No More Learning

In _Advent_, the experience of the atmosphere becomes an experience in
his innermost soul and, therefore, all things become of value to him
only in so far as they partake of the atmosphere, as they are seen in a
peculiar air and distance. This first phase in Rilke's work may be
defined as the phase of reposeful nature.

To this sphere of relaxation and restfulness in which the objects are
static and are changed only as the surrounding atmosphere affects them,
the second phase in the poet's development adds another element, which
later was to grow into dimensions so powerful, so violently breaking
beyond the limitations of simple expression in words that it could only
find its satisfaction in a dithyrambic hymn to the work of the great
plastic artist of our time, to the creations of Auguste Rodin. This
second element is that which the French sculptor in a different medium
has carried to perfection. It is the element of gesture, of dramatic
movement.

This might seem the appropriate place in which to speak of Rilke's
monograph on the art of Rodin. To do so would, however, be an undue
anticipation, for it will be necessary to trace Rilke's development
through several transitions before the value of his contact with the
work of Rodin can be fully measured.

The gesture, the movement begins in _Advent_ and _Celebration_ to
disturb the stillness prevailing in the first two volumes of poems. Even
here it is only gentle and shy at first like the stirring of a breath of
wind over a quiet sea; and gentle beings make this first gesture,
children and young women at play, singing, dancing or at prayer.

Particularly in the cycle _Songs of the Maidens_ in the book
_Celebration_, the atmosphere is condensed and becomes the psychic
background of the landscape against which the gesture of longing or
expectation is seen and felt. It is the impatience to burst into
blossoming, the longing for love which pulsates in these _Songs of the
Maidens_ with the tenseness of suspense. _The Prayers of the Maidens to
Mary_ have not the mild melody of maidenly prayer; they vibrate with the
ecstasy of expectant life, and the Madonna is more than the Heavenly
Virgin, their longing transforms her into the symbol of earthly love and
motherhood. This expectation, in spite of its intensity, is subdued and
is only heard like the cadence of a far off dream:

"How shall I go on tiptoe
From childhood to Annunciation
Through the dim twilight
Into Thy Garden? "

Mention should be made of some prose writings which Rilke published in
the year 1898 and shortly afterward. They are _Two Stories of Prague_,
_The Touch of Life_ and _The Last_; three volumes of short stories; a
two-act drama, _The Daily Life_, points to a strong Maeterlinck
influence, and finally _Stories of God_.
With both beauty of detail and
problematic interest, the short stories show an incoherence of treatment
and a lack of dramatic co-ordination easily conceivable in a poet who is
essentially lyrical and who at that time had not mastered the means of
technique to give to his characters the clear chiselling of the epic
form.

* * * * *

A sojourn in Russia and especially the acquaintance with the novels of
Dostoievsky became potent factors in Rilke's development and served to
deepen creations which without this influence might have terminated in a
grandiose aesthesia.

Broadly speaking, Russian art and literature may be described as
springing from an ethical impulse and as having for their motive power
and _raison d'etre_ the tendency toward socio-political reform, in
contradistinction to the art and literature of Western culture, whose
motives and aims are primarily of an aesthetic nature and seek in art the
reconciliation of the dualism between spirit and matter.

Dostoievsky, whom Merejkovsky describes somewhere as the man with the
never-young face, the face "with its shadows of suffering and its
wrinkles of sunken-in cheeks . . . but that which gives to this face its
most tortured expression is its seeming immobility, the suddenly
interrupted impulse, the life hardened into a stone:" this Dostoievsky
and particularly his _Rodion Raskolnikov_ cycle became a profound
artistic experience to Rilke. The poor, the outcasts, the homeless ones
received for him a new significance, the significance of the isolated
figure placed in the mighty everchanging current of a life in which this
figure stands strong and solitary. In the poem entitled _Pont Du
Carrousel_, written in Paris a few years later, Rilke has visioned the
blind beggar aloof amid the fluctuating crowds of the metropolis.

Of Russia and its influence upon him, Rilke writes: "Russia became for
me the reality and the deep daily realization that reality is something
that comes infinitely slowly to those who have patience. Russia is the
country where men are solitary, each one with a world within himself,
each one profound in his humbleness and without fear of humiliating
himself, and because of that truly pious. Here the words of men are only
fragile bridges above their real life. "

The great symbols of Solitude and of Death enter into the poet's work.

* * * * *

In the first decade of the new century Rilke reached the height of his
art and with a few exceptions the poems represented in this volume are
selected from the poems which were published between the years 1900 and
1908. The ascent toward the acme of Rilke's art after the year 1900 is
as rapid as it is precipitous. Only a few years previous we read in
Advent:

"That is longing: To dwell in the flux of things,
To have no home in the present.