Personal Things: A Countertheme Sequence from Rilke’s Neue Gedichte 1907

…Du, der um mich so bittter
das leben schmekte, meines kostend, Vater…

…You, whose life tasted so bitter, after
tasting mine, father…

            Rilke: The Fourth Duino Elegy

…We were brother and sister, but as in a distant past, before the marriage between brother and sister became sacrilegious.

            Lou Salome, recollecting her love affair with Rilke.

Some months ago, a friend sent me a translation of a Rilke poem titled “Todes-Erfahrung,” he found in a British journal. I wasn’t familiar with the poem, and it piqued my interest enough to try my own version.

Initially, the seeming oddity of the title got me wondering if it was a coined construct, but another friend, a Berliner visiting for Christmas, assured me that the expression “death experience” is as common in conversational German as “life experience” in English. One might have a todeserfahrung, say, visiting a dying friend or experiencing the death of a relative. And, as in a “life experience” or “near-death experience,” a lesson is often implied.

But that was peripheral to what drew me to the poem. Rilke’s two-volume New Poems, published in 1907 and 1908, represent a sharp shift from the sometimes-indulgent romanticism of his younger work. There are parallels to still nascent Modernism, but the immediate inspiration for these volumes wasn’t a literary movement. It was Rilke’s very personal reaction to the art of Rodin, who became a mainstay of his decade-long, off-and-on Paris years. These began when he arrived in 1903 to research a commissioned monograph on Rodin and continued through a stint as Rodin’s live-in secretary and beyond. As Rilke’s treatise developed, he began to apply his take on Rodin’s aesthetic to his own poetics.

Similar to a sculptor or painter, he said he wanted to create Dinggedichte, “thing-poems,” poems that impose their own discrete existence, beyond simple authorial intent. It was both a concrete and dynamic art, never more so than when its subjects are Paris scenes. Rilke’s zoo-caged panther paces the page. In the Louvre. an ancient torso of Apollo seethes with inner heat. And the cabaret bonfire sparked by his Spanish dancer’s castanet steps still smolders. If the 173 New Poems alone constituted Rilke’s total canon, his place in 20th century German and world poetry would be assured.

Conversely, “Death-Experience” seems to veer from “thing-poem” objectivity, where the first-person pronoun is a rarity. It departs the tangible world for a fancied glimpse of an unknowable afterlife. Its point of view might be comfortably at home in a 19^th-century seance. In his translator’s comments on New Poems, Edward Snow quotes Rilke saying that he was expressing “not feelings, but things I had felt.” “Death-Experience,” appositively, feels, then imagines.

Browsing, I noticed several other New Poems, 1907 pieces scattered in the same vicinity that also seem more personally emotive than object-driven. Read in sequence, the effect felt complementary. The first poem below, Goodbye (Abschied), directly precedes Todes- Erfahrung and the others follow, not directly but closely, with only small gaps. I’ve also noted the dates the poems were written.

Goodbye

 

How I’ve felt what’s called goodbye.

How I still know it: a dark

invulnerable grim something, offering

a beautiful union, just to tear it apart.

 

How defenseless I was, replaying it.
As if it were all womankind calling me,

letting me go, turning back again. Yet

small, white and nothing but this:

 

A wave from a hand no longer mine.
A quiet flutter of waves – no more explicable

maybe than a blossoming plum tree
from which a cuckoo has too soon flown.

 

Spring, 1906

 

 

Death-Experience

 

We know nothing of that departure

that shares nothing with us. We have

no basis, can only pretend to venerate

and love – or hate – death, who reveals

 

nothing beyond the down-turned mouth
of the grieving tragic masque. Yet, the world

is filled with roles we play so anxious

to please. And death is inseparable

 

from our performances, even if he doesn’t

care to please. But when you left, a glint

of something real slipped through the gap

into which you passed – green, real green,

 

real sunlight, real forest. Our play goes

on as we nervously declaim our tricky

assignments, with gestures and timely

steps. But your presence, worlds away

 

now from ours, taken from our skit,
still fleetingly touches us like an epiphany

from that reality. And we’re swept
up into life’s play, indifferent to applause.

 

Capri, January, 1907

 

 

Before Summer Rain

 

All at once – who knows what – but

something’s gone out from everything

green in the park. You can feel it: gathering

closer, silent at the window. In the thicket

 

a plover pipes, urgent and loud,
reminiscent of some Saint Jerome –
that same melange of loneliness and zeal wrapped

in one voice invoking the downpour to come.

 

The drawing room walls with their

paintings withdraw from us,
as if they aren’t supposed to hear

 

things we might say, And playing on the faded

tapestry is the same uncertain light of those

afternoons it was so frightening to be a child.

 

Paris, early July, 1906

 

 

Portrait of My Young Father

 

A dreaming eye. The forehead contemplating

something far off. An immensely young

unsmiling seductive mouth. And guarding

the proud brocade of his trim noble uniform,

the saber hilt covered by both hands –

resting so calmly, awaiting nothing.
But you can hardly make them out. As

if they were the first of him to clutch at

distance and disappear. And everything

else veiled within himself, hidden

incomprehensible muddled depths …

 

you, quickly fading daguerreotype in

my still slowly departing hands.

 

Paris June, 1906

 

 

Self-Portrait from the Year 1906

 

The stern eyebrows of an ancient noble line,

arched above a still frightened child’s blue

gaze. And here and there a humbleness,
not a house maid’s but a helpmate’s.

The mouth, just a mouth, but good-sized.

Not argumentative. Nor shy about

speaking out. The forehead un-furrowed,

sheltered in quiet shadows

 

Of what might come of it all, only hints.
No griefs yet conquered, no clarity. Just
a sense that among scattered things still far

off something earnest and real is conspiring

 

Paris, Spring 1906

Is There Commonality Here?
If I can be pardoned an arbitrary statement, the poems we most value are written out of personal need. Similarly, aesthetic constructs such as dingegedichte best function as an enabling platform for expressing underlying necessity. Rilke’s quintessential thing-poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” ends Du mußt dein Leben ändern. That “you” in “You have to live another life” is emphatically self-referential. So, what was going on in Rilke’s life at the time? That thought sent me re-reading Wolfgang Leppmann’s 1980s biography, along with Rachel Corbett’s 2016 deeply researched account of Rilke’s Rodin years, You Must Change Your Life. What follows isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but rather a docent-like attempt to flesh out some of the life events around these poems.

In September 1905, Rodin asks Rilke to become his secretary and live at his Meudon estate. In March 1906 Rilke’s father dies. In May 1906, Rodin summarily fires and evicts him. A backdrop to this is that, in his early thirties with a wife and young child, Rilke hadn’t really figured out how to earn a reliable living.

“Portrait of My Young Father” and “Death Experience” are both memorials. The departed “you” in “Death Experience” is Countess Luise von Schwerin, who also died in 1906. Rilke and his wife Clara first met her while taking a rest cure at a posh Dresden spa. The expense strained the young couples’ meager means but bore fruit when the Rilke’s clicked with the countess. She took them under her wing and invited them to her castle and family circle. She also was instrumental in encouraging Rilke to seriously pursue commercial publication of a long narrative poem that would become his most popular early work.

That foray, The Lay of the Love and Death of the Cornet Christoph Rilke, now seems a blind alley detour from the direction and depth of New Poems. Set in 1664, it recounts the imagined adventures and romanticized death of a dubious ancestor. An eighteen-year-old Austrian cavalry squire battling Turkish invaders in Hungary.

Whatever its potboiler vacuities, the three-hundred-line poem’s language and drive are dazzling. In time, it became Rilke’s first source of meaningful royalties, outpacing his “serious works” throughout his lifetime. He dedicated the year-end 1906 edition to Countess von Schwerin after her death.

Do “Death Experience’s” “performances” and “roles” include the fictional Cornet Christoph Rilke? Even if only imaginary, that lineage imparted an implicit “von Rilke” on the poem’s author. And there’s Rilke’s railway station manager father, who nursed unfulfilled noble rank pretensions and lamented his inability to obtain an officer’s commission after years in the army. He too died prior to the publication, but it seems probable his son shared prior limited editions of the Cornet with him.

The Genteel Workplace
“Before Summer Rain,” which blurs, perhaps crosses, the line between “object poem” and pathetic fallacy, might also be viewed through the prism of “Death Experience’s” “performances” and “roles.” Its grand estate setting is a far cry from Rilke’s bland Prague childhood. It’s the kind of social set his parents aspired to, but only in disappointed fantasies that perhaps led to their early separation. And that milieu also represented a patronage to be cultivated in the late Austrian Empire. A source of connections, shelter, and largesse that had to be “worked” if an aspiring poet wanted to avoid being denied his “real work” by having to take a job.

As for the childhood trauma that intrudes into the genteel setting. There is nothing to stop a reader from wondering if the secure and generous Countess von Schwerin might have seemed a consoling matronly figure, almost the opposite of the mother Rilke characterized as “intimidating.” A mother who mourned the crib death of the two-month-old daughter who preceded him by dressing and treating her “Rene” as a girl until she sent him off to Catholic school at five. As Rilke recalled in later life, a mother who “played with me as though I were a big doll.” A mother he never warmed to and who outlived him. In Michael Hamburger’s translation of an uncollected 1915 poem, Rilke kvetches:

Oh misery, my mother tears me down

Stone upon stone I’d laid, towards a self

And stood like a small house…
Now comes my mother and tears me down.

 

… From her to me no warm breeze ever blew.

Never she lived where any wind can stir.

…and daily Jesus comes and washes her.

Rilke sincerely liked Countess von Schwerin, and “Death-Experience” was a commemorative her family seems to have taken to heart. Wolfgang Leppmann takes us to the scene of a tombstone in a Capri cemetery overlooking the Bay of Naples, ” on which some verses of Rilke are carved, without mention of his name.” The inscription is the first two sentences of “Death Experience.” The stone marks the grave of Luise von Schwerin’s daughter, Baroness Gudrun Uexküll, buried in 1965. That the source of the lines went without saying seems a further sign of how deeply that heirloom was treasured.

(As an aside, Rilke’s lifelong cultivation of upper-crust patrons also oddly recalls another nobility-schmoozing writer, the 18^th-century memoirist Casanova. As does Rilke’s lifelong success with women. Neither Casanova nor Rilke seemed suited for marriage and family, but neither were exploitive Don Juans. Their talent was camaraderie, not seduction. Perhaps Rilke’s faux-female childhood taught him how much fun it can be to play with girls?)

 A True and Foster Father
“Portrait of my Young Father” is a much-anthologized poem. It stands on its own but read in context of the burgeoning success of its obverse, the Cornet Rilke, the disappointment of the father who had to settle for so much less than he’d wanted takes on a more palpable sadness.

Josef Rilke had three brothers. One died fairly young from illness. The youngest brother did manage to become a cavalry officer but died by suicide when his career stalled. Only the eldest brother, Jaroslav, a prominent attorney, was successful. Jaroslove pursued a “promotion” into the nobility based on the suspect credentials that inspired the Cornet. An extensive official investigation failed to prove noble lineage, but the emperor chose to nevertheless grant him entrance to the peerage as a reward for distinguished civil service, but only for himself and his direct descendants.

Stephen Mitchell’s translation of the poem quotes a 1914 Rilke letter that talks about finding the daguerreotype among his father’s effects upon his death. It was taken “when he was seventeen, just before his departure for the Italian campaign… Those first naive photographs could be so movingly real. This one gives you the impression that you are looking at him through his mother’s eyes, seeing the beautiful young face in its solemn, barely smiling presentiment of bravery and danger….”

Rilke’s father was sixty-eight when he died, He married relatively late and was thirty-seven years older than his son. As an only child, it was a death and a life that Rilke bore unduly alone. His mother didn’t attend the funeral.

The companion New Poem, “Self Portrait from the Year 1906,” is often connected with a 1906 Paula Modersohn-Becker painting of Rilke. But Rachel Corbett points out that the poem preceded the finished painting. And that, in her reading, it was his response to being fired and evicted by Rodin. The blow-up came when Rodin discovered Rilke had engaged in personal correspondence with two of Rodin’s patrons. He took it as a hint that his ambitious secretary was using the position for his own aims. Whether or not Rodin overreacted, upward schmoozing was a survival mechanism that seemed to come instinctively to Rilke. A venue in which Rilke’s father came up short.

Corbett also casts Rodin as a quasi-father figure to the admiring poet whose father had just died. So, the abrupt dismissal was a blow upon a blow. But Rilke is not without wry resources and, at least as I read the poem, casts the dust-up in a gender-bending metaphor that almost sounds as if there had been a running joke about Rilke being treated as Rodin’s “office wife.” “… nicht eines Knechtes doch eines Dienenden und einer Frau.“

Goodbyes
But what about the poem that leads off the above selection? Perhaps the most counter-thing-poem theme of all? Apart from its subjectivity, the implicit possessiveness of this break-up kvetch seems out of tune with Rilke’s “adjacent solitudes” love mantra. Who was it that left him, and when? I’m sure there’s commentary somewhere about this piece, but I haven’t been able to locate it. So, from here on, I’m speculating.

It’s hard to identify a woman in his life capable of causing this level of distress other than Lou Salome. The event the poem does call to mind is Lou Salome’s unilateral ending of the intense three-and-a-half-year affair that began when he was twenty-one and she was thirty-six.

But that rejection culminated in 1901, not long before Rilke’s April 28 marriage to the sculptor Clara Westhoff. Given the birth of their daughter, Ruth, in December of ’01, it was likely a marriage of pregnant necessity. That perception is also reinforced by the parents promptly leaving the newborn in the care of Clara’s mother while the couple pursued their off-and-on, together-and-apart careers. Rainer and Clara were definitely two solitudes.

Five years later, could the poet still be licking that old wound? Of course. And in this case, the femme fatale was the heartbreaker who left some notable other broken hearts, not least among them Nietzsche’s. Did the Rodin breakup trigger memories of that other awful split? The poem’s present perfect tense evokes a past, not a current crisis. “Things I had felt.”

By 1906 Salome and Rilke seem to have assuaged those pains and moved into a new phase that would continue to the end of Rilke’s life. Apart but always together in correspondence and occasional meetings as their lives diverged. But the poem’s dismissive refusal to mourn the rift may have marked the release needed to allow a reset relationship to breathe. Rilke was also angry at Rodin’s precipitous dismissal and wrote to tell him so. But to others, he noted his relief at being free again in “Paris, the bright, the silken… Paris in May…”

And Lou, the successful novelist and philosopher who took the fledgling Rene’ under her wing and rechristened him Rainer, became, in the 1910s, a close colleague of Sigmund Freud’s and the first woman psychoanalyst. Freud observed that Lou Salome had a singular therapeutic gift for listening. He’s also reputed to have said of her ongoing relationship with Rilke that “she was both the muse and the attentive mother of the great poet.”

Who can argue with Freud’s perceptiveness? Although I think Rilke probably dispensed with any nostalgia for the maternal before leaving home for good as soon as he could. Might Lou’s equally perceptive confessor’s ear have also provided him with what any only child of difficult parents yearns for—a loyal sibling.