No More Learning

_The Book of Hours_ contains three parts written at different periods in
the poet's life: _The Book of a Monk's Life_ (1899); _The Book of
Pilgrimage_ (1901), and _The Book of Poverty and Death_ (1903), although
the entire volume was not published until several years later. _The Book
of Hours_ glows with a mystic fervour to know God, to be near him. In
this desire to approach the Nameless One, the young Brother in _The Book
of a Monk's Life_ builds up about God parables, images and legends
reminiscent of those of the 17th century Angelus Silesius, but sustained
by a more pregnant language because exalted by a more ardent visionary
force. The motif of _The Monk's Life_ is expressed in the poem beginning
with the lines:

"I live my life in circles that grow wide
And endlessly unroll. "

Through the grey cell of the young Monk there flash in luminous
magnificence the colours of the great renaissance masters, for he feels
in Titian, in Michelangelo, in Raphael the same fervour that animates
him; they, too, are worshippers of the same God.

There are poems in _The Book of Pilgrimage_ of the stillness of a
whispered prayer in a great Cathedral and there are others that carry in
their exultation the music of mighty hymns. The visions in this second
book are no less ecstatic though less glowingly colourful; they have
withdrawn inward and have brought a great peace and a great faith as in
the poem of God, whose very manifestation is the quietude and hush of a
silent world:

"By day Thou art the Legend and the Dream
That like a whisper floats about all men,
The deep and brooding stillnesses which seem,
After the hour has struck, to close again.
And when the day with drowsy gesture bends
And sinks to sleep beneath the evening skies,
As from each roof a tower of smoke ascends
So does Thy Realm, my God, around me rise. "

The last part of _The Book of Hours_, _The Book of Poverty and Death_,
is finally a symphony of variations on the two great symbolic themes in
the work of Rilke. As Christ in the parable of the rich young man
demands the abandonment of all treasures, so in this book the poet sees
the coming of the Kingdom, the fulfilment of all our longings for a
nearness to God when we have become simple again like little children
and poor in possessions like God Himself. In this phase of Rilke's
development, the principle of renunciation constitutes a certain
negative element in his philosophy. The poet later proceeded to a
positive acquiescence toward man's possessions, at least those acquired
or created in the domain of art.

In our approach through the mystic we touch reality most deeply. It is
because of this that all art and all philosophy culminate in their final
forms in a crystallization of those values of life that remain forever
inexplicable to pure reason; they become religious in the simple,
profound sense of that word. Before the eternal facts of Life doubt and
strife are reconciled into faith, will and pride change into humility.
The realization of this truth expressed in the medium of poetry is the
significance of Rilke's _Book of Hours_. A distinguished Scandinavian
writer has pronounced _Das Stunden-Buch_ one of the supreme literary
achievements of our time and its deepest and most beautiful book of
prayer.

In his subsequent poetic work Rilke did not again reach the sustained
high quality of this book, the mood and idea of which he incorporated
into a prose work of exquisite lyrical beauty: _The Sketch of Malte
Laurids Brigge_.

* * * * *

In _New Poems_ (1907) and _New Poems, Second Part_ (1908) the historical
figure, frequently taken from the Old Testament, has grown beyond the
proportions of life; it is weightier with fate and invariably becomes
the means of expressing symbolically an abstract thought or a great
human destiny. _Abishag_ presents the contrast between the dawning and
the fading life; _David Singing Before Saul_ shows the impatience of
awakening ambition, and _Joshua_ is the man who forces even God to do
his will. The antique Hellenic world rises with shining splendour in the
poems _Eranna to Sappho_, _Lament for Antinous_, _Early Apollo_ and the
_Archaic Torso of Apollo_.

The spirit of the Middle Ages with its religious fervour and
superstitious fanaticism is symbolized in several poems, the most
important among which are _The Cathedral_, _God in the Middle Ages_,
_Saint Sebastian_ personifying martyrdom, and _The Rose Window_, whose
glowing magic is compared to the hypnotic power of the tiger's eye.
Modern Paris is often the background of the _New Poems_, and the crass
play of light and shadow upon the waxen masks of Life's disillusioned in
the Morgue is caught with the same intense realistic vision as the
flamingos and parrots spreading their vari-coloured soft plumage in the
warmth of the sun in the Avenue of the Jardin des Plantes.

Almost all of the poems in these two volumes are short and precise. The
images are portrayed with the sensitive intensity of impressionistic
technique. The majestic quietude of the long lines of _The Book of
Pictures_ is broken, the colours are more vibrant, more scintillating
and the pictures are painted in nervous, darting strokes as though to
convey the manner in which they were perceived: in one single,
all-absorbing glance. For this reason many of these _New Poems_ are not
quite free from a certain element of virtuosity. On the other hand,
Rilke achieves at times a perfect surety of rapid stroke as in the poem
_The Spanish Dancer_, who rises luminously on the horizon of our inner
vision like a circling element of fire, flaming and blinding in the
momentum of her movements. Degas and Zuloaga seem to have combined their
art on one canvas to give to this dancer the abundant elasticity of
grace and the splendid fantasy of colour.

* * * * *

Many of the themes in the _New Poems_ bear testimony to the fact that
Rilke travelled extensively, prior to the writing of these volumes, in
Italy, Germany, France, and Scandinavia. His book on the five painters
at the artists' colony at Worpswede, where he remained for a time,
entirely given over to the observation of the atmosphere, the movement
of the sky and the play of light upon the far heath of this northern
landscape, is an introduction to every interpretation of the work of
landscape painters and a tender poem to a land whose solitary and
melancholy beauty entered into his own work.