The Orphic Voice, page 36
gross wie in Kinder.
Und das Gerücht, dass ein
Schauender sei,
rührte die minder,
fraglicher Sichtbaren,
rührte die Frauen. Beasts took comfort and came
into that open glance, for pasture,
captive lions stared in
as into ungraspable freedom;
birds flew straight through it,
it, the consenting; flowers
gazed back into the glance,
big as in children’s.
And the rumor, a seer was here,
stirred the less visible things,
the less certainly visible things,
stirred the women.
And then comes a passage saying this is not enough. Wherever he is, a stranger in strange rooms, something abroad in the air deliberates over his heart and passes sentence that love is lacking. He continues:
Denn des Anschauens, siehe,
ist eine Grenze.
Und die geschautere Welt
will in der Liebe gedeihn. For, see, there’s a limit to look
ing.
And the much-looked-at world
wishes to blossom in love.
Werk des Gesichts ist getan,
tue nun Herz-Werk
an den Bildern in dir,
jenen gefangenen; denn du
überwältigtest sie: aber nun
kennst du sie nicht.
Siehe, innerer Mann, dein in-
neres Mädchen,
dieses errungene aus
tausend Naturen, dieses
erst nur errungene, nie
noch geliebte Geschöpf.
Face-work is finished,
do now the heart-work
on those pictures imprisoned
within you; for you
mastered them, yes: but, as of
now, you don’t know them.
Behold, oh innermost man, your
innermost maiden,
fought for and won from
thousands of natures, she that was
only won up till now, and never
as yet
a creature beloved.
This poem, coming almost halfway between the two Orpheus occurrences in Rilke’s work, sums up what is going on. It is about metamorphosis. In it the poet enjoins a further metamorphosis upon himself, a moving on from observation to some deeper, more loving and more human interpretation which the poem speaks of as “heart-work.” Yet there is continuity here too, for the poem reverts to one after another of Rilke’s abiding subjects—stars, landscape, lions, birds, flowers, women. It is also prophetic, in that final glimpse of some kind of inner feminine principle as the means by which the new understanding might be achieved. All this waits for the Sonette, and we see in this poem something of what an individual poem always is in the life of the poet, a metamorphosis or true Wendung yet embedded in a continuum, complete in itself but preparing always some further metamorphosis in the future.
The process continues with Rilke right up till the last moment before the Orpheus Sonnets were to make their startling entrance. In his collected poems, three short lyrics appear80 which were written on January 31 and February 1, the last gathering, preparatory, prefiguring work before the Orphic outburst began on February 2.
The first of these three, “Solang du Selbstgeworfnes fängst,” is, like Wendung, self-admonition. (I make no apology for paraphrasing these poems; they are important for what they say, and to recognize this does them no violence.) The poet sees his task here as a game of ball, an image that will recur in the Sonette, in 11.8. It is of no use, he says, to play by yourself and to catch the ball you have yourself thrown up in the air. Rilke uses the pronoun du, the familiar “you,” in this poem, not as a sign of self-division but because the admonition concerns others besides the poet. You must suddenly find yourself catching the ball thrown to you by an eternal girl-playmate, “eine ewige Mit-Spielerin.” Only then is the ability to catch (Rilke turns the poem most elegantly upon the child’s pride and sense of achievement in his ability to catch a ball) a power, and a power not of your own but of the world. If you were to have strength and enterprise enough to throw it back, or better still, he says, to throw it straight back before you knew you needed either, then and only then would you be truly joining in the game. Out of your hands the meteor comes and hurtles into its spaces.
The second is a tiny playful cycle81 of three sets of verses, written to accompany a drawing which Rilke himself made of foliage and a lyre growing out of one another. He is so close to Orpheus here as to be really tantalizing; but Orpheus is still two days off. The first of the three complains, lightly yet feelingly, of the imposition of speech and song in the face of the perfection of hearing (Ur-Geräusch was a celebration of the sense of hearing, insufficiently appreciated, Rilke thought, in modern poetry); in face also of the lovely silence of the myths in the woods, Narcissus or Artemis. The vignette he drew captures his own questioning: Is the lyre really to come out of the trees or to melt back into them? In the second and third sets of verses it is the lyre as visual shape that he plays with in a series of conceits which grow, one feels, out of his actual limning of the lyre. It is interesting to see Rilke, like Goethe, taking to the drawing pencil, and of course the two do resemble each other in their lifelong interest in, and sympathy with, the visual arts. Here in the second and third parts of this tiny cycle of poems, the lyre after the hand has bent it into shape out of twigs and branches becomes the horns of a gazelle but without a head under them— “wo ist das Haupt?”— the rounded hips of a woman, a vase or pitcher in the potter’s forming hand.
The circle is drawing in. In these two January 31st poems we have already a great deal: the shadowy woman who is to explain the world, who is the world in some sense, so that only though her, in a reciprocal relationship of action and passivity, can one fully participate and find a power which in the end becomes a shooting star; the lyre growing out of trees and leaves, the animals, woman—real woman here, a real, sexual being—and that tension between hearing and the uttering of language where also the myths are.
It is this last theme which is taken up by the third of these lyrics, “Wann wird, wann wird, wann wird es genügen,” which precedes the Sonnets by only twenty-four hours. It repeats the complaint about the necessity of utterance in man. Speech here becomes noise, endless, filling the entire universe. Why, when such masters of human speech have come among us, must we keep on with new attempts? Books, too, are part of the hubbub—Rilke compares them to incessant peals of bells and bids us rejoice if between two of them we get a glimpse of quiet sky or an angle of evening earth. Men have made more din than all the storms and all the seas. What reserves of silence there must be in the universe for the cricket to have remained audible to us at all, for the stars to seem silent in a sky so much cried to! Rilke ends:
Redeten uns die fernsten, die alten und altesten Väter!
Und wir: Hörende endlich! Die ersten hörenden Menschen.
(Time out of mind it was us our fathers and forefathers spoke!
And we: Hearers at length! The very first men to be hearers.)
At this point Rilke is calling in question the whole language tradition from the Ancients onward, with the great minds that have worked in it. He questions books as part of that tradition, seeing an antagonism between books and nature, between language and nature, between the virtue of silent hearing and the dubious gift of speech. It is like Wordsworth, in The Prelude and the Power of Sound; there Wordsworth answers his own questions, affirmatively for language, but here Orpheus is going to answer them, on Rilke’s behalf, and in the near future. For all of these seeming antagonisms are only waiting the Orphic resolution soon to come.
8
Thrace also has much that is essential to one who intends to dance—Orpheus, his dismemberment and his talking head that voyaged on the lyre
WHETHER it was Orpheus or Rilke who chose the sonnet cycle as the form of this inquiry, the choice was a good one. It permits repeated lyric utterance, yet at the same time gives a certain length and a serial quality. It is interesting, too, in the history it brings with it, for in Europe it is traditionally where love, intellect, and lyric meet. The rigorous sonnet form is helpful to this alliance, and certainly proves helpful to Rilke. With his consummate craftsmanship, the result of years of devotion, he responds wonderfully to its formal challenge—it is possible to count over a dozen metrical variations in the Sonette an Orpheus. It is likely that Rilke’s genius was at its best when held fairly closely within certain fixed and formal bounds. (Where I quote from the Sonette I am going to put in a translation. There have been a great many translations of these poems already. Mine are, as I have said before in similar circumstances, rough ones, and they are, please, not to be taken in a high or solemn spirit. They were done as much for enjoyment as for any other reason, and I believe that a certain lightness of approach may fit Rilke better than an excess of reverence.)
The three figures of the Orpheus myth, in the succession in which we have been using them here, are going to be our guide to this, the last work we shall be concerned with. The first sonnet of Part I contains the first figure; the last sonnet contains the third. Between the two lies the figure of Eurydice, etherealized in death but a woman still.
We will start with Sonnets 1 and 2. They set the whole thing moving; then the series runs on to 11, after which it pauses. There will be another pause later, after 20, the two pauses marked by a correspondence of the figure in each, that of a horse. Yet there is metamorphosis in that figure itself, for the first occurrence asks “Separation?” while the second says “integration” within the whole Orphic cycling of the universe, including nature and mind.
This is Sonnet 1:
Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung!
O Orpheus singt! O hoher Baum im Ohr!
Und alles schwieg. Doch selbst in der Verschweigung
ging neuer Anfang, Wink and Wandlung vor.
Tiere aus Stille drangen aus dem klaren
gelösten Wald von Lager und Genist;
und da ergab sich, dass sie nicht aus List
und nicht aus Angst in sich so leise waren,
sondern aus Horen. Brüllen, Schrei, Geröhr,
schien klein in ihren Herzen. Und wo eben
kaum eine Hütte war, dies zu empfangen,
ein Unterschlupf aus dunkelstem Verlangen
mit einem Zugang, dessen Pfosten beben,—
da schufst du ihnen Tempel im Gehör.
(And a tree mounted up—serene surmounter!
O Orpheus sings! Tree, in the ear how high!
And everything fell still. But new encounter
was in that stilling, to move and modify.
Turned into silence, beasts left lair and covert,
came pushing through the bright untangled wood,
and not for wariness, it was discovered,
nor yet for cunning were they being so good,
rather for hearing’s sake. Roar, howl and boom
they felt at heart was little. Where was no room
to take this in—a den, scarcely a hovel,
woven of darkest longing, where you grovel
under and in past doorposts quivering tense—
you made them temples in their hearing-sense.)
We start with the sense of hearing, just as we did in Wordsworth’s Power of Sound, the ear which opens into the labyrinth within the head, within the body which is also mind and which is the kingdom of living and dead. It is here within, quite as much as in the outside world of action (though that is here too in the thronging beasts of the wood) that the Orphic transformations are to begin. First, the human ear and mind respond, and the great tree is raised there by the power of the song. Scaled down as it is to the due level of lyric expression, this is still essentially an epic vision, the new ordering of things already in existence but dark and tangled, which is how ancient thought conceived of creation,82 seeing it not as a bringing of something out of nothing but as a harmonizing of what was already there, a deeply human rather than superhuman way of looking at things. After the human response come the animals, and their sense of hearing too is to be transformed, from the animal level up to the level of the human, is to become acceptable to them in the form of poetry, because they recognize it as a continuation of forms of their own, thus giving rise to no antagonism—neither malice nor fear. This transformation which poetry is to effect will move on into the greater world of social achievement and beauty which the idea of “Temple” brings with it. Orpheus is here once more at the true Ovidian point of metamorphosis or Metamorphoses, the evolutionary transformations of the lower orders of nature up through man into the works of society; for temples are not animal refuges or human dwelling places called into being under the stress of need. They are places of communal grace.
This is one turning point in the poem. There is another, having to do with silence and speech or song. Nature falls silent, so the first four lines say, but not now for desire to be rid of the human voice, even at its loveliest, as Rilke had seemed to desire in the pre-Orpheus poems. Rather it falls silent for love of that voice as Orpheus sings. Silence is here not an ultimate but a condition in which better sounds can be abroad than the inarticulate crying of the creatures. So we are not merely at the Ovidian, we are also at the Baconian Orphic point, where nature may be made to speak 83—a human language. Orpheus, however, is not merely poetry but myth as well. Rilke sets this essential figure of myth, firmly and from the beginning, at the working point of transformation between the mind and nature, and we shall meet the myths in general as we go forward through the Sonnets, in the form of the classical gods who turn up in strange and significant places.
In Sonnet 2 of Part 1 Rilke begins his own Orphic speech. As we move on to it, we shall see that for these poems metamorphosis is not only their theme, it is their working dynamic. We cannot expect them to proceed in a simple series by gradual development; instead we undergo metamorphosis at once:
Und fast ein Mädchen wars und ging hervor
aus diesem einigen Glück von Sang und Leier
und glänzte klar durch ihre Frühlingsschleier
und machte sich ein Bett in meinem Ohr.
Und schlief in mir. Und alles war ihr Schlaf.
Die Bäume, die ich je bewundert, diese
fühlbare Ferne, die gefühlte Wiese,
und jedes Staunen, das mich selbst betraf.
Sie schlief die Welt. Singender Gott, wie hast
du sie vollendet, dass sie nicht begehrte,
erst wach zu sein? Sieh, sie erstand und schlief.
Wo ist ihr Tod? O, wirst du dies Motiv
erfinden noch, eh sich dein Lied verzehrte?
Wo sinkt sie hin aus mir? . . . Ein Mädchen fast . . .
(And what came out of it—almost a girl,
From undivided joy of lyre and song,
And through her springtime veils her body pearled,
And in my ear she laid herself along.
And slept in me. Her sleep was all-that-is.
The trees I’ve always thought miraculous things,
The meadow sensed, the sensible distances,
And all my own frequent self-wonderings.
She slept the world. O singing god, explain
How you perfected her she overstept
Waking, of choice? First came to be, then slept.
Where is her death? O will you catch that strain
Before your song itself becomes a ghost?
She sinks from me . . . where to? . . . a girl almost . . .)
Before we single out anything here, we have first to see what an extraordinary thing has happened. There was an “it” or a “this” in the eleventh line of the first sonnet, dies, meaning not any one thing but the whole phenomenon or process, all that was going on. It was this that there was no room for till Orpheus made it. The “this” is the Orphic metamorphosis itself. Now that “it,” with the same meaning, is here in the first line, in the elided es of wars, it was. “It” is the entire postlogical process, the power of Orpheus; and what Rilke does with it, most astonishingly, is to turn it into a woman. The poem marvels at its own audacity—“fast ein Mädchen wars,” it was almost a girl, the little phrase inverted to make the lovely answering cadence of the last line, “ein Mädchen fast.” The girl is the power, the dynamic, the form of thinking, the speech and song, for she comes forth from song and lyre. She is bodily sense and its hearing, and her sleep is all the world—trees, fields, the human mind. And unless one sees this, it is quite possible to read these sonnets through without realizing how new and exciting this is.
Here is the first metamorphosis of the Orpheus myth in this cycle, from the first to the second figure. These two will now be elaborated up till the last sonnet but one, which will answer this one in being about a woman, and then all will be gathered in the last sonnet and the third figure. This is as near to Eurydice as we come in Part I. (She makes one entrance, by name, in 11.13, “Sei immer tot in Eurydike”— be forever dead in Eurydice.) Instead of obsessing the poetry as she tended to do in Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes, she is dispersed into a beautiful balance, not lost but spread abroad. This can be seen clearly in another poem, Gegen-Strophen,84 one of many Rilke wrote on the subject of women, which was begun in 1912 and finished in 1922. In the part written later there are these lines:
Blumen des tieferen Erdreichs,
von allen Wurzeln geliebte,
ihr, der Eurydike Schwestern,
where women become blossoms of the deeper parts of the world, the beloved of all roots, Eurydice’s sisters. It is like the Eurydice of 1904, “made root already,” not now a dead weight of return to the kingdom of death but a circling of the cycles of vegetative life where women may be, most closely and livingly, in touch with the dead. (Flowers and women will continue circling through the Sonette; see particularly 11.7.)
