Elizabeth Watson

Guests of My Life

EMILY DICKINSON, my companion in the early months of grief, wrote:

We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When Light is put away - ...

Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight -
And Life steps almost straight. (1)

And so it was. We began to recover in body and in mind; life resumed something of its normal pace. I went through the routines of home and job. I functioned. But the world was still drained of color. An enormous shadow fell between me and the sun. Grief, being never absent, still determined the circumference of my world. And God was still dead. - Then in the spring, some nine months after the accident, a friend sent me a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. I had heard the name, knew that he wrote in German, but that was about all. Now this poem began to haunt me:

Everything beckons to us to perceive it,
murmurs at every turn, "Remember me!"
A day we passed, too busy to receive it,
will yet unlock us all its treasury.

Who shall compute our harvest? Who shall bar
us from the former years, the long-departed?
What have we learnt from living since we started,
except to find in others what we are?

Except to re-enkindle commonplace?
O house, O sloping field, O setting sun!
Your features form into a face, you run,
you cling to us, returning our embrace!

One space spreads through all creatures equally -
inner-world-space. Birds quietly flying go
flying through us. O, I that want to grow!
the tree I look outside at's growing in me!

I have a house within when I need care.
I have a guard within when I need rest.
The love that I have had! - Upon my breast
the beauty of the world clings, to weep there. (2)

Phrases from the poem came to me as I worked, as I walked, as I woke at night.

Who shall compute our harvest? Who shall bar
us from the former years...

The answer, Rilke seemed to imply, was no one, no one except myself. I asked myself, was it possible that the treasure of days passed by could still be recovered?

I have a house within...

Had I been looking in the wrong direction? Everything outside reminded me of my loss, for memories are associated with places and things. If I could learn to look within, could I find her still there?

...a house within when I need care.
...a guard within when I need rest.
The love that I have had!

Did that love still exist as a two-way relationship so that it could shelter me like a house, and let me relax without having to be on guard?

One space spreads through all creatures equally - inner - world - space...

In preoccupation with my own grief, I was failing to see the inner-world-space of those around me. I remembered mystical experiences I had had, and I longed to be open to them again, vulnerable enough to experience once more the wholeness of life.

- Upon my breast
the beauty of the world clings, to weep there.

All things carry the seeds of death in them, of separation, of longing. In their fragility lies their beauty. My private grief had kept blinding me to the fact that everyone, and everything, is finite.

Rilke's poem seemed to imply a larger world than the one in which I lived. It appeared to be a world in which the past continues into the present so that it becomes a part of it (and the future, too, as I was to experience.) The inner world and the outer are parts of a whole- -with no separation. And the living and the dead (and the as yet unborn) are a beloved community. All this seemed to be implied in the poem as I lived with it day after day.

I am given to enthusiasms. As I had immersed myself in Dickinson, so I now immersed myself in Rilke. It was not that my love for Emily faded, but that Rainer seemed to provide the other side of the coin. Dickinson was concerned with personal authenticity. Rilke seemed to be concerned with the authenticity of everyone and everything else.

How could I climb out of my two-dimensional world into his multi-dimensional one? The opening line of the poem suggested the way:

Everything beckons to us to perceive it...

Grief had kept me from perceiving. It got in the way of seeing things, hearing things, responding to things. It was spring again now. All around me, I realized, things were murmuring, "Remember me!"

A line from another poem became my touchstone:

There remains, perhaps,
some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day. (3)

Slopes are not easily come by in Chicago, but I found

my tree, a Japanese maple, and I began to perceive it day after day, season after season. As my acquaintance with the tree, and with Rilke, grew, so did my perception. The shadow of grief began to lift. A line from another poem began to describe my emergence into the light of affirmation again:

Over the nowhere arches the everywhere. (4)

But who was Rilke? Even before I felt sufficiently acquainted with him to make claims to a personal Rilke, as I had my private Emily, I found that other people had their private Rilkes. C.F. MacIntyre begins his Introduction to his translation of Selected Poems:

"After I had got on with my personal Rilke for ten years, I was surprised to discover I'd been living with a sort of Proteus who seems to have been all things to all critics and to have trifled with me...After some melancholy months of perturbation, during which time I have regarded his disaffections as personal disloyalty, I have been able to put most of these Rilkes aside in my mind...

"I want now to isolate my own Rilke, with a documented brief for his existence, as a man who during a certain period of his life rode the twin fillies of the wing'd horse, sculpture and painting, keeping a firm foot on each, and singing, as he went, his beautifully formed and colored sonnets, or polishing and painting small concert and salon pieces, sonatas in miniature." (5)

I cannot document my Rilke as thoroughly as MacIntyre can his, but I want to affirm that he does exist, that he is alive and well and occupying a permanent guest room in my house. And I find that a casual reference to him, or even a line quoted out of context, will often reward me with an answering gleam in another's eye. People of many ages, and many occupations, and many dispositions, have their private Rilkes about whom they feel strongly.

Out of what kind of human life had this unusual poetry and this compelling vision of the universe come? I could not get very deeply into the poetry without wanting to know more about the poet.

Emily Dickinson withdrew into her house and garden to shut out distractions and to experience life more intensely. Rilke did not have a permanent home until the last years of his life. He was a wanderer, and he wrote much of his poetry as a guest in other homes.

Like Dickinson, he gave his own meaning to special words. The most important of them was not a grand word like "circumference," but a humble one. It is thing. Its meaning has its roots in his childhood. He speaks in his second lecture on Rodin of those things to which small children, even babies, attach themselves - teddy bears, dolls, blankets - without which they are inconsolable, cannot settle down to sleep, and to which they cling even after they become ragged and worn out and broken. This childhood thing dominates life and is in many ways more important than people. He adds:

This small forgotten object, that was ready to signify everything, made you intimate with thousands through playing a thousand parts, being animal and tree and king and child - and when it withdrew, they were all there. This Something, worthless as it was, prepared your relationships with the world, it guided you into happening and among people, and, further: you experienced through it, through its existence, through its anyhow-appearance, through its final smashing or its enigmatic departure, all that is human, right into the depths of death. (6)

Rilke was born December 4, 1875, in Prague, then still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was the product of an unhappy marriage. His father had wanted a military career, but had had to settle for a dull civil service job. His mother felt she had married beneath herself when the dashing young officer in uniform turned into an ordinary and undistinguished white-collar worker. Rilke saw her as arrogant, and difficult, and very pious. There is some evidence that she was not as negative a person as this poem would indicate, but certainly much of the time this is how he perceived her:

Alas, my mother will demolish me!
Stone after stone upon myself I'd lay,
and stood already like a little house round which the day
rolls boundlessly.
Now mother's coming to demolish me:

demolish me by simply being there.
That building's going on she's unaware.
Through my stone wall she passes heedlessly.
alas, my mother will demolish me!

In lighter flight the birds encircle me.
The strange dogs know already: this is he.
It's hidden only from my mother's glance,
my gradually augmented countenance.

No warm wind ever blew to me from her.
She's not at home where breezes are astir.
In some heart-attic she is tucked away,
And Christ comes there to wash her every day. (7)

Poor boy! No wonder he placed such importance on a childhood "thing." He really needed a security blanket! The tragedy is that this poem was written when he was forty. Alas, his mother outlived him. Though she did not recognize his "augmented countenance" when he needed that recognition, she did live to bask in the reflected glory of his fame.

Sophia Rilke had lost an infant daughter before Rainer was born. She dressed her man child in girls' clothes until he went to school. At ten he was sent away from home to a military school. His fellow students made fun of him and he retreated into himself. Finally his frail health allowed him to escape the nightmare. He was sent to business school, but he had as little aptitude for that as for the army. He tried the university at Prague, but soon dropped out of that too. In 1899, he and Lou Andreas-Salome journeyed together to Russia. They met and were deeply impressed by Tolstoy. They studied Russian over the winter and made a longer Russian tour the next spring. In Rilke's mind the Russian experience marked the beginning of his spiritual and artistic development. A score of years later in one of the Sonnets to Orpheus, he evokes the memory of an evening in Russia, and a white horse joyfully tossing his mane, despite the hobble on his leg, as he was turned out to pasture on a Volga meadow. He sent the sonnet to Lou.

In 1900 he moved for a time to a colony of artists at Worpswede in Germany. Here he met and married Clara Westhoff, the sculptor. They went to Paris in 1902, drawn by their mutual interest in Auguste Rodin. Rilke served as Rodin's secretary for a time, and wrote a book on him. Rodin, like Tolstoy, was a major influence in his artistic development. Sculpture finds its way into his poetry all through the many volumes.

The poetry of these early Paris years established Rilke as a major voice. He evolved a new kind of poetry, which he called his "thing poems." (Dinggedichte) Rodin's method of working impressed him. Rodin approached a piece of marble, not with preconceived ideas, but open to the possibilities that lay within the block of stone, possibilities that his hands could reveal. Both Rodin and Rilke wondered if this were applicable to poetry as well as to sculpture. They drew up a list of "things" in and around Paris which might presumably yield poems. Rilke systematically exposed himself to one thing after another on the list, waiting perceptively for each to yield its own poem to him. The first poem he thought successful was about the panther in the zoo in Le Jardin des Plantes:

His sight from ever gazing through the bars
has grown so blunt that it sees nothing more.
It seems to him that thousands of bars are
before him, and behind him nothing merely.

The easy motion of his supple stride,
which turns about the very smallest circle,
is like a dance of strength about a center,
in which a mighty will stands stupefied.

Only sometimes when the pupil's film
soundlessly opens...then one image fills
and glides through the quiet tension of the limbs
into the heart and ceases and is still. (8)

Swans, flamingoes, gazelles, the merry-go-round in the park, blue hydrangeas- -the thing poems poured forth. Notre Dame, DaVinci's fresco of the Last Supper, Roman sarcophagi, early Greek sculpture in the Louvre, paintings - especially those of Cézanne - all yielded their poetry to him. Rodin's sculpture, of course, was another fertile source. Several poems derive from Rodin's "Hand of God," as this one:

The leaves fall, fall as if from far away,
like withered things from gardens deep in sky;
they fall with gestures of renunciation.

And through the night the heavy earth falls too,
down from the stars, into the loneliness.

And we all fall. This hand must fall.
Look everywhere: it is the lot of all.

Yet there is one who holds us as we fall
eternally in his hands' tenderness. (9)

It was a fruitful time. The Book of Pictures was published in July 1902, and a second edition with additional poems in December 1906. The Book of Hours, whose imaginary author is a Russian monk, appeared in 1905. New Poems came out in December 1907, and New Poems, Second Part, in November 1908. These Paris years also saw his one major prose work published, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. There are vivid pictures of things in it, too. The passage on Beethoven's death mask is especially loving to me, for I felt something of the same emotions when I saw it in Vienna in 1970, but had no words to express them.

In spite of the productivity, it was a difficult and insecure time for Rilke. The position as Rodin's secretary was not really satisfactory to either of them. Like Dickinson, he was called to be a poet, and like her, he had to give up everything else if he were to fulfill his calling. There seemed no way to earn a living and support his wife and child and still have the necessary time and concentration to write. He and Clara gave up a household together. Their small daughter, Ruth, was raised by Clara's parents. Clara pursued her career as a sculptor. They were never divorced; they wrote to one another, though with less frequency and intimacy as the years advanced.

Rilke found it difficult to establish permanent relations with anyone. Some of the most brilliant and beautiful women of Europe were his intimate friends, and sometimes lovers. They lent him their villas for periods of solitude to write. Paris was home for him, but they also traveled widely, with memorable journeys to Italy, Spain, and Egypt. Imagery from these journeys became the substance of poetry. C.F. MacIntyre, in the same introduction in which he isolated his private Rilke, says of these Paris years:

"The most important poet in Germany since Goethe, let him be considered at this period of his life as a man who felt himself in exile, a man who spent his days in museums, galleries, studios, libraries, public parks and gardens; a wanderer of the streets by night, often even of the more sinister boulevards, a brooder on the many bridges over the Seine." (10)

The periods of creativity would suddenly end, however, and times of dryness set in, and then he despaired that his poetic gift was irrevocably gone. In these times he was a prolific correspondent, and the letters are beautiful reading. His friend, the Austrian essayist, Rudolf Kassner, suggested that Rilke's poetry and his correspondence are like a coat and its lining. The lining is made of such beautiful material that one is tempted to wear the garment inside out.

A student in the same military school in Prague that Rilke had endured as a boy, wrote him to ask for criticism of his own poetry. Franz Xaver Kappus never did become a well known poet, but he is remembered because he preserved and published ten letters Rilke wrote him between 1903 and 1908, under the title, Letters to a Young Poet. They are full of grace and wisdom and are a good place to start for those who do not know Rilke and would like to become acquainted with his style and ideas.

He began to feel a great work stirring within him. A friend invited him to spend the winter of 1911-12 at her castle, overlooking the Adriatic. The hospitable family would not be at Castle Duino and he could have the solitude he needed. But the weeks wore on and the muse was absent. An annoying business letter came one day, demanding an answer, and it seemed to be the final detail in his despair. He went out into the wind and walked along the edge of the cliff over the sea, and his despair found voice:

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders? (11)

These are the opening words of the "First Duino Elegy." Part of the answer that came to him there on the cliff was:

There remains, perhaps,
some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day (3)

He completed the first elegy that evening. Within the next month he finished the second, and fragments of others. And then inspiration ran out. This was 1912, and the terrible events of the world were to create for him, as for so many others, an enormous hiatus.

Paris was still home base, but at the precise moment the hostilities of the First World War broke out, he was on holiday in Germany. As an Austrian national, he could not return to France. He camped out most of the war years in Munich. His Paris landlady auctioned off the possessions in his apartment - his letters and pictures, even, and all the precious little "things." He was called up for military service, and even had a few terrible days of drill which brought back the old boyhood nightmare. Friends intervened and arranged a desk job, but it would appear that he was not very efficient at it. It was a time to be endured.

In the summer of 1914, he wrote two related poems - related, at least, in my mind. The first he wrote in Paris on June 20th, before the war began, and the second in Munich during late August and early September. He sent the first poem to his friend Lou Andreas-Salome, the companion of his youthful Russian journeys, saying, "...I spontaneously called it 'Turning,' because it depicts the turning which probably must come if I am to live..." (12)

In the poem he looks back on the years of writing the "thing poems" as a time of "gazing" in detachment. He speaks of himself in the third person as the gazer, and speaks of stars, towers, landscapes, captive lions, birds, flowers he has gazed into while he waited for their poetry to emerge. Then he speaks of his wandering, his restlessness, his inability to write, and the depressing inns where he cannot sleep. He feels judgment has been passed on him that he has gazed into things but has not loved them, and this is why he can no longer write. Then he addresses himself directly:

Work of sight is done,
now do heart-work
on the pictures within you, those captives; for you
overcame them: but now do not know them.
Behold, inner man, your inner maiden,
this, won from
a thousand natures, this
creature, now only won,
never yet loved. (13)

The poem he wrote two months later is the one my friend sent me that spring after the accident. In both poems the birds are flying through him. He gave no title to this poem. At the beginning of this chapter I quoted the poem in the translation in which my friend sent it to me. The last stanza, which moved me deeply, read:

I have a house within when I need care.
I have a guard within when I need rest.
The love that I have had! - Upon my breast
the beauty of the world clings, to weep there.

In later editions, however, the translator, J.B. Leishman, had second thoughts. He retranslated those last four lines so that they now read:

It stands in me, that house I look for still,
in me that shelter I have not possessed.
I, the now well-beloved: on my breast
this fair world 's image clings and weeps her fill. (14)

This seemed to change the meaning for me. I had read into the earlier translation that the only real shelter or dwelling we have is the love we have given and received. The second translation does not seem to say that, at least not as clearly as the first. So I worked to make a literal translation:

I shelter myself; in me is the house.
I guard myself and in me is the guard.
Beloved that I have become, on me rests
the lovely image of creation, crying itself out.

This seemed to confirm the second translation and I was disappointed. But as I became more deeply involved in Rilke's life, this second translation took on new meaning. During the war, Castle Duino, where the first of the elegies had been written, was bombed and destroyed. Rilke managed to complete the fourth elegy, the most pessimistic one, during the war. But he came to feel that he must find the right place to bring the project to completion, some place untouched by the war. In such a place, with a sufficient time of solitude and concentration, he believed the elegies would come right. During the war he despaired that he would ever find such a place and time. There is a special poignancy, then, in Leishman's second translation:

It stands in me, that house I look for still...

In 1919 an invitation came to lecture in Switzerland. It seemed a good omen. Perhaps here he would find the right place. Eventually he found a diminutive 13th century castle -- run down, with no water or electricity, but with a magnificent view of the Rhône valley. Castle Muzot felt right, although the practical problems of making it liveable loomed large for a while. All through the summer of 1921 friends helped make it habitable, and as fall gave way to winter, and he adjusted his habits to his new home, he felt certain he could achieve here the necessary concentration to complete the long interrupted work.

And he was right. In February 1922, in a burst of inspiration that held him day and night, he completed the ten elegies, and was satisfied that they were right. In addition a sequence of fifty-five sonnets came to him, fully formed, and needing little revision. The genesis of the sonnets had come on New Year's Day when he read a friend's account of the death of her daughter from a mysterious glandular disorder. Vera Knoop was a dancer. Rilke remembered her. She was only nineteen when she died. The Sonnets to Orpheus are in her memory.

There remained a few more years, lived for the most part in his small castle. He wrote, but no longer under pressure nor with such intensity. His health was failing. In time his malady was diagnosed as leukemia. He died on December 29, 1926, and is buried in the yard of an old church near Muzot, where the view of the valley was unusually lovely. It was a place dear to him, and he chose it.

In a poem of the Paris years, called "Remembering," he spoke of a year's "anguish, and form, and prayer." The word translated form is Gestalt. Anguish, form, prayer - this is a brief summary of his life. The breadth of his vision is measured by the depth of his loneliness, his periods of despair and anguish. The shape his poetry took was determined by his lifelong preoccupation with form and pattern in other art media. And always he remains, as I see him, the great God-seeker.

In the Paris years, again, he wrote one of the greatest "thing poems" about an ancient torso of Apollo in the Louvre. The beauty of this broken fragment is so perfect, so complete in itself, that having once seen it, he says, you can never be the same again:

You must change your life.

I, too, was confronted in Rilke's poetry with beauty that left me no place to hide. I had to change my life.

I moved out of the "nowhere" of grief, into the "everywhere" of affirmation of life. I began to see that everything was asking to be responded to, to be remembered. Relationships are a trust, a responsibility to which we are called, as he said. Our first obligation is to respond to the content of each given moment perceptively. So I strive, imperfectly, to live.

I had not gone far before I discovered that Rilke had much to say about those who die young - "the early departed" as it is sometimes translated, or "the youthfully dead." The first elegy has many beautiful lines which suggest what it must be like for those who die before their time, no longer having human relationships. Then he adds:

Yes, but all of the living make the mistake of drawing too sharp distinctions.
Angels (they say) are often unable to tell
whether they move among living or dead.
The eternal torrent whirls all the ages through either realm
for ever, and sounds above their voices in both. (15)

In time my daughter came back to me as a living presence in my life - not in any supernatural way, but experienced as warmth, like sunlight.

Rilke wrote a long poem, "Requiem for a Friend," in memory of Paula Modersohn-Becker. Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff were close friends in the artists' community at Worpswede. Paula was perhaps the most gifted artist there. Soon after Clara and Rainer were married, Paula married Otto Modersohn, another member of the colony. He was a pleasant, but mediocre artist. The marriage was not happy. Modersohn found it hard to accept his wife's greater gift. Paula felt stifled by marriage and knew that her creativity was being destroyed by the relationship. She left her husband and went to Paris in 1906. Later that year, he followed her and persuaded her to return to him. She died in 1907 in childbirth.

Rilke was haunted by the tragedy. Paula Becker's problem was his own: the claim of one's artistic calling, and the conflicting claims of one's personal relationships. He felt strongly the wrongness of Modersohn's insistence that his wife return to him, and in the Requiem he says:

For this is guilt, if anything be guilt,
not to enlarge the freedom of a love
with all the freedom in one's own possession.
All we can offer where we love is this:
to loose each other;... (16)

Hard words for parents and lovers!

The poem for Paula Becker led me to the astounding discovery of Rilke the feminist. As I became part of the women's movement in the late 1960's and early 1970's, I found that I was companioned not only by Emily Dickinson, but by Rainer Maria Rilke as well. He speaks in many places of right relationships between men and women. The most familiar one is in the seventh "Letter to a Young Poet" where the protection of one another's solitude is given as the right commitment in a love relationship.

Rilke gave me a greater gift, however. Through living with his arresting poetry I entered once again into a creative relationship with God - a God more beautiful, more mysterious, more personal than I had known.

Rilke's God is a very personal one - the God of an artist with a perceiving eye and a mystical sensitivity He tells of a conversation about God that he and Paula Becker had. She identified God with nature, which she thought of in feminine terms as the source of life. Rilke still saw God in masculine pronouns. God is still growing, he said, and needs our help. Due to his state of incompleteness, God has inconsistencies, even shortcomings. Reality for Rilke lies in relationships. Everything needs the perceiving response to attain wholeness:

Until I perceived it, no thing was complete,
but waited, hushed, unfulfilled. (7)

And this is no less true of God, he says, than of created things:

What will you do, God, when I die?
When I, your pitcher, broken, lie?
When I, your drink, go stale and dry?
I am your garb, the trade you ply,
you lose your meaning, losing me. (8)

This whole idea is not too inconsistent with that of the theologian under whom I did my graduate work at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Henry Nelson Wieman saw God as " creative interchange," that extra component in a relationship which makes it more than the sum total of its parts. Wieman said we need to be sensitively, intelligently, and appreciatively present in all our relationships, in so far as we can.

Rilke had vivid mystical experiences from time to time. One of these took place at Duino that winter he began the Elegies. He told his friend who owned the castle about it later. He was standing on the roots of an old olive tree, leaning against its trunk. The sensation came to him that everything that had ever lived or suffered existed in him. He felt the anguish and the love of all human existence, and non-human existence as well, concentrated in him.

I was fortunate that the first book I owned by Rilke was The Book of Hours, translated by Babette Deutsch, herself a poet. This was the one available at the bookstore when I went in to ask for something by Rilke. Deutsch has been quite faithful to the original text, but her translations come out poetry in their own right. The Book of Hours was exactly what I needed at that time. Thanks to Emily Dickinson my anger against God was now largely spent. I was longing to establish a relationship again and I was groping for a way.

The only way we can communicate our experience of God is through symbols. They come thick and fast in The Book of Hours. The book encouraged me to search for my own symbols, to create them out of my experience, transforming the outward stimulation into inner meaning. It became for me a form of praying, a practice of the presence of God. And God, who had been dead for me, became resurrected in me.

You have so mild a way of being.
They
who name you loudly when they come to pray
forget your nearness. (9)

Poetry can be a means to religious experience.

In 1970, I had a long bout with pneumonia. During the long nights when I struggled to breathe, these lines sustained me:

You, neighbor God, if sometimes in the night
I rouse you with loud knocking, I do so

only because I seldom hear you breathe
and know: you are alone. And should you need a drink, no one is there
to reach it to you, groping in the dark.
Always I hearken. Give but a small sign.
I am quite near. (20)

This strange inversion of our usual conception intrigued me: as if God were the pneumonia patient, struggling to breathe, groping in the dark for a drink. In time I came to realize that Neighbor God was not only suffering from pneumonia in my room, but from many things in many rooms.

The most attesting symbol for God that l have found in Rilke is a bouncing ball. Rilke was intrigued by balls, and the figure recurs in poem after poem. I found it first in The Book of Hours:

If I had grown up in a land where days
were free from care and hours were delicate,
then I would have contrived a splendid fête
for you, and not have held you in the way
I sometimes do, tightly in fearful hands.

There I would have been bold to squander you,
you boundless Presence.
Like a ball
I would have flung you among all tossing joys,
so one might catch you,
and if you seemed to fall,
with both hands high would spring
toward you,
you thing of things. (21)

The ball appears again in one of the poems of his last summer, a poem sent on August 24, 1926 to Erika Mitterer, a friend with whom he corresponded in verse:

Dove that remained outside, / outside the dovecote,
back in its sphere and home, / one with the day and night,
it knows the secrecy / when the most remote
terror is fused into / deeply felt flight.

Of all the doves the / always most protected,
never endangered most, / does not know tenderness;
richest of all hearts is / the resurrected;
turning back liberates, / freedom rejoices.

Over the nowhere / arches the everywhere.
Oh, the ball that is / thrown, that we dare,
does it not fill our hands / differently than before?
By the weight of return / it is more. (22)

So I think of the daughter to whom at birth I promised the freedom to leave the dovecote. And I think of myself, resurrected from grief, and I rejoice that I left the nowhere for the everywhere that contains us both. And I pray for courage not to cling too tightly to any ball that is tossed into my eager hands.

I began my journey with Rilke by finding a tree:

There remains, perhaps,
some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day... (3)

and I found, as he found in Munich in the terrible days of the war, that

the tree I look outside at grows in me!

And the tree became a symbol of my world. So each of us may look without and within, perceptively, discerning our own patterns and overlapping relationships, and out of them constructing our own symbols of reality, while we still have time to perceive them.

Whoever you are, go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit;
your house is the last before the infinite,
whoever you are.
Then with your eyes that wearily
scarce lift themselves from the worn-out door-stone
slowly you raise a shadowy black tree
and fix it on the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world (and it shall grow
and ripen as a word, unspoken, still).
When you have grasped its meaning with your will,
then tenderly your eyes will let it go... (23)

CHAPTER II

1. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, op. cit., No. 419, p. 200.

2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Later Poems, translated by J.B. Leishman. London: The Hogarth Press Ltd.

Es winkt zu Fühlung fast aus allen Dingen,
aus jeder Wendung weht es her: Gedenk!
Ein Tag, an dem wir fremd vorübergingen
entschließt im künftigen sich zum Geschenk.

Wer rechnet unseren Ertrag, wer trennt
uns von den alten, den vergangnen Jahren?
Was haben wir seit Anbeginn erfahren,
Als daß sich eins im anderen erkennt?

Als daß an uns gleichgültiges erwarmt?
O Haus, o Wiesenhang, o Abendlicht,
auf einmal bringst du's beinah zum Gesicht
und stehst an uns, umarmend und umarmt.

Durch alle Wesen reicht der eine Raum:
Weltinnenraum. Die Vögel fliegen still
durch uns hindurch. O, der ich wachsen will,
ich seh hinaus, und in mir wächst der Baum.

Ich sorge mich, und in mir steht das Haus.
Ich hüte mich, und in mir ist die Hut.
Geliebter, der ich wurde: an mir ruht
der schönen Schöpfung Bild und weint sich aus.

Munich or Irschenhausen, August/September 1914. Edition from the Sammlung der verstreuten und nachgelassenen Gedichte aus den Jahren 1906 bis 1926, in the Sämtliche Werke Band 2, Insel-Verlag 1956.

3. Rilke, Duino Elegies, The German Text, with an English translation, introduction and commentary by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender. New York: W.W. Norton and Company Inc. 1939. First Elegy, lines 13-14, p. 21.

4. Kaufmann, Walter, editor and translator, Twenty German Poets. New York: Modern Library, 1962. "From the Correspondence with Erika Mitterer," p. 241. Also in Twenty-Five German Poets: A Bilingual Collection, edited, translated and introduced by Walter Kaufmann. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1975.

5. Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Poems, with English translations by C.F. MacIntyre, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966, p. 1-2.

6. Duino Elegies, op. cit., Commentary on the Fourth Elegy, p. 100.

7. Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems 1906-1926, translated with an Introduction by J.B. Leishman. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966. p. 213-214.

8. Selected Poems, op. cit., p. 65.

9. ibid., p. 45.

10. ibid., p. 5.

11. Duino Elegies, op. cit., First Elegy lines 1-2, p. 21.

12. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, Vol. Two, 1910-1926, translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M.D. Herter Norton. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., Inc. 1947, 1948. Letter 60, p. 115.

13. ibid., p. 117.

14. Poems 1906-1926, op. cit., p. 193.

15. Duino Elegies, op. cit., First Elegy, lines 79-84, p. 25.

16. Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Works, Volume II, Poetry, translated by J.B. Leishman. New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1967, p. 204.

17. Rainer Maria Rilke, Poems from The Book of Hours, translated by Babette Deutsch. New York: New Directions Publishing Corp., 1941, p. 11.

18. ibid., p. 31.

19. ibid., p. 35.

20. ibid., p. 13.

21. ibid., p. 23.

22. Twenty German Poets, op. cit.

23. Selected Poems, translated by Maclntyre, op. cit., p. 21. [From Das Buch der Bilder - p. 371]

Wer du auch seist: Am Abend tritt hinaus
aus deiner Stube, drin du alles weißt;
als letztes vor der Ferne liegt dein Haus:
Wer du auch seist.
Mit deinen Augen, welche müde kaum
von der verbrauchten Schwelle sich befrein,
hebst du ganz langsam einen schwarzen Baum
und stellst ihn vor den Himmel: schlank, allein.
Und hast die Welt gemacht. Und sie ist groß
und wie ein Wort, das noch im Schweigen reift.
Und wie dein Wille ihren Sinn begreift,
lassen sie deine Augen zärtlich los . . .