The Orphic Voice, page 35
I am going to take Part I of these Sonnets, and it alone, as the climax of Rilke’s mythological work and his true Orphic pronouncement. Part II, which followed at a slightly more leisurely rate the bursting-forth of Part I, is much more diffuse (you can see it in the rhythms even and it is longer than Part I, twenty-nine sonnets as against twenty-six), philosophizing, and commentational; we shall use it as occasional comment but no more. Part I was written within three days, between February 2 and 5 in 1922, and what it would mean to write twenty-six beautifully shaped sonnets in three days will perhaps be fully appreciated only by those who have tried to write even one careful sonnet; eighteen working hours upon one such is nothing, to speak from my own experience. What Rilke produced was a work of art in which scarcely any changes were needed and which has form as a whole, quite apart from the individual units. A fully Orphic sonnet stands at the beginning and the end of the series, the only two which deal exclusively with the traditional myth. Within this work Rilke’s Orphic task is accomplished. But not merely what he says but the phenomenon is significant too. The figure of Orpheus occasions here twenty-six sonnets upon the modern Orphic theme, and also an extraordinary spurt of energy and fertility in the living organism. We have, as we go forward, to remember and hold to both.
Rilke himself is self-contradictory about the whole experience, which involved, over those three weeks, the completion of the Duineser Elegien as well. He knew himself to be full of contradictions, which he wished to preserve intact.62 It is useful to realize this from the start, for it makes him an unreliable guide to himself, and we have been much too ready to take over his self-interpretations, which are only partial. He is in this respect quite unlike Wordsworth. Wordsworth knew in general very well what he was about, and can tell us. Rilke cannot. His letters over the years show a mind tenacious of its purpose but for the most part groping blindly forward, deeply perplexed at its own bewilderment and long spells of impotence. Once he likens himself, in words that remind one of Goethe and his concept of his own mental organism, to something growing out in radiate form from a center, but he adds, “And in this no other person may watch him, his nearest and dearest particularly, for he may not even do so himself”63—and this from one of the most conscientiously introspective minds imaginable. So also, in that much-quoted letter to his Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, of November 13, 1925, he says, “And is it I who may give the Elegies their right explanation?” and then goes on to give an explanation of Elegies and Sonnets which is endorsed again and again in critical works on these poems. But Rilke’s statements are frequently as ambiguous as his poetry may be, and it is best to recognize this frankly.
Of the Sonette an Orpheus we find Rilke saying first of all that they were dictation, “perhaps the most mysterious . . . enigmatic dictation I have ever held through and achieved.”64 The idea of dictation is not new to Rilke. In 1920 he had written a series of poems which he called Aus dem Nachlass des Grafen C.W., choosing to believe or make believe that they had come to him by dictation from one who was dead.65 It implies a theory of poetic inspiration which is ultimately that of possession by a power in some sense other than the self. It removes inspiration, poetic or otherwise, from the ordinary run of human experience and ranges it among extrahuman or suprahuman experiences. This is a notion of inspiration which to some extent poets have fostered, but it is not helpful. It runs counter to the constant declarations of great poets that they are not different from other people; counter also to the whole Orphic tradition as we have traced it out here, in which poetry is a part of the great general endeavor of thinking and inquiry. Inspiration, whatever it may be, is at the root of science and all true thinking, and it should be possible to keep such an experience as Rilke’s within the great current, as an interesting but not exceptional example of something which forms part of the way in which the human organism of mind and body thinks and learns. (At another level altogether, it is worth observing that Catholic theology of inspiration in the Scriptures does not entail a concept of “direct dictation” by the Holy Spirit, but rather a process which, divine though it is, conforms to normal human ways of thinking, learning, and writing.)
The experience which Rilke called dictation and to which the term “inspiration” is frequently applied by critics, consists in an apparently sudden access of power and fertility resulting from the apprehension by the mind (in this case a recognition, though sometimes it may be an invention that is called for) of a figure which synthesizes a great deal of earlier material already experienced and learned, and held ready in the mind. Put in this way, the experience tallies with what we know of cases of scientific discovery, and with what we call having an idea. We know that such discoveries and ideas do not appear out of nowhere, despite the dramatic suddenness with which they may make themselves known66 to the recipient mind, and it is interesting to find Rilke saying this about his own experience. When sending the Sonette an Orpheus to a friend at the end of the momentous February of their composition, he says in the accompanying letter, “Here, it seems to me, things have taken on form which date from a long way back . . . Much that could gradually and perfectly smoothly illuminate itself, and alongside, close alongside, the immediate and direct elements which became clear to me from the very first moment of the undertaking.”67 This poetic experience too, like those other experiences in thought to which it may be closely akin, was the result of preparatory and prefiguring work within the organism. In organic change and growth there can be no absolute disjunction between what precedes and what follows. Yet novelty does ensue, and it may be that it is as some sort of organic change that we could visualize an idea, in Rilke’s case or elsewhere. It is this sort of change which the Sonette exhibit, and it is exciting to find Orpheus at the heart of the situation.
The Orpheus who so suddenly broke into Rilke’s poetry in 1922— “the ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ . . . stormily imposed themselves (they were not in my plan)” Rilke says in the von Hulewicz letter—was not a complete newcomer. He was, as we have seen, in Rilke’s mind and poetry eighteen years earlier. The Orpheus of Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes is a preliminary marker in a succession of happenings in Rilke’s mental life. This earlier poem was not just, we remember, a retelling of the mythological narrative. There seemed then to be a change going on inside the myth itself, as it and mind worked on one another, toward the third and last stage of the story. In 1904 Rilke is, in his own terms, fore-thinking or pre-thinking what he is not yet capable of thinking—Vor-denken he calls it,68 an admirable phrase which makes it unnecessary to entertain any notion of unconsciousnesses or subconsciousnesses in the mind. Now in 1922 what was there forethought can be taken up, added to all that has been thought and learned in the intervening years, and given new and more vital shape. In 1922 Rilke comes through Orpheus to his real theme.
For the real theme is not Orpheus himself. When one asks oneself the rather naive question what the Sonnets are really about, the answer is surprising. They are not about Orpheus, with the exception of the first and last sonnets of Part I, which tell the Orphic story. They are addressed to Orpheus. They are also intended by their author to be a memorial to Wera Ouckama Knoop, a young girl, a dancer, who had recently died and whose story he had been reading just before the Sonnets broke upon him. They are not, however, with the exception of one sonnet in each part, about her either. They commemorate her. When it comes to the point, there is only one theme that can be thought of as common to them all, with their widely varied subject matter (stars, animals, fruit and flowers, machines, the spring, and so on). This theme, the true subject of the Sonette, is metamorphosis.
It is characteristic of Rilke and his contradictions that in the end his subject matter proves to be abstract. His “thing-piety,” a devotion to objects large or small, living or nonliving, in all their detail and individuality,69 which reaches its height in the Neue Gedichte of 1907 and 1908, has obscured from us how abstract a poet he is, though the Elegies proclaim it all the way through, and explicitly in the Ninth, where “things” are to be “said” to the Angel who in Rilke is an abstract personification of power and intelligence at an infinite degree, supposedly purified of any theological taint in the concept. Earth, it says here, is to reach its fulfillment by becoming invisible within the human mind:
Erde, ist es nicht dies was du willst: unsichtbar in uns erstehn?
a message taken up in Rilke’s letters more than once.70 (It is helpful here to remember Mallarmé, Rilke’s immediate predecessor in the Orphic line, and what he was trying to do in the way of making the world disappear in his poetry.) Rilke’s passion for abstraction tends to vaporize his poetry; also, at times, the criticism which is written about that poetry, much of which is philosophising to an excessive degree. This is a misfortune, for Rilke is a lyric poet through and through, by vocation. Immediately, though, we need to be clear about what that means. It does not mean that he is precluded from thinking by such a vocation. Not in the very least. An Orphic lyrist is not a gusher of imagery and sentiments. What it does mean is that he must do his thinking strictly in lyric, in concentratedly poetic, postlogical, mythological terms. It is at this exact point that Orpheus and Rilke meet and soar together.
We can see now how the Sonnets come to be the consummation of that union of myth and mind foreshadowed in 1904. There are hints of Rilke’s negative tendencies still in them, though more in Part II than in Part I. Even in Part I the abstractness may become obtrusive (as in 12, for instance), but Rilke is blessed in his key figures. The girl brings with her two real forms of metamorphosis, dancing and death; and in the myth Rilke’s theme fuses perfectly with his figure. Here once for all the Orphic myth comes into its own, a vast improvement on the angels of the Elegies, figures which do nothing for the mind. Now also we can see the reason for that tentative move in the earlier poem toward the third stage of the story. These Sonnets rise to their triumphant ending in Sonnet 26, celebrating Orpheus in death and destruction and what came after. Comment and statement are needed no more. Here Orpheus undergoes, or to put it another way, becomes metamorphosis himself, passing through an agony of dismemberment into earth and water and stars and so into the elements and all living things, in which henceforward the Orphic song and power abide. So, and only so, by means of this third figure of the myth itself, is the lyric thinker enabled to pursue, in terms which yet are wholly poetic, a highly abstract and difficult inquiry into metamorphosis in nature, to which he too, as body and mind, is subject.
This is Rilke’s task in the line of Orphic research. Once again, as in Goethe and Wordsworth, the poet’s life is involved, though Rilke’s involvement is different from theirs. His Orpheus is not merely a figure of transformation in nature but also a marker of a mutation point in the development of the poet’s nature. Once again, too, nature is to include mind, and the organic metamorphoses must be interpreted in those terms. The myth itself says this, for besides the bodily reintegration with the universe in the cycles of life and death, there is the figure of the head, the lyre, the speech and singing which also return to the elements and yet persist in their own forms. It seems that in Wordsworth and Rilke two different rhythms of total organic growth are being studied. Wordsworth was intent upon the “origins and progress of his mind.” The growth of organisms and minds, however, can be thought of in different ways. One such way is to see growth as a steady process, involving change, of course, but slowly and gradually. Another way is to see it in terms of varying degrees of transformation, as plant-stuff is transformed in leaf and flower, those metamorphoses which Goethe watched in his pursuit of a transformational morphology that was to include humanity as well.
This is the way in which Rilke will work, for whom, as we have seen, “life is self-transformation.” His own mind works so; and he will work on this subject. Orpheus of the third figure attends him at both points, and what this means is very important. In these poems myth in its most intrinsic and traditional form is reclaimed from the over-specialization into which Freudian psychology and Frazerian anthropology might narrow it. It is not solely the expression of erotic drives in the individual, nor of fertility rites in society. Not denying those two perhaps kindred motives, which it carries along with it, myth in the form of Orpheus (who is, we may remind ourselves, myth thinking about myth) is reinstated by the poet at the heart of the organism’s process of growing and learning. What Rilke suggests in and through Orpheus is a morphogenesis of the organic life of the mind, an Orphic epistemology whose dynamic is that of metamorphoses in a continuum.
His preoccupation with metamorphosis (the word Metamorphose is in evidence in his work as early as 1907)71 links him especially closely with two of his Orphic ancestors, Ovid and Goethe. Ovid he seems to have known and valued early.72 He shares with him the concern with metamorphosis itself, the commanding position of Orpheus, the building in of sex as part of the methodology, of which we shall see more in a while, and there is a pure and beautiful Ovidian echo in 11.12:
Und die verwandelte Daphne
will, seit sie lorbeern fühlt, dass du dich wandelst in Wind.
(And Daphne, translated,
in her laurelling self-awareness wants you to turn yourself into wind.)
This sonnet as a whole is a commentary on the main Ovidian theme. The German language has borrowed Metamorphose from the Greek, but it has two words of its own that fall within this range of meaning. They appear here as nouns, Wandlung and Verwandlung, in the first two lines:
Wolle die Wandlung. O sei für die Flamme begeistert, drin sich ein Ding dir entzieht, das mit Verwandlungen prunkt;
(Be absolute for change. O be fervent for flame, in which a thing leaves you for good as it flaunts its transmutings)
and the nouns are answered by the verbs in the last two lines already quoted: wandeln, which contains a sense of both movement and change, and verwandeln, which means “to transform.” When Rilke discovers another Orphic ancestor, Hölderlin, in 1914, and writes a poem to him,73 he will apostrophize him as “O du wandelnder Geist, du wandelndster!”, the most changing spirit of them all, and will give him for his image the moon, which shows forth those two senses of the word, movement and change both.
When we come to the other great Orphic ancestor Rilke owns to, Goethe, we find that Rilke’s relationship to him constitutes in itself a metamorphosis. It seems to have begun in 1910. In that year Rilke writes to Anton Kippenberg, “I read Goethe all through the journey, (I was alone all the time), the Tag- und Jahreshefte; starting from this point, as with the Diaries, I get really close to him, and he bears with me then, just as if this was how things were meant to be.”74 It is borne out by the later references to Goethe in the letters that it is the Orphic Goethe who effects the rapprochement; not the Goethe of the great set pieces but the observing self-taxonomic and scientific Goethe in his Ovidian research. (Kretschmar in his Goethe und Rilke says that Rilke had known Goethe early, as a literary figure, reading Die Wahlverwandschaften at the age of sixteen, then later, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre; then reacted against him during the period of production of the Stundenbuch, Neue Gedichte and Malte Laurids Brigge.)75 In August 1911 Rilke visited Weimar, encouraged by the Kippenbergs, who played a large part in Rilke’s education here. A month later he is saying in a letter to another friend, “Goethe was for the first time propitious.”76 In February 1912 Rilke says in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, “The ban against him [Goethe] was already broken in July,” and he goes on to discuss, with a sense of fellow feeling and an admission of how much it had moved him, the Italienische Reise. A year and a half later he is quoting to the same correspondent one of Goethe’s Venezianische Epigramme and adding, “I need to realize that greatness is not superhuman exertion but naturalness.”77 His relationship with the Orphic Goethe progresses to 1919, when, six months before he wrote his essay Ur-Geräusch as Kretschmar points out, that essay with its splendidly Goethean prefix78 (Geräusch is noise, but in the form of muted murmur or rustle—an Ur- rustling) he is reading the Metamorphose der Pflanzen, as he tells Lou Andreas-Salome in a letter of February 21. He runs through as if by instinct the whole of Goethe’s Ovidian and taxonomic work—the journals, the Italian Journey, the Metamorphose der Pflanzen, the lyric poems.79
Yet during these intervening years Rilke is not merely tracing out the Ovidian metamorphic line in others, nor merely thinking about it himself. His life is caught up in it as well. One poem of his, written in 1914, shows this particularly well. It is called Wendung, which is a turning or turning-point. In this meditation the poet reconsiders his entire living methodology. The poem is quiet, not very well-known. It is, I think, one of the most just and beautiful poems Rilke has written.
“Lange errang ers im Anschauen,” it begins— Long he wrested out what he wanted by effort of looking. Anschauen is a favorite word of Goethe’s: observation, contemplation, the long, deep, exact, loving looking of the morphologizing eye. Indeed the poem as a whole, with its concentration and the short irregular lines, reminds one insistently of the Harzreise. In Rilke as the poem advances it is first to the stars that the looking is directed, wrestling with them till they are brought to their knees, or alternatively the observer kneeling to look and receive a glimpse of a godhead, a sleeping smile. There is already a flexibility of effort and receptivity, and in the next paragraph (if that is the right word) of the poem there is a suggestion of an almost Wordsworthian interchangeability of inward and outward forms—towers and landscapes—in the looker’s mind. The poem goes on:
Tiere traten getrost
in den offenen Blick, weidende,
und die gefangenen Löwen
starrten hinein wie in
unbegreifliche Freiheit;
Vögel durchflogen ihn grad,
den gemütigen; Blumen
wiederschauten in ihn
