The Orphic Voice, page 42
33. Rilke took the title from a work of art in the Naples museum; see Letters, Vol. 1, postcard to Clara Rilke, December 2, 1906. The edition of Rilke’s poems used throughout is Gesammelte Werke (Insel-Verlag, 1956), Vols. 1 and 2.
34. See, for instance, “It is so natural for me to understand girls and women; the deepest experience of the creator is feminine” (Letters, Vol. 1, November 20, 1904, p. 181); “I, who could never get along with men . . .” (Briefwechsel, Thurn und Taxis, 1, 54, August 5, 1911); “I often think that what is possible between two human beings is not really very much in the long run; everything that is infinite is inside the individual” (Ibid., p. 42, May 31, 1911). The celebration of death is to be found from the Stundenbuch to the Duino Elegies. Kassner, in his introduction to the Thurn und Taxis collection of letters already cited, has wise things to say about this death doctrine of Rilke’s (“Sie hat etwas knabenhaft Hastiges an sich, sie scheint reif, ist unreif,” p. XVII) as also about the whole relation of Rilke to psychoanalysis.
35. See Levy, The Sword from the Rock, p. 121: in myths of discovery “such heroes were apt to win their ultimate renown for mental rather than for physical achievement.”
36. Ibid., p. 101. The writer describes how the ancient myth of cosmic enmity between father and son “has given rise in modern times to new myths of interpretation,” adding in a footnote, “Cf. Freud’s Myth of the Murdered Father in Totem and Tabu.”
37. The contrast, in tone and helpfulness, in some modern work, such as Mircea Eliade’s Patterns of Comparative Religion, is heartening.
38. The edition is that of Selincourt, Oxford, 1933.
39. Freud has an interesting comment on this question in his essay “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming,” Collected Papers, Vol. 4, London, Hogarth Press, 1950. He says on p. 177: “The relation of phantasies to time is altogether of great importance. One may say that a phantasy hovers between three periods of time—the three periods of our ideation . . . So past, present and future are threaded, as it were, on the string of the wish that runs through them all.”
40. Oxford edition, p. 246.
41. The heroic shield occurs later in the poem also. “I had approach’d, like other Youth, the Shield / Of human nature from the golden side / And would have fought, even to the death, to attest / The quality of the metal which I saw” (x.663–66).
42. Rachel Levy in The Sword from the Rock gives three main subjects of epic poetry, the battle for creation, the quest of the lost, and the third, heroic, type, based on wars of migration (pp. 85–86). It is not fanciful, I think, to see in The Prelude notes of all three.
43. Bk. IV.71; X.659; XI.42; XIII.269, 408, 418.
44. See, for instance, J. Z. Young, Doubt and Certainty in Science: A Biologist’s Reflections on the Brain (Oxford, 1951): “In some sense we literally create the world we speak about. Therefore our physical science is not simply a set of reports upon an outside world. It is also a report upon ourselves and our relations to that world, whatever the latter may be like” (p. 108).
45. Wordsworth sees truth itself as a living thing, not a dead idol. He says in Bk. VIII, line 430: “ye who are fed / By the dead letter, miss the spirit of things, / Whose truth is not a motion or a shape / Instinct with vital functions, but a Block / Or waxen Image which yourselves have made, / And ye adore.”
46. Logic in isolation may become an idol also (see preceding note). In XI.123, Wordsworth says, “There comes a time when Reason, not the grand / And Simple Reason, but that humbler power / Which carries on its no inglorious work / By logic and minute analysis / Is of all Idols that which pleases most / The growing mind.” Earlier (X.844) he speaks of minds that “sacrificed / The exactness of a comprehensive mind / To scrupulous and microscopic views / That furnish’d out materials for a work / Of false imagination.” One recalls Lévy-Bruhl, Valéry, and Poe, each of whom understood in his own way about idolatry in the mind.
47. See the passage from the Friend quoted above in Pt. II, Sec. 8.
48. XII.234.
49. IV.303.
50. This Orphic vision appears also in Novalis’ Die Lehrlinge zu Sais, in the second part. One recalls the strange saying, “My Father works hitherto, and I work,” in John 5:17. The Word works in the works of creation.
51. Cf. “the Creature, / Sensuous and intellectual as he is, / A two-fold Frame of body and of mind” (XI.168).
52. The phrase about the differences hid in all exterior forms suggests Bacon’s “latent configuration,” while the whole passage accords with Goethe’s scientific method.
53. Quoted by Selincourt, notes, p. 265.
54. II.180, 370, 374.
55. XII.252.
56. The dream works on classic Freudian structural, though not interpretative, principles.
57. There are two passages where Wordsworth connects explicitly childhood and power. The first is V.531: “our childhood sits, / Our simple childhood sits upon a throne / That hath more power than all the elements. / I guess not what this tells of Being past, / Nor what it augurs of the life to come; / But so it is.” The second is XI.329, “Oh! mystery of Man, from what a depth / Proceed thy honours! I am lost, but see / In simple childhood something of the base / On which thy greatness stands.” A few lines later he speaks of his own childhood as “the hiding-places of my power.” Rilke with his abiding nostalgic preoccupation with childhood is on much less sure ground here.
58. V.579.
59. This is not to be labeled, or confused with, pantheism. Mircea Eliade, in Patterns in Comparative Religion (New York, Sheed and Ward, 1958), discusses this matter very helpfully. In the conclusion, p. 459, he says, “Some of the highest religious experiences identify the sacred with the whole universe . . . That this is more than a simple idea classed, rightly or wrongly, as pantheist, is shown by the words of Leon Bloy speaking of the . . . ‘mystery of Life, which is Christ. Ego sum Vita. Whether the Life is in man, animals or plants, it is always Life . . .’ It is clear that this is not ‘pantheism’ in our sense, but what we might call ‘panontism.’ ” This is not to deny the boldness of the theological thinking in Wordsworth’s poem. It is matched only, in my experience, by Teilhard de Chardin’s Le Phénomène humain, Pt. IV and epilogue.
60. He deals with these on the same postlogical terms. Cf. IX.102, “Whence the main Organs of the public Power / Had sprung, their transmigrations when and how / Accomplish’d, giving thus unto events / A form and body . . .”
61. Letters, ed. Forman, letter to John Hamilton Reynolds (May 3, 1818), p. 143.
62. A passage from Rilke’s diary, November 3, 1899, runs: “I fear within me only those contradictions that tend towards conciliation. That part of my life, where they could join hands, must be very narrow. My contradictions ought rarely to know of one another and then only through rumour.” Quoted by F. W. van Heerikhuizen, Rainer Maria Rilke: His Life and Work, trans. Fernand G. Renier and Anne Cliff (London, Routledge, 1951), p. 121.
63. Letters, Vol. 1, letter to Clara Rilke (May 8, 1903), p. 105.
64. In a letter to Xaver von Moos, April 20, 1923. I have taken this Englishing from Sonnets to Orpheus, trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York, Norton, 1942), which, with J. B. Leishman’s translation of the same work, I have frequently consulted.
65. In the Nachwort to the individual edition of these poems (Insel-Verlag, 1950), p. 37, Rilke is quoted as saying, “es war sehr merk-würdig, die Feder wurde mir buchstäblich ‘gefü hrt.’ ”
66. There is good precedent for the conscious use of personification in the language in which one talks about ideas. Goethe spoke of them to Eckermann as the free children of God who stand before us and say “Here we are!” There is also Valery’s Chant de l’idée-maîtresse in Mélange, where the Idea is indeed the master-mistress of a passion.
67. Briefwechsel mit Katharina Kippenberg (February 23, 1922), p. 455.
68. Briefwechsel mit Lou Andreas-Salomé (February 20, 1914), p. 327. The whole passage is interesting: “Und vielleicht ist alles Phallische (wie vor-dachte ich im Tempel von Karnak, denken konnt ichs noch nicht) nur eine Auslegung des menschlich heimlich-Geheimen im Sinne des offen-Geheimen der Natur. Ich kann das aegyptisches Gott-Lächeln gar nicht erinnern, ohne dass mir das Wort ‘Blütenstaub’ einfällt.”
69. “. . . if they would not lose the power to rejoice as deeply in a birch leaf or in the feather of a peacock or the pinion of a hooded crow as in a great mountain range or a splendid palace. The small is as little small as the big—is big.” Letters, Vol. 1, letter to Helmuth Westhoff (November 12, 1901), p. 59. The attitude is like Wordsworth’s “looking for the shades of difference.” Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s Der Brief des Lord Chandos, written in 1902 but supposed to be set in the year 1603, is an interesting commentary to this and to much else in Rilke. Donald Davie deals with it in Articulate Energy.
70. See especially that much-publicized letter to the Polish translator. It is given in full in the Leishman translation of the Sonnets, introduction, p. 17, and in M. D. Herter Norton’s version, notes, pp. 131 ff. Rilke is connected at this point not only to Mallarmé, a poem by whom is among those Rilke translated into German, but to Valéry also, his nearest and closest Orphic friendship. As Hans-Egon Holthusen points out in his Rilkes Sonette an Orpheus: Versuch einer Interpretation (Munich, 1937), pp. 19–21, “Auch Valery ist ein Verwandler.” He differs from Rilke, however, in that his transformations tended to be mathematical. Rilke’s imagery for his own transformations was organic from the beginning. He speaks in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé of August 10, 1903, of his need to find the “smallest basic element, the cell,” of his art.
71. See, for instance, stanza 1 of Aus dem Kathedralen-Kreis, Notre-Dame-de-Paris, of this year (Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 2, p. 350). Also letter to Paul Zech, September 12, 1907, where Rilke speaks of “the unerring recognition of my metamorphoses through your eyes.”
72. About Rilke’s connection with Ovid there are incidental intelligences in Else Buddeberg, Rainer Maria Rilke, eine Innere Biographie (Stuttgart, Metzler, 1954), p. 403, “die viel frühere Kenntnis der Ovidschen Metamorphosen”; and in J.-F. Angelloz, Rainer Maria Rilke, l’évolution spirituelle du poète (Paris, Hartmann, 1936), p. 32, n. 1: “L’amie qui s’est occupée de l’installation à Muzot nous signala ces deux faits susceptibles d’avoir contribué à inspirer les Elégies: l’admiration de Rilke pour les Métamorphoses d’Ovide et la présence d’une image représentant Orphée, qu’elle lui avait offerte.” The most circumstantial is in Erich Simenauer, Rainer Maria Rilke: Legende und Mythos (Berne, 1953), p. 739, n. 12, which refers to the Rilke Lettres à Merline and says Rilke read the Metamorphoses in the French translation.
73. An Hölderlin, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. 2, p. 93.
74. Briefe (Wiesbaden, Insel-Verlag, 1950), Vol. 1 (letter of February 11, 1910), p. 279.
75. Goethe und Rilke (Dresden, 1937), pp. 19–21.
76. Briefe, Vol. 1 (letter to Hedda Sauer, September 28, 1911), p. 314.
77. The two references are Letters, Vol. 2 (letter of February 19, 1912), p. 58; and Briefwechsel mit Lou Andreas-Salomé (letter of October 13, 1913), p. 312.
78. Kretschmar, Goethe und Rilke, pp. 69 ff. Rehm in his Orpheus (p. 521) makes a connection between Goethe’s Urworte: Orphisch and Rilke.
79. We know Rilke particularly loved the Harzreise im Winter.
80. Gesammelte Werke, 2, 132–35.
81. Playfulness as a genuine element in Rilke’s poetic make-up should not be underestimated. It shows plainly in many of the occasional poems, in German and French. In this also he resembles the Mallarmé who used to address envelopes to his friends in little riddling verses which found, one hopes, an ingenious postman.
82. Levy, The Sword from the Rock, p. 117: “In all ancient thought creation means the arrangement into form of what is already alive.”
83. It is interesting, in this connection, that one of the sonnets in Pt. II deals with the torture of the rack, in a judicial situation—quite inadequately, as II.11 deals with its theme of killing. These are subjects (and suffering is among them, despite Rilke’s pronouncements about that) from which Rilke shut himself out, by the life he led and its effects on him.
84. Gesammelte Werke, 2, 136.
85. See, for instance, Von Bertalanffy, Problems of Life, p. 49, and Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, p. 387.
86. Letters, Vol. 1, letter to Baroness Schenk zu Schweinsberg (November 4, 1909), p. 353: “The hour of dying, which wrests this insight from everyone, is only one of our hours and not exceptional: Our being is continually undergoing and entering upon changes that are perhaps of no less intensity than the new, the next, and next again, that death brings with it.” Briefe, Vol. 1, letter to Franz Xaver Kappus (July 16, 1903), p. 51: “denn auch das geistige Schaffen stammt von dem physischen her, ist eines Wesens mit ihm und nur wie eine leisere, entzücktere und ewigere Wiederholung leiblicher Wollust.”
87. Briefe, letter to Kappus, as above, p. 52: “Und auch im Mann ist Mutterschaft, scheint mir, leibliche und geistige, sein Zeugen ist auch eine Art Gebaren, und Gebaren ist es, wenn er schafft aus innerster Fülle. Und vielleicht sind die Geschlechte verwandter, als man meint, und die grosse Erneuerung der Welt wird vielleicht darin bestehen, dass Mann und Mädchen sich, befreit von allen Irrgefühlen und Unlusten, nicht als Gegensätze suchen werden, sondern als Geschwister und Nachbarn und sich zusammentun werden als Menschen.” Also letter to Kappus (May 14, 1904), p. 80: “Dieser Fortschritt wird das Liebe-Erleben, das jetzt voll Irrung ist, (sehr gegen den Willen der überholten Männer zunächst) verwandeln, von Grund aus verandern, zu einer Beziehung umbilden, die von Mensch zu Mensch gemeint ist, nicht mehr von Mann zu Weib.”
88. A poem of Rilke’s of 1907 (Gesammelte Werke, 2, 30) gives buried treasure as one of a series of almost taxonomic images of what it means to be a young girl: “Ein junges Mädchen: das ist wie ein Schatz, / vergraben neben einer alten Linde; / da sollen Ringe sein und Goldgewinde, / doch keiner ist erwählt, dass er sie finde: / nur eine Sage geht und sagt den Platz.” (The girl is also compared in this poem to a star and to fallen rain.) It is as if at this Orphic point of death-and-life woman retained her importance as presence and possibly clue.
89. Rühmen, the concept of praising as the poet’s task, has seemed very important in Rilke. It plays a considerable part in the Elegies and in other poems, notably, “Oh sage, Dichter, was du tust?— Ich rühme,” of 1921. But to isolate praising like this as the poet’s essential task is misleading. The poet obviously should love and affirm all the universe, and be grateful to the Maker of it. But poetry’s task is not to be so simplified, including as it does the task of discovering, learning, teaching, foretelling, thinking, tending and fostering the good estate of language. Nothing is gained by muddling poetry with liturgy.
90. Language and food meet again in 11.20, where a language for fish is suggested by the poet looking at their odd faces when cooked and on the table.
91. It reminds one deeply of Valéry’s Le Cimetière marin.
92. Women become lutes in this sonnet, just as before they were lyres. Thus Rilke identifies women in bodily terms (cf. Die Laute in the second part of the Neue Gedichte) with the two traditional musical instruments of Orpheus.
93. Gesammelte Werke, 2, 135.
94. See Holthusen, Rilkes Sonette an Orpheus, pp. 33–34: “Immer wieder überschreiten die Bilder der Sonette die bloss irdische Natur des Symbols und manifestieren sich in der kosmischen Figur des Sternbildes.”
95. Rehm, Orpheus, p. 525. There is one place in Rilke where the lyre is among the stars—in “Depuis quand nous te jouons” of 1926 (Gesammelte Werke, 2, 632). It says, “Comme la lyre, tu devais etre / rendue aux constellations!”
INDEX
The links below refer to the page references of the printed edition of this book. While the numbers do not correspond to the page numbers or locations on an electronic reading device, they are retained as they can convey useful information regarding the position and amount of space devoted to an indexed entry. Because the size of a page varies in reflowable documents such as this e-book, it may be necessary to scroll down to find the referenced entry after following a link.
NB: The “Notes” section is not included in the index.
Abercrombie, Lascelles, 302
Academy of Sciences (Stockholm), 189
Adams, H. P., 184
Adanson, Michel, 200; Families des plantes, 213
Aeschylus, 281
Analysis vs. synthesis, 29–31, 32
Andreas-Salomé, Lou, 380, 381
Anthropology, 64, 288, 327, 334–36, 402
Anthropomorphism, 262, 352
Apollo, in Orpheus myth, 3, 333; and Christ, 65
Arber, Agnes, 49, 50, 193, 221, 262; Goethe’s Botany, 229
Aristotle, 60, 61, 101, 108, 144, 145, 187
Arnold, Matthew, 8
Art: and science, split between, 7; plastic, 29; union of nature and, 124–25; various meaning of, 125; liberal, 126; mechanical arts, in Shakespeare, 127, 128–33
