No More Learning

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.
And these are wishes: gentle dialogues
Of the poor hours with eternity. "

With _Das Buch der Bilder_ the dream is ended, the veil of mist is
lifted and before us are revealed pictures and images that rise before
our eyes in clear colourful contours. Whether the poet conjures from the
depths of myth _The Kings in Legends_, or whether we read from _The
Chronicle of a Monk_ the awe-inspiring description of _The Last Judgment
Day_, or whether in Paris on a Palm Sunday we see _The Maidens at
Confirmation_, the pictures presented stand out with the clearness and
finality of the typical.

It is a significant fact that Rilke dedicated this book to Gerhart
Hauptmann, "in love and gratitude for his Michael Kramer. " Hauptmann,
like Rilke in these poems, has placed before us great epic figures and
his art is so concentrated that often the simple expression of the
thought of one of his characters produces a shudder in the listener or
reader because in this thought there vibrates the suffering of an entire
social class and in it resounds the sorrow of many generations.

* * * * *

In _The Book of Pictures_, Rilke's art reaches its culmination on what
might be termed its monumental side. The visualization is elevated to
the impersonal objective level which gives to the rhythm of these poems
an imperturbable calm, to the figures presented a monumental erectness.
_The Men of the House of Colonna_, _The Czars_, _Charles XII Riding
Through the Ukraine_ are portrayed each with his individual historical
gesture, with a luminosity as strong as the colour and movement which
they gave to their time. In the mythical poem, _Kings in Legends_, this
concrete element in the art of Rilke has found perhaps its supreme
expression:

"Kings in old legends seem
Like mountains rising in the evening light.
They blind all with their gleam,
Their loins encircled are by girdles bright,
Their robes are edged with bands
Of precious stones--the rarest earth affords--
With richly jeweled hands
They hold their slender, shining, naked swords.