CHAPTER 23

Nearer to the Well-Spring (1943)

Review of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, translated by M. D. Herter Norton

On February 5, 1922, the first of the two sequences of Sonnets to Orpheus was finished, and Rilke sent them to the mother of the dead girl, Vera Knoop. He had entered into the death of this young dancer. Learning of the details of her death at the time of his daughter’s marriage; reading Valéry’s L’Ame et la danse, with its quotation from Socrates speaking of the dance as pure metamorphosis, he remembered this dancer as a nameless flower, pausing as if she were being cast in bronze, at last entering the hopelessly open portal—the unconscious Eurydice, dead and shadow, news of whose death was the news which made these poems fall in a stream.1 Scatterings of the Duino Elegies, they were written in two marvelous bursts of sonnets during the same days as the arrival of the Elegies.2 The first sequence, of twenty-six, was written after Rilke’s letters had complained continually of his inability to concentrate, because of the effect of the war. The last of these complaints occur in two letters written on January 28, 1922. From February 2 to February 5, the twenty-five sonnets were written—hardly written, almost spoken, among the long and powerful music of the Elegies, which were now also being finished. And, in another burst, from February 12 to February 20, the second sequence, of twenty-nine sonnets, was done.

In a great crisis, at Muzot, this book was written down. In the grip of this crisis, Rilke again broke through his isolation. Speaking in the Elegies for angels in their full height and menace, he speaks here for the root, the shadow, the transience, for the song which visits death, visits the gleaming earth, can pass only as song, only as Orpheus. For Eurydice, pure and unconscious, is human to the end, even in afterlife. But the poet, the wound, Rilke-Orpheus, rent and scattered, cannot be destroyed; in the end, he can only be heard, heard everywhere.

There is little use in tracing the poems and myths that echo through these sonnets; both Mrs. Norton’s and Leishman’s notes, as well as Rilke’s letters, do that for us.3 Valéry’s dead are here—the shadowy people at the roots of trees, their lost words, their unique selves—the dead of Le Cimetière marin are close to Rilke’s dead, as the dead of the Greek ancestors, dormant and fluid, in a fruit, a dance, a mirror, a trace of earth.4

But to us existence is still enchanted; at a hundred

points it is origin still.5

In love, in change, in Orpheus singing. Rilke saying it, in the third sonnet:

Song, as you teach it, is not desire,

not suing for something yet in the end attained;

song is existence. Easy for the god.

But when do we exist? [. . .]6

All the pieces of his fear, all the withdrawals, are here; but in this book, since the object is acknowledged dead, there is no threat; and since he as poet is all-powerful, death may be visited and seen as origin. The early magic is here, with its strong symbols, its cries, and the bread and milk of its mysteries. “Nothing can harm for him the valid symbol,” says a line near the end of the sixth sonnet, and the seventh begins in the familiar tone, “Praising, that’s it!”7 That Rilkean praise which must arrive with all lament; lament, which moves in the world of praising, and which, together with praising, can sing the image.

The richness of these sonnets is very great, even in translation.

No matter if the farmer works and worries,

where the seed is turning into summer

he never reaches. The earth bestows.8

This gesture of gift and blessing is balanced by the warning of: “not till a pure whither / outweighs boyish pride / of growing machines” will “one who had neared the distances / be his lone flight’s attaining.”9 But from the line “Killing is a form of wandering sorrow” to “the head and the lyre” of Orpheus killed, to the “O come and go” of the dancer, is a succession of movement and image.10 This sequence must be found all at once and taken completely, in its imagery. Here is the long unfolding of a single image-cluster, transformed and killed and taken up again, sustained by Rilke through wartime. Analogies of isolation are here, and the convalescent breathing of a poet who has come through war to release and poetry again. Much of that breath is lost in translation; Mrs. Norton says disarmingly in her Foreword that she still believes that “the closest adherence to the poetry itself is best achieved through the most literal possible rendering of word, phrase, image, far as the result may prove to remain from the final perfection . . .” and I have printed two sonnets here, in full, attempting in a short space to illustrate this definition.11 Mrs. Norton does not speak of music.12

Rilke’s definition of religion, as “a direction of the heart,” surely applies to poetry; and a “literal rendering” can as surely ignore the direction of a poem as a statement about the “facts” of war can ignore the issues of the war, when “facts” and “literalness” depend on relationship.13 One wishes, then, for a third poem, after the original and the literal translation—an equivalent poem, an English poem.

But Mrs. Norton is making an architectural gift to us of Rilke, book by book. Gift by gift, he increases, even when his faults and softness increase.

(Kenyon Review, 1943)