No More Learning

Until a few years ago, known only to a relatively small community on the
continent but commanding an ever increasing attention which has borne
his name far beyond the boundary of his country, the personality of
Rainer Maria Rilke stands to-day beside the most illustrious poets of
modern Europe.

* * * * *

The background against which the figure of Rainer Maria Rilke is
silhouetted is so varied, the influences which have entered into his
life are so manifold, that a study of his work, however slight, must
needs take into consideration the elements through which this poet has
matured into a great master.

Prague, the city in which Rilke was born in 1875, with its sinister
palaces and crumbling towers that rose in the early Middle Ages and have
reached out into our time like the threatening fingers of mighty hands
which have wielded swords for generations and which are stained with the
blood of many wounds of many races; the city where amid grey old ruins
blonde maidens are at play or are lost in reverie in the green cool
parks and shady gardens with which the Bohemian capital abounds, this
Prague of mingled grotesqueness and beauty gave to the young boy his
first impressions.

There is a period in the life of every artist when his whole being seems
lost in a contemplation of the surrounding world, when the application
to work is difficult, like the violent forcing of something that is
awaiting its time. This is the time of his dream, as sacred as the days
of early spring before wind and rain and light have touched the fruits
of the fields, when there is a tense bleak silence over the whole of
nature, in which is wrapped the strength of storms and the glow of the
summer's sun. This is the time of his deepest dream, and upon this dream
and its guarding depends the final realization of his life's work.

The young graduate of the Gymnasium was to enter upon the career of an
army officer in accordance with the traditions of the family, an old
noble house which traces its lineage far back to Carinthian ancestry.
His inclinations, however, pointed so decisively in the direction of the
finer arts of life that he left the Military Academy after a very short
attendance to devote himself to the study of philosophy and the history
of art.

As one turns the pages of Rilke's first small book of poems, published
originally under the title _Larenopfer_, in the year 1895, and which
appeared in more recent editions under the less descriptive name _Erste
Gedichte_, one realizes at once, in spite of a lack of plasticity in the
presentation, that here speaks one who has lingered long and lovingly
over the dream of his boyhood. As the title indicates, these poems are a
tribute, an offering to the Lares, the home spirits of his native town.
Prague and the surrounding country are the ever recurring theme of
almost every one of these poems. The meadows, the maidens, the dark
river in the evening, the spires of the cathedral at night rising like
grey mists are seen with a wonderment, the great well-spring of all
poetic imagination, with a well-nigh religious piety. Through all these
poems there sounds like a subdued accompaniment a note of gratitude for
the ability to thus vision the world, to be sunk in the music of all
things. "Without is everything that I feel within myself, and without
and within myself everything is immeasurable, illimitable. "

These pictures of town and landscape are never separated from their
personal relation to the poet.
He feels too keenly his dependence upon
them, as a child views flowers and stars as personal possessions. Not
until later was he to reach the height of an impersonal objectivity in
his art. What distinguishes these early poems from similar adolescent
productions is the restraint in the presentation, the economy and
intensity of expression and that quality of listening to the inner voice
of things which renders the poet the seer of mankind.

The second book of poems appeared two years later and like the first
volume _Traumgekront_ is full of the music that is reminiscent of the
mild melancholy of the Bohemian folk-songs, in whose gentle rhythms the
barbaric strength of the race seems to be lulled to rest as the waves of
a far-away tumultuous sea gently lap the shore. The themes of
_Traumgekront_ are extended somewhat beyond the immediate environment
of Prague and some of the most beautiful poems are luminous pictures of
villages hidden in the snowy blossoming of May and June, out of which
rises here and there the solitary soft voice of a boy or girl singing.
In these first two volumes the poet is satisfied with painting in words,
full of sonorous beauty, the surrounding world. From this period dates
the small poem _Evening_, which seems to have been sketched by a
Japanese painter, so clear and colourful is its texture, so precious and
precise are its outlines.

With _Advent_ and _Mir Zur Feier_, both published within the following
three years, a phase of questioning commences, a dim desire begins to
stir to reach out into the larger world "deep into life, out beyond
time. " Whereas the early poems were characterized by a tendency to turn
away from the turmoil of life--in fact, the concrete world of reality
does not seem to exist--there is noticeable in these two later volumes
an advance toward life in the sense that the poet is beginning to
approach and to vision some of its greatest symbols.

Throughout the entire work of Rilke, in his poetry as well as in his
interpretations of painting and sculpture, there are two elements that
constitute the cornerstones in the structure of his art. If, as has been
said with a degree of verity, Nietzsche was primarily a musician whose
philosophy had for its basis and took its ultimate aspects from the
musical quality of his artistic endowment, it may be maintained with an
equal amount of truth that Rilke is primarily a painter and sculptor
whose poetry rests upon the fundaments of the pictorial and plastic
arts.

Up to the time of the publication of these volumes, Rilke's poems
possessed a quietude, a stillness suggested in the straight unbroken yet
delicate lines of the picture which he portrays and in the soft, almost
unpulsating rhythm of his words. The approach of evening or nightfall,
the coming of dawn, the change of the seasons, the slow changes of light
into darkness and of darkness into light, in short, the most silent yet
greatest metamorphoses in the external aspects of nature form the
contents of many of these first poems. The inanimate object and the
living creature in nature are not seen in the sharp contours of their
isolation; they are viewed and interpreted in the atmosphere that
surrounds them, in which they are enwrapped and so densely veiled that
the outlines are only dimly visible, be that atmosphere the mystic grey
of northern twilight or the dark velvety blue of southern summer nights.
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.