December 4 marks the birthday of important Austian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 -1926). Rilke was in many ways a proto-Modernist, seeking to create poetry that kept a transcendental, even mystical, sense alive in the face of anxiety, alienation and solitude as unavoidable consequences of humanity’s development. In his masterpiece Duino Elegies (first begun in 1912, then put on hiatus due to Rilke’s struggles with depression, only to be renewed in 1922) Rilke believed he had found a way to describe the ineffable. Yet even the joyous beginning of the tenth and final elegy, has to give way to a coda describing the inevitability of suffering: Some day, in the emergence from this fierce insight, let me sing jubilation and praise to assenting Angels. Let not a single one of the cleanly-struck hammers of my heart deny me, through a slack, or a doubtful, or a broken string. Let my streaming face make me more radiant: let my secret weeping bear flower. O, how dear you will be to me, then, Nights of anguish. Inconsolable sisters, why did I not kneel more to greet you, lose myself more in your loosened hair? We, squanderers of pain. […] But if the endlessly dead woke a symbol in us, see, they would point perhaps to the catkins, hanging from bare hazels, or they would intend the rain, falling on dark soil in Spring-time. – And we, who think of ascending joy, would feel the emotion, that almost dismays us, when a joyful thing falls. Click for high-res photo

December 4 marks the birthday of important Austian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 -1926).

Rilke was in many ways a proto-Modernist, seeking to create poetry that kept a transcendental, even mystical, sense alive in the face of anxiety, alienation and solitude as unavoidable consequences of humanity’s development.

In his masterpiece Duino Elegies (first begun in 1912, then put on hiatus due to Rilke’s struggles with depression, only to be renewed in 1922) Rilke believed he had found a way to describe the ineffable. Yet even the joyous beginning of the tenth and final elegy, has to give way to a coda describing the inevitability of suffering:

Some day, in the emergence from this fierce insight,

let me sing jubilation and praise to assenting Angels.

Let not a single one of the cleanly-struck hammers of my heart

deny me, through a slack, or a doubtful, or

a broken string. Let my streaming face

make me more radiant: let my secret weeping

bear flower. O, how dear you will be to me, then, Nights

of anguish. Inconsolable sisters, why did I not

kneel more to greet you, lose myself more

in your loosened hair? We, squanderers of pain.

[…]

But if the endlessly dead woke a symbol in us,

see, they would point perhaps to the catkins,

hanging from bare hazels, or

they would intend the rain, falling on dark soil in Spring-time. –

And we, who think of ascending

joy, would feel the emotion,

that almost dismays us,

when a joyful thing falls.