Rainer Maria Rilke

Category: Online Poetry

1875-1926

The German author Rainer Maria Rilke is best known for his poetry, in which he attempted to come to terms with his fearful perceptions of life. His personal spiritual crisis was related to his view of a larger crisis of society, and both are reflected in the poetry he created.

Rilke was born in Prague, Bohemia (now in the Czech Republic), on Dec. 4, 1875. An unhappy childhood left him with many fears and a restlessness expressed in his extensive traveling throughout his life. His first major work, ‘The Book of Hours’, published in 1905, was written as a reaction to his first trips to Russia. After leaving Russia he stayed briefly in the artists’ colony of Worpswede, Germany, and then moved to Paris, where he was commissioned to write a book on Auguste Rodin.

In Paris Rilke developed the Ding-Gedicht, or “object poem,” in which he attempted to capture the essence of a physical object. This style was the basis for his ‘New Poems’ (1907-08). Other poems include ‘Das Marienleben’ (1913) and ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ (1922). The culmination of Rilke’s poetic development was ‘Duino Elegies’ (1922). In these poems the fears that had been a large part of his life were resolved in his personal aesthetics and statement of the justification of life.

Rilke continued to travel after the publication of these poems, mostly within Switzerland. He died of leukemia on Dec. 29, 1926, in Valmont, Switzerland.

Selected Poems

Untitled

Sometimes a man stands up during supper
and walks outdoors, and keeps on walking,
because of a church that stands somewhere in the East.
And his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.

And another man, who remains inside his own house,
dies there, inside the dishes and in the glasses,
so that his children have to go far our into the world
toward that same church, which he forgot.

(Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke trans. By Robert Bly)

Pieta

Thus, Jesus, do I see your feet again?
Those feet which last time were a slender lad’s,
When timidly I bared and washed them here;
How they forlornly stood among my plaits
Like, in a thornbush caught, a milk-whit deer.

So now I see your limbs, unfondled ever,
For the first time, at this our lover’s tryst.
We never in our time lay down together;
Now to adore and watch is all there is.

But look, your hands are mangled at the center – :
What bites, beloved – they were not my own.
Your heart is open, anyone’s to enter:
That was to have been my door, mine alone.

Now you are weary, and your mouth too wry
To have a longing for my suffering lips -.
Jesus, Jesus, whence came our eclipse?
How quirkily we perish, you and I.

(The Best of Rilke trans. By Walter Arndt)