put forward as public revelation: the angels, the dolls, the acrobats, the newly dead, the great lovers, the urge to make the visible invisible. These are not public oracles, as Orphic myth and statement must be. They are private toys which Rilke mistook for public revelation. The Elegies are very broken indeed. There are hints of Orphic statement and seeking in them, but no more. But in the Sonette an Orpheus something else happens, and it happens because Orpheus is there. At long last Rilke’s poetic instincts led him to that marvelous myth, which offers him a narrative framework and a classic ancestral mythological instrument. By its strength many of his own private instruments, inadequate on their own, fall into place; and grounded on the myth itself, something approaching an “Orphean insight” here too becomes visible. I believe for this reason that the Sonnets are much more important than the Elegies, although Rilke valued them less.
