Rainer Maria Rilke was a German-language poet born in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary. His life and work developed through travel and sustained encounters with other writers and artists. Russia, Paris and Switzerland each became important settings. The sculptor Auguste Rodin helped focus his attention on the patient work of making art and on looking closely at things. Rilke’s writing includes the New Poems, the Duino Elegies, the Sonnets to Orpheus and the novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.
His poetry brings inner experiences into contact with bodies, animals, objects, landscapes and works of art. Solitude, desire, mortality and transformation recur, but their meanings are rarely reducible to a reassuring maxim. A caged panther and an imagined speaking monk belong to different poetic situations. Letters to a Young Poet, published after his death, gathers advice to Franz Xaver Kappus and provides a more direct, though still personal, voice. The selections here keep that difference visible. Each English version is credited, because the translator’s choices strongly affect the voice a reader encounters.
Quotations retain the wording of the cited editions. The explanations are Alrewaq’s editorial readings.
01Living with a question
…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves…
Writing to a young correspondent, Rilke encourages patience with questions whose answers cannot simply be acquired at once. Understanding may develop through living. Our reading makes room for an unresolved question without treating delay as a virtue when evidence or a necessary decision calls for action.
Source & edition · Living with a question
Letters to a Young Poet Letter Four
M. D. Herter Norton, revised English translation.
Preserved from the existing researched Alrewaq card; ellipses mark omitted text. The link identifies the publisher’s edition.
His weary glance, from passing by the bars,
Has grown into a dazed and vacant stare;
The poem imagines a panther whose strength is confined within a cage and whose perception has become exhausted. Its attention stays with a particular animal. Our reading is to notice how a setting constrains a living being, rather than immediately turn that being into a symbol for ourselves.
Source & edition · Seeing confinement
The Panther Opening two lines · Poems (1918)
Jessie Lemont, Poems (1918).
The two lines complete the opening statement about the captive animal’s gaze; the stanza continues.
The poem hears intimacy as music and asks how two lives can sound together. It also begins to question where the music comes from and who holds the instrument. The poem asks how intimacy can join two people without either controlling the other.
Source & edition · The resonance of another person
A speaker in The Book of Hours imagines widening circles around God and asks what kind of being or song he may be. The poem joins searching with an unfinished identity. The speaker circles around God and keeps questioning his own identity.
Source & edition · A searching life
The Book of Hours The Book of a Monk’s Life · poem beginning I live my life in circles, line 1
Jessie Lemont, Poems (1918).
The first line of the poem; its sentence continues on the following line.
But there is One who holds this falling
Infinitely softly in His hands.
Falling leaves widen into a vision of the earth and the speaker’s own mortality. The closing image offers a divine presence holding that fall. The poem expresses trust in that divine presence amid mortality and change.
