The Orphic Voice, page 37
Eurydice is here in the shadows. But the “Mädchen fast” of this sonnet, shadowy though she too may be, is a real human being, the young girl to whose memory the work is dedicated. Wera brings with her her womanhood, her death; also, in time as we shall see, her dancing. It is not a mere metaphor of sex and of death who enters but the true living-and-dead figure, a mortal indeed in every sense. With her, sex and death are seen not only as part of the fate of the organism but as part of the interpretative methodology.
If we think that we know about sex and death, together with the reasons why poets connect them, because Freud has told us, we shall go hopelessly astray. We know little of either yet, even as physical facts, let alone as mental ones. What we have to realize is that there are sound reasons for connecting them which are not psychiatric but biological. It has been said by scientists that the two of them entered the world together. So long as an organism reproduces itself by simple fission, death is an irrelevance. As soon as there is differentiation of sex and reproduction on those terms, with the corresponding individualization of the organism, death follows.85 It is this deep biological connection which Rilke inquires into, as Keats also did. Rilke sees both sex and death not as incidents but as continuing states in the life of the human organism, and asks the profound question: what effect do these two have on the life of the mind?86
In this second sonnet, where both make their appearance, sex is not spoken of directly. It is here, however, in the delicate and ghostly eroticism of the image, the faint bodily appearance of the girl, her passage into the physical sense of the man, her sleep. It is a kind of mating at the point where body passes over into mind, and part of the postlogical investigation of that very point. The poem says, as Rilke says elsewhere, that where there is union of male and female in the mind, there the universe is. We need a biological understanding (and Jung will not do) of the conjunction and alternation of sex in the individual mind, and of the “unendliche Paarung” of Rilke’s own phrase in 11.9. There were clues toward such a study in Novalis, but it still waits to be made. We have glanced already at Rilke’s insistence on the female nature of creation, mental as well as physical. He goes on to suggest that in time a comprehension of this may have a deeply humanizing effect upon heterosexual relationships, seen at length as relations not simply between man and woman as opposites but between human beings.87 The third Duino Elegy, of 1913, is devoted to this subject, in a postlogical setting in which the fearful Neptune, river-god of the blood, appears at the very spring and fountainhead of physical desire in the man. Rilke indicates that the way to this more human understanding may be through attention to the feminine quality of the organism.
Meanwhile Rilke turns to the other aspect of his inquiry, to death as a human phenomenon. In Sonnet 5 it too is seen through Orpheus not as fixity but as movement, not the memorial tablet but the roses blossoming in their season. Then in 6, again through Orpheus, the unity of human living and dead is figured. Here the dead inhabit the house as much as the living do, and this Sonnet ends with Orpheus praising household objects, vessels or jewelry, whether they be in the household of the living or in that of the dead which is the grave.88 For these are the objects traditionally buried with the dead, and the poet suggests a transformation of our attitude to this and other ancient ritual practices connected with the dead; for perhaps they are not only primitive customs but, seen with the eye of postlogic, genuine and profound biological insights not yet fully realized.
The metamorphosis continues. Death is not dust, stone, and silence; in 7 it is already, through Orpheus, becoming vineyard and grape and moving toward human language in such words as Stimme, voice, Lügen, lies, Bote, messenger, or Rühmung, praise.89 The two merge beautifully in the first eight lines of Sonnet 10, where Rilke remembers what he had seen of the old stone coffins of antiquity, in Rome used as conduits and filled with water’s “wandelndes Lied,” that wavering modulant song, in Provence turned into troughs of wild flowers alive with bees and butterflies. In both, the dead are already moving back to speech, and Rilke greets in them “the reopened mouths which have already learned what it means to be silent.”
Sonnets 11 and 12 are difficult and important. The first asks the question: Is there no constellation of Horse and Rider? Rilke sets up two extremes, the stars and a mental image (which is of course exactly what a constellation is, a fusion of those two) and tries to bridge them by postulating a unity between real horse and real man. The vision does not succeed; the poem falls back into separation, between man and beast, between star and the figure alone, which is all we are left with at the end, enjoined to believe that for the time being, if we cannot do more. Sonnet 12 reasserts Geist and Figur, the mind or spirit which binds us, the figures in which we truly live. But it comes down to earth, literally, and we progress from mind and figure at the beginning, through relations between mind and mind which Rilke figures by radio aerials, to the earth of peasant and summer and seed growing. So the way is prepared for Sonnet 20 and its beautiful white horse, remembered by Rilke from his Russian travels twenty years before. Sonnet 12 moves us from mental figure to earth. Sonnet 20 closes that circle, for in it one of earth’s loveliest and earthiest creatures (“dieser Stolz aus Erde” Rilke called the horse) is offered back to Orpheus, who is in his turn, being a myth, a figure of the mind.
The theme of language and the organic life which shows itself in sex and fertility, flower and fruit, is taken further now. First an exercise is performed upon this alone, in 13, where word and fruit are merged with an exquisite sensuous exactitude in their narrow bodily meeting place, the mouth.90 Apple, pear, banana, gooseberry speak in the mouth, yet gradually become nameless in the taste, which must then be resaid, “Wagt zu sagen, was ihr Apfel nennt,” dare to say what you call “apple.”
(One lovely gloss to this solidarity of words and plants occurs in 21. There the earth is figured as a child anxious to say all the poems she knows by heart. That is fancy, charming but no more. At the end, however, comes this:
und was gedruckt steht in Wurzeln und langen
schwierigen Stämmen: sie singts, sie singts!
(and what is printed in roots and long
difficult stems, she sings it, she sings it!)
Roots and stems—those are the very words we use technically and probably unthinkingly in philology, and it is admirable to see them revert, in a poet’s mind, to their plant nature, which is at one with their word nature, in a postlogical and biological etymology.)
Already in 13 the fruit was said to speak “life and death in the mouth,” and in 14 this fruit-language metamorphosis is expanded to include the ancestral past of the fruit which is also ours, our common ground as you might say.
Wir gehen um mit Blumen, Weinblatt, Frucht.
Sie sprechen nicht die Sprache nur des Jahres.
(We have to do with flower, vineleaf, fruit.
They speak a language not of this year only.)
They come from the dead whose bodies fatten the land in an intimate fusion, and the poem moves into an extraordinary image of ancestors sleeping not merely at the tree roots but with them in the sexual sense, the German preposition bei carrying both meanings, with the fruits as halfway things sent up to us, the living, out of the overplus of the dead and their dumb and griping embraces with prehuman organic life.
The fruit tree next becomes the genealogical or family tree binding dead and living in ceaseless reproduction in both kingdoms.91 Sonnet 15 takes this forward into society and language, as Ovid did also:
Zu unterst der Alte, verworrn,
all der Erbauten
Wurzel, verborgener Born,
den sie nie schauten.
Sturmhelm und Jägerhorn,
Spruch von Ergrauten,
Männer im Bruderzorn,
Frauen wie Lauten . . .
Drängender Zweig an Zweig,
nirgends ein freier . . .
Einer! O steig . . . O steig . . .
Aber sie brechen noch.
Dieser erst oben doch
biegt sich zur Leier. (All things that blindly grow,
Their hidden cause:
The Old One far below,
Gnarled in the roots.
Helmet and hunting-horn,
Ancients’ wise saws,
Man-wrath in brothers born,
Women like lutes . . .
Though shoot on shoot press on
Freedom’s not won . . .
Yes, there! oh higher . . . higher.
Now that too snapped and gone.
Only the topmost one
Curves and is lyre.)92
After this, immediately, with 18, the machines come in, “der Maschinenteil,” the machine part of the social and modern world, entering here as a new sound which Orpheus is questioned about. This is not intrusion, not a mistaking by a poet of his lyric vocation. This is the classic Orphic tradition, from Bacon and his Mechanical Arts onward, and what Rilke has to say about machines is remarkable. They are dealt with in Sonnets 22-24. They would have had a run of four consecutive sonnets had Rilke not taken a dislike to the original 21 and substituted for it the little spring fantasy we have already mentioned. The reject stands in his later poems,93 however, and is not uninteresting. It argues about what is new and what is old, saying that he who is all for novelty is bound to be soon brought to silence:
Denn das Ganze ist unendlich neuer
Als ein Kabel und ein hohes Haus,
(For the All is infinitely newer
Than a cable or a skyscraper)
and he goes on to add that the oldest fires of all are the stars, while the newer fires go out, and we are not to suppose our longest transmission shafts turn the wheels of the future, “denn Aeonen redet mit Aeonen,” aeon speaks with aeon as deep calleth unto deep, and more than we realized has already happened. (It is strange how often Rilke catches a Goethean echo in what he says—he certainly does so here.)
Sonnets 22 and 23 speak of aeroplanes and flight: speed in itself alone is not the way into the future. Sonnet 22 ends with a lovely triplet, offset against the aeroplane and its hasting:
Alles ist ausgeruht:
Dunkel und Helligkeit,
Blume und Buch.
Everything is rested through and through, completely relaxed, has had its sleep out—darkness and light, flower and book. To come on these immediately after those swift machines, in contrast and yet still in close relation to them, makes a beautiful synthesis, everything turning in the turning cycles of season and nature (books here being as much a part of nature as they were in Wordsworth) toward a new metamorphosis which 23 proposes for flight itself, whose true possibilities for life and imagination have not yet been realized.
With 24 the machines take a new, final, and exceedingly interesting turn in Rilke’s mind: they are related to the gods, technology to mythology, and the difficulties the former causes us are set down here, by implication, to our increasing alienation from mythology. The sonnet suggests there is a true connection we have failed to maintain. We think we have outstripped the gods by steel and wheels and straight-engineered roads, but the fire imprisoned in our steam-boilers is the former fire still (of the Titans and Vulcan perhaps?), and in our separation from them we have merely become like swimmers who have swum on and on only to find their strength is going. This Sonnet is akin to 11.19, where the god is linked with gold in the bank, as if there too were a world subject to mythology. “Dichtung der Finanzwissenschaften”— Novalis hinted at it; “Nur dem Gottlichen horbar,” Rilke says, audible only to the god are the proceedings of money. There is a glimpse here of yet another extension of postlogic, into a mythology which might be at the base of the processes and thinking in technology and economics.
The one theme we have left to look at before coming to the last Orphic figure is the dance. It enters as a language of the body, akin to word language as we can see in the pairing of 13, where apple is to be named, with 14, where orange is to be danced. What it figures is the whole dynamic of life, in nature and society. (This is enlarged upon in 11.18.) And the dance now gathers up all the themes and sets a symmetry on the whole work, for the next to last sonnet in each Part corresponds. Each is about a girl and dancing, and is addressed explicitly, by Rilke himself, to Wera. Sonnet 28 in Part II is much the better poem. In it the dead dancer, still almost a child, is bidden to come and go, like Orpheus himself in 1.5, perfecting the dance figure into a figure of stars. The dancer’s motion is said to date from that primordial moment when Orpheus and the lyre were first heard, and to this high celebration and central point all the beauty of her steps was directed, part of the true hearing in nature which began when Orpheus sang. (There is playfulness in this poem too; the dancing girl is a little astonished if a tree takes a long time to make up its mind to go along with her, in the hearing and the dance.) So here are the dead girl, the dance, the figures of the myth, the hearing of nature, the power of poetry and the stars.
In 1.25 Rilke tries to deal with the real dancing girl’s real illness and death, and cannot; but in the still-figuring first stanza there are two interesting lines. In line 2 the dead girl is called by the poet “a flower whose name I do not know,” where flowers, language, death, and woman meet. Then in line 4 she becomes “schone Gespielin des unüberwindlichen Schreis,” beautiful playfellow of the cry that is to prevail. This is a difficult line, and we may understand it better if we remember that playmate in Rilke’s pre-Sonette verses who was the universe and the poet’s partner; and then turn to 11.26, which is about cries in the universe, birds’ cries, children’s cries (as Rilke had been complaining in another of those verses that the universe was overfull of crying and noise). In this sonnet in Part II, the cries are to be regulated by Orpheus. He as singing god is asked to order the criers so that they may wake into a rushing stream carrying along with it the head and the lyre. This is the only place in Part II where the third Orphic figure is mentioned, and it seems as if in this hint in 1.25 we look forward to that final metamorphosis.
This is Sonnet 26:
Du aber, Göttlicher, du, bis zuletzt noch Ertöner,
da ihn der Schwarm der verschmahten Mänaden befiel,
hast ihr Geschrei übertönt mit Ordnung, du Schoner,
aus den Zerstörenden stieg dein erbauendes Spiel.
Keine war da, dass sie Haupt dir und Leier zerstör.
Wie sie auch rangen und rasten; und alle die scharfen
Steine, die sie nach deinem Herzen warfen,
wurden zu Sanftem an dir und begabt mit Gehör.
Schliesslich zerschlugen sie dich, von der Rache gehetzt,
während dein Klang noch in Löwen und Felsen verweilte
und in den Bäumen und Vogeln. Dort singst du noch jetzt.
O du verlorener Gott! Du unendliche Spur!
Nur weil dich reissend zuletzt die Feindschaft verteilte,
sind wir die Hörenden jetzt und ein Mund der Natur.
(Worshipful one who sang on to the end, while the storm
Of gathering Maenads swept round you, your scorn to repay,
You in your beauty outmastered their cries into form:
Out of destruction your structuring melodies play.
Lyre and head were immune from that murderous crowd,
However much in their fury they struggled and burned;
All of the stones they flung at your heart, sharp edges, were turned,
As they met you, to gentle things and with hearing endowed.
Lusting for vengeance, at last they made you their prey,
But in the crags and the lions still lingered your sound,
And in the trees and the birds. You sing there today.
You are the god who is lost—most boundless of clues!
Only since hatred undid you and spread you around
Are we true hearers, a mouth for nature to use.)
This is the end of Rilke’s inquiry into postlogical thought as living metamorphic process. Orpheus, dead, is re-embodied into the dynamic of nature at every level, which sings of him henceforward: the methodology of postlogic is a part of, and at one with, natural process. And it is we, human beings with our hearing and our language-aspoetry, who are the clue to what is going on. Rilke asks an immense question: what if all the dynamics in the natural world, up to and including those of human society, are clues to, or hieroglyphics of, the methodology of thinking, special attention to be paid to sex (which is here in its full human complication, witness the “verschmahten Mänaden,” the Maenads Orpheus rejected) and to life and death in their intimately connected dynamic relationship? It can be seen dimly here how psychology, anthropology, and poetry offer the basis for an immensely extended Ovidian biology of thinking.
We have now only to attend to the ending of the myth; for where Rilke leaves Orpheus in the final sonnet is not the end of the story. It is Ovid in the Metamorphoses who completes the cycle. Book xv ends with the apotheosis of Rome in the person of the dead Caesar shooting up into heaven as a star; the crowning social form, as Ovid saw it, returning by right among the primordial forms of the stars. Rilke also, in his pre-Sonette poem saw a meteor shooting from the hand up into its own place, while the Sonette speak of the human voice being lifted among the stars in 1.8, of a possible connection between a mental figure and the stars in 1.11, of dance as akin to the stars in 11.28. Critics have pointed out how often Rilke’s poetry moves toward the stars.94 As early as Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes there was a sky of stars, but they were the landscape of mourning called up by Orpheus in his grief and were distorted. In the Tenth Elegy, Rilke returns to this image, naming there his own imaginary constellations for a sky of pain. Strangely and significantly, we are told, Head and Lyre of Orpheus figured in the original draft among these star clusters, but was later struck out.95 Rilke does not answer the question: why this connection between figures and stars? The myth itself, however, makes a suggestion.
