Rainer Maria Rilke: A Poet Who Fled from God

Reflection of the tragedy of a “man-centered pagan night”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) has been called Germany’s greatest lyric poet since Goethe and Heine. In mirroring his milieu (which had seen the wave of unbelief in his nation reach and pass its crest in Marx and Freud), he constantly deplored the dearth of seed and soil for a spiritual rebirth among his people. But in that culture that had grown hopelessly confused and confusing he was himself caught; and he sought his escape through music, specifically the music of poetry.

The intellectual climate of Germany, imbued as it was with Hegelian idealism, was too much for Rilke’s own faith. Born of Catholic parents in Prague, and a Catholic in his boyhood, Rilke had an ancestry both Czech and German. He was as much a cosmopolitan as Heine, if not more so. But where Heine was to repudiate at the last the pantheism in which he had been trained under Hegel himself, Rilke sacrificed his native Christianity for a belief in Orpheus, as symbol of the everlasting life of song. For, wasted and desecrated as his faith became, he never quite lost the artist’s fire.

Rilke had only the vaguest notion, of course, of the Orphic mysteries. But the thought of Song (and of only the old divinity’s being able to sing it, since song stays though song’s themes come and go, just as poets come and go) haunted him. Thus he wrote of and to “the singing god” in one of the Sonnets to Orpheus:

Over the thrust and throng,

Freer and higher,

Still lasts your prelude song,

God with the lyre.

Sorrows we misunderstand,

Love is still learning,

Death, whence there’s no returning,

No one unveils.

Song alone over the land

Hallows and hails.

(Translation by J. B. Leishman, quoted in E. M. Butler’s Rilke [Cambridge University Press, 1941]. Used by permission.)

“Still lasts your prelude song!” Rilke’s lifelong nostalgia for the changeless, which the relativist philosophy that supplanted his earlier Christian belief would deny, speaks—or better, sings—over and over in his poetry; and it is this that gives value to his verses. In Rilke’s lines translated by Ludwig Lewisohn as “The Song of Love,” we find the suggestion of a Reality standing at an immeasurable distance from the god with the lyre. The “Great Player” of the imagery is more than abstract song, and more too than Orpheus ever was to his followers.

How shall I guard my soul so that it be

Touched not by thine? And how shall it be brought,

Lifted above thee, unto other things?

Ah, gladly would I hide it utterly

Lost in the dark where are no murmurings,

In strange and silent places that do not

Vibrate when thy deep soul quivers and sings,

But all that touches us makes us two twin,

Even as the bow crossing the violin

Draws but one voice from the two strings that meet.

Upon what instrument are we two spanned?

And what great player has us in his hand?

O Song most sweet!

(An Anthology of World Poetry, edited by Mark Van Doren [Harcourt, 1936], pp. 937, 938.)

The supernatural presences—angels or powers or whatever else they are called—that fill Rilke’s poems from his early Book of Pictures and the Book of Hours to the Duino Elegies, and finally even the Sonnets to Orpheus, owe their extraordinary appeal to the poet’s original Christian heritage. Even in imagery as pagan as Rilke’s appeal to the Heraclitean fire, we find a lurking vestige of the spirit that makes all things new, a twist of the image to include Someone standing beyond the flame who looks on and is master of “the earthly”:

Will the changing. O be enthusiastic for the flame …

That contriving Spirit which masters the earthly,

Loves in the swing of the figure nothing so much

as the turning point.

(Except where otherwise noted, the translations of Rilke’s poetry in this essay are the author’s.) It may be noted that the Heraclitean relativists held to only one fixed principle—that of flux itself—but hardly gave it personal value! In a poem entitled Herbst (“Autumn”) the poet wrote, early in his career:

We all fall. This very hand falls.

And look at others: it’s the same for all of us.

And yet there is One Who holds this falling

With infinite gentleness in His hands.

The reader must ask: What pagan deity ever possessed “infinite gentleness”?

The thirteen poems of Rilke’s cycle Marienleben (“Life of Mary”) appeared in 1913, shortly before the opening of the First World War. The poet’s fatal belief that he dealt with a myth is absent from the cycle itself. Rilke said of the volume: “It is a little book that was presented to me, quite above and beyond myself by a peaceful, generous spirit, and I shall always get on well with it, just as I did when I was writing it.”

The reader may see readily enough why Rilke should have had such satisfaction as well as why he recognized the “given” quality of his poetic appreciation in the Marienleben. For he has reproduced the Christian story in its own terms from the first poem, “The Birth of Mary,” to the last one of the series. The Life of Mary ends with a long tripartite exposition of her death. Mary’s assumption into heaven as described by the angel of the Annunciation, Gabriel, to the Apostle Thomas—in the perfervid imagination of the poet—is tenderly portrayed:

Are you surprised how gently they could bring

Her from these burial clothes?

Could thus retrieve her?

The very heavens are shaken to receive her:

O man, kneel down, look after me, and sing!

“The Birth of Christ,” one of the longest poems of the cycle opens directly and is addressed to the Mother of Jesus:

Had you not such simplicity, this Birth

Could not have happened thus to light

our night …

And, after showing the kings proffering their treasures in the cave of Bethlehem, the speaker goes on talking to Mary:

But look within the confines of your shawl—

See, even now, He has outdone them all!

The rarest amber ever shipped afar,

Or goldsmith’s pride, or spice on southwinds blowing

Such as these great kings bear, lured by His star,

Pass swiftly, and pain marks them in their going.

But He (you’ll see) brings joy past all men’s knowing.

The short, stark “Pietà” is deeply moving:

My cup of misery brims; without a name

It fills me full …

Greatly You grew—

Yes, greatly grew

So that this larger pain

Wholly too much for my heart’s compassing

Might thus stand forth.…

The “Consoling of Mary by the Risen One” is in this same vers-libre form. According to an old tradition, Jesus first appeared to his mother on Easter morning. “Oh, first to her!” says Rilke in this poem, which ends,

So they began,

As still as trees in spring,

The endless

And immediate moment

Of their most high communing.

(It is to be stressed here that Mary is “symbol of the spiritual ego giving birth and form to the divine.”)

Not until 1923, ten years after the publication of The Life of Mary, did Rilke produce any more poetry. Then, the Sonnets to Orpheus and the Duino Elegies revealed this poet as, in Kurt Reinhardt’s words, “the late-born heir of the great culture of Europe who on the highest artistic level and in precious language sang the swan song of German romantic idealism and man-centered humanism.” In Germany: 2000 Years, Dr. Reinhardt describes Rilke’s works, before World War I particularly, as reflecting both his search for and his flight from God. “But the road that leads to Thee,” Rilke had said in the Book of Hours, “is fearfully long, and the track laid waste because no one has traveled it for so long.” Nevertheless—and even in the face of the incommensurable distance of Rilke’s own restless search from the Way of faith of a Kierkegaard, for example—we still recognize in his poetry the eternal seeker of the “I” for the “Thou,” the singer of a soul’s undying longing after God. But the German lyric poet was fleeing from God, as Reinhardt suggests, by ways of dream that lead to death.

For although Rilke, after he lost his native Christianity, still held to finite man’s dependence on infinite power, the Heraclitean fire to which he turned as a last personal defense against the despair of materialism assuredly had nothing to offer. The view of nature as a Heraclitean fire is, for the Christian, no more than the pagan imagery of relativism. Only in such a context as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins in his famous poem on this very subject can the ancient symbol carry Christian relevance. For Hopkins contrasts the Heraclitean fire with the “immortal diamond” of the living soul that has been creatured-in-Christ. The concept of the Light that enlightens everyone who comes into this world is of a wholly different order from any concept in Greek philosophy. Hopkins, who also saw the “world’s wildfire leave but ash,” knew himself saved by the beacon shining across his “foundering deck”—that of the “eternal beam” of the Resurrection:

In a flash, at a trumpet crash,

I am all at once what Christ is,

since he was what I am, and

This Jack, joke, poor potsherd,

patch, matchwood, immortal diamond

Is immortal diamond.

(From Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Robert Bridges [Oxford University Press, 1961]. Used by permission.)

Rilke, in turning back to himself, leaves as his final product only the reflection of the philosophical confusion rampant in German idealism. His own life shows in microcosm the course of Christianity’s prostitution that reduced its teachings to various forms of vague personal mysticism.

To compare Rilke’s poetry with that of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets—notably Richard Crashaw in England, who also celebrated what he called “the universal Song”—is to show something of the distance between them. Where the modern writer’s song is man-centered, Crashaw’s is wholly Christ-centered. (In fact it is Christ who is held synonymous with Song in Crashaw’s 250-line poem, “Hymn to the Holy Name of Jesus.”) Instead of the agony and despair that mark Rilke’s poetry as a whole, we find, in eloquent contrast, a brightness and an ecstasy filling Crashaw’s poems. In this connection it is to be remembered that Crashaw, a contemporary of Descartes, had seen the beginning of the ratio movement that flowered and went to seed in German philosophy. Crashaw’s “Epiphany Hymn” contains references to the pagan “darkness made of too much day”—that of the ego’s “bright meridian night” which the Magi wisely left behind them for the Word which was made flesh in Bethlehem of Judea.

Rainer Maria Rilke’s tragedy, alas, is the tragedy of European culture as it returned to a man-centered pagan night. But the poet who wept for the lack of a spiritual climate in his homeland did not realize that his own betrayal of the faith in which he had been born added to the general desolation, even as he reflected it in his poetry. Plato’s famous quarrel with the poets was, after all, motivated in part by the fact that falsehoods gain a semblance of truth when they are combined with the music of poetry.

The Village Atheist Seeks Conversion

The other day I went to talk to that eloquent exponent of avant-garde Christianity, Bishop Golightly, and found him in his study mulling over his forthcoming bestseller, Is It Time to Throw out the Christ Child with the Baptismal Water? Suddenly, he picked up a New Testament, tore out the Gospels, and tossed them out the window. I greeted him while nimbly dodging a crucifix that followed hard upon the Gospels, and he in turn greeted me by dancing that elevating entrechat, Second Corinthians 13:13.

When we were seated at last, I said, “I am a village atheist. However, village atheists are becoming as old hat as village idiots, so I’ve decided to have a go at Christianity. One must keep up with the times.”

“At all costs,” said the bishop, a deep fervor intensifying the genial glint in his eye. “And it will be to your everlasting—if I may use that outmoded word—your eternal credit that you’ve come forward, despite the handicap of your heredity and environment.”

Quickening to this warm, contemporary approach, I confessed, “I was persuaded to come by a follower of yours, a woman journalist I met at a cocktail party.”

The good bishop’s face clouded. “Persuaded?” he said in awful tones. He struggled to regain his famed equanimity. “Oh, my dear chap, how intolerant of the poor, misguided woman! It’s against my principles to persuade, evangelize, preach, convert, and proselytize, and so forth. In fact, I really can’t say whether I can help you at all. I may be infringing upon your basic right to your own opinions, no matter how ill-informed.”

I knew I should accept this overwhelming logic, but I was already too far gone in my search for salvation. “Then,” I cried desperately, “how in God’s name will you spread the Gospel to me, considering what you’ve just thrown out the window?”

At once the bishop’s face brightened. I sensed we were on the verge of some penetrating analysis, if not some enormous revelation. He thrust a copy of his latest book at me: Christianity Rethought, Reshaped, and Repackaged. “Try this!” he cried. “Paperback, of course. Fourth printing.”

“Not since the Delphic oracle has there been anything like this,” I marveled, after I had scanned the first few pages.

But the bishop seized my arm, giving me, so to speak, a firm grip on reality. “Come, let us have a meaningful dialogue,” he murmured. “Tell me, how is the basic state of your being?”

Moved almost to tears by such profound concern, I answered, “Fine, except for a little sinus trouble. But speaking of things basic, I should very much like to hear some basic Christian doctrine. About salvation.…”

“Doctrine?” the bishop thundered, looking aghast. “Salvation? Are you asking me to violate my agnostic silence about such matters?” And as if to preserve his silence, he fainted dead away.

Stricken with remorse, I rushed about the study, until I found a bottle of wine. I poured a reviving draught down the bishop. “I hope I haven’t used the communion wine,” I said as he recovered. “I shouldn’t wish to use what may become a symbol of Christ’s blood.”

The bishop favored me with a tender, forgiving smile. “My dear sir, avant-garde Christianity isn’t flesh and blood. It’s free! Stark free! A bare skeleton stripped of all non-essentials! Prayer? Out! Virgin Birth? Out! Trinity? Out! Resurrection? Out! Eternal life? Out! Miracles? Divinity? All out!” His beatific smile warmed and melted me until I thought my legs might not support me any more.

“You’ve convinced me,” I said gratefully. “Why, I’ve been a Christian all along and haven’t known it. Thank you so much.”

“I’m sorry I can’t give you any more time today,” he said in reply, “but some gentlemen of the press are coming to interview me on nuclear physics.”

“What a brilliant mind!” I gasped to myself as I walked toward the door clutching Christianity Rethought, etc. I turned back to thank the bishop again, but that versatile man was already engrossed in a new task. He was polishing a large brass ring, and I stopped to watch. After a couple of minutes, he gave the ring a final swipe and then set it firmly on his head. Thus haloed, he returned to his daily labors of enlightening those in peril of believing.—E. N. BELL, Vancouver, British Columbia.

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