Reading Rilke (20 page)

And when Auden watches Icarus fall and completes his poem about it, we shall be able to read the poet weighing Breughel as he weighs the world. It is a perception which paintings have let the poet have. And so the indebtedness proceeds, threatening regressions in both directions. Let them be. They are benign.

BLUE HYDRANGEA

Like the green that cakes in a pot of paint,

these leaves are dry, dull and rough

behind this billow of blooms whose blue

is not their own but reflected from far away

in a mirror dimmed by tears and vague,

as if it wished them to disappear again

the way, in old blue writing paper,

yellow shows, then violet and gray;

a washed-out color as in children’s clothes

which, no longer worn, no more can happen to:

how much it makes you feel a small life’s brevity.

But suddenly the blue shines quite renewed

within one cluster, and we can see

a touching blue rejoice before the green.
⁹

This sonnet is made of many observations, some information, one metaphor for the leaves, three more for the petals, and one conclusion in the first triplet. When we translate
Hortensia
, which is the name these flowers have in Europe (so called after the mistress of a French botanist), we lose one meaning and gain another (which the “water cup” shape of the seedpods supplies). This plant is like litmus paper. In alkaline soils the blooms are likely to be pink; under acid conditions they are likely to be blue. Aluminum sulfate will provoke the plant in the blue direction; lime will intensify the pink. My grandmother buried nails near her hydrangea, and they bloomed blue as jeans.

The petals do fade toward a dirty beige, with a little yellow appearing, a bit of purple, too, as the poem says. Here we have a rather namby-pamby soil, and this is what the distant mirror reflects. The color is “washed-out.” The blue shade of old writing paper also pales in a similar way. The poem proceeds through three fades: a teary mirror, a faded letter, worn-out children’s clothes. The brevity of a small life: petal, paper, child—and all they stand for. Until a spot more fertile for the flower is found, and the blue is suddenly renewed, whereupon it rejoices as one risen might. This, then, is a poem of consolation.

Little more than a year later, Rilke writes another
Hortensia
poem. This plant bears pink blossoms, perhaps because it is not a sonnet, but the roles of the petals and the leaves are reversed. The flowers are giving away their scent, hoping perhaps, with this generosity, to escape a decolorization. However, the poet observes that underneath the pink of the petals, the plant’s leaves have grasped the situation. Their green is going, as
though they wanted to be a reminder of what must come, because the leaves understand the inevitable. No consolation here, only a memento mori.

Do we need to be told? No. These are simply … simply poems. It is the quality of the awareness encapsulated here that counts. The teardrop in a distant mirror which speaks to us of vanity perhaps or beauty’s loss; the billet-doux whose ink has probably faded, too; the folded children’s clothes about to be buried in an attic hamper: advancing stages of life that are most delicately invoked, so sadly sensed, little losses everywhere to brighten by contrast one sudden blue renewal. The poem’s final line, then, is both positive and pathetic.

The poem transforms many things—precepts, facts, feelings, memories, rhythms, words—and represents them. It is now a verbal “thing”—an object unlike the leaves, which are said “to know” but really know nothing; an object which is a complex bit of human awareness of the world, an awareness of which we become aware ourselves … and then again … and then again …

Many grow impatient with what, in Rilke, they see as an escapist view of art: this emphasis on Being rather than on Doing, on relinquishment rather than retention, on acceptance rather than revision; it smacks more of moral indolence than saintliness to them; and its radical subjectivity is offensively antisocial and indifferent to the collective.

The desire to improve the world, and therefore the condition of the people who occupy and who despoil it, is, however compassionate, an impulse born of ignorance and arrogance.

To wish to better a person’s situation presupposes a degree of insight into his circumstances that even a writer does not enjoy regarding a character born of his own imagination.… 
To wish to change, to better a person’s situation means to give him, in exchange for difficulties in which he is practiced and experienced, other difficulties which may find him even more helpless.
¹⁰

Here is another example of how cleverly Rilke hid behind the truth (or a partial truth) and concealed his unconcern.

Yet the
Elegies
, over and over, denounce the times, most particularly their cheap pleasures and their commercial culture.

Squares, O square in Paris, ceaseless showplace,

where the
modiste
Madame Lamort

weaves and winds the restless ways of the world,

those endless ribbons, into ever new designs:

bows, frills, flowers, cockades, artificial fruit,

each cheaply dyed, to decorate

the tacky winter hats of Fate.
¹¹

Surely, in these sentiments, Rilke is not out of line. “The Tenth Elegy” is particularly fierce.

Oh, how completely would an Angel crush underfoot their market of cheap comforts,

with the church at its side, purchased ready-made,

as swept, as shut, as disappointing as a post office on a Sunday.…

Especially worth seeing, but for adults only: coins in copulation,

right there on stage, money’s metal genitals rubadubdubbing.

Educational, and sure to stimulate multiplication …

Denounce is all he does. Rilke has no program for social reform. Our problems are basically metaphysical and cannot be voted out of office or, their heads on pikes, paraded through the streets. Again reflecting Rilke’s stoicism, the human condition (as it has come to be called) can only be understood, appreciated, and endured.

We’re not in tune. Not like migratory birds.

Outmoded, late, in haste, we force ourselves on winds

which let us down upon indifferent ponds.
¹²

We are not at one with Nature the way the animals are. Actually, we surround ourselves with ourselves (farms, towns, cities, nations, education, technology, art) to blot Nature out, only to find no soul is reachable, touchable, knowable, but our own. And it? Left begging to belong. Rilke suffered, as Nietzsche did, and many others before him, from an envy of the animal. The grace of the big cat, the eagle’s easy soaring, the spider’s patience—qualities we so desperately desire—are granted to these creatures along with their furs and feathers as a birthright. And the bees hive, starlings flock, cows herd, geese fly together north to south, reading the air, knowing towns and times. Alas for us, as Plotinus wrote: life is the flight of the alone to the alone.

This is not the worst of the
Elegies
’ mistakes, though it is half-baked ideas of this kind which lead many people to dismiss poetry as merely poetry. They know that instinct—the source of blind repetition—is a species of stupidity. Instinct opposes change; it cannot cope with difference.

Nor does one need another ideology to reject Rilke’s view that life and death are in the same continuum as though one were infrared and the other ultraviolet. Plato, in the
Phaedo
, struggling
with the idea of significant contraries and the problem of relations, tries to argue for the immortality of the soul by suggesting that life is dependent upon death the way warmth is connected to cold; that the life/death continuum is therefore a matter of degree; and that without death (as is the case with “right” and “left” and “high” and “low”) we could not understand or possess life. One is made from or comes out of the other: the cold can be said to “cause” warmth, and short things make tall ones possible. Rilke makes this point repeatedly. But the argument first confuses a condition like death (which is not a matter of degree) with dying (which is). If I am not running but standing still, my stationary condition should not be understood as very slow running, or my running, when it occurs, as very fast standing. The argument also assumes that if two terms must be defined jointly, because our
understanding
of one requires our
understanding
of the other, then the
existence
of these states or qualities is equally interdependent. We cannot infer from the fact that good and evil are correlative terms (if it is a fact) that Paradise, in order to be Paradise, must have its snake. The most we can conclude is that if there were a perfect place, the people there would be unaware of its perfection, just as the good book says. Adam and Eve know neither good nor evil until they’ve eaten of the apple.

Plump apple, banana, gooseberry, pear,

speak life and death into the mouth.

I have seen them there. I swear …

on a child’s face when eating them.

This comes from far … from far.

What’s slowly growing nameless in your mouth?

Freed from the fruit’s flesh,

where words once were, the juices of discovery are.

How can you call this “apple.”

This sweetness that feels at first so dense

and reluctant, yielding slowly to the tongue,

until it clarifies, becomes awake, transparent,

doubly meant, sunny, earthy, wholly here:

Oh, such touching, carnal knowing, joy—immense.
¹³

Dying is indeed a diminished form of life, but there is no realm of the dead where the dead dwell like shades cast into an underworld. It may be possible to die your own death, as Rilke also believed, by making your death a clear consequence of your “way” of living, and in that sense growing your death inside you. Moreover, one could refuse the ministrations of doctors and the help of hospitals—dying on your own—alone. Howling, as the Chamberlain’s death howls in
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
.

The seed image serves Rilke well. As the tree reaches fruition, and realizes the purpose of its growing; as flowers flower and exemplify theirs; as couples couple, too, to produce anew; so pods and fruit appear, only to fall and rot or lose their life between a child’s greedy jaws, or, shaken by a breeze, to reseed the earth for another season, populate a meadow with Queen Anne’s lace and goldenrod. Life thus passes from one body to another, and we all must make way for the vast numbers who are coming; yet it is not my life, nor yours, that seeds itself in a son or daughter, to rise again and look out with refreshed eyes, no, it is just life as life—life that has no single owner.

Thomas Hardy, who is also a very great poet, tackles this kind of transmigration, as he always tackles his topics, head on, in some lines written after Louisa Harding, whom he’d been sweet on as a boy, died well along, at seventy-two.

Portion of this yew

Is a man my grandsire knew,

Bosomed here at its foot:

This branch may be his wife,

A ruddy human life

Now turned to a green shoot.

These grasses must be made

Of her who often prayed,

Last century, for repose;

And the fair girl long ago

Whom I often tried to know

May be entering this rose.

So, they are not underground,

But as nerves and veins abound

In the growths of upper air,

And they feel the sun and rain,

And the energy again

That made them what they were!
¹⁴

Like so many of the sentiments expressed in the
Elegies
, these thoughts are more than a bit balderdashy. In this poem, nothing asserted or surmised can possibly be so. Yet the sentiment expressed is everywhere splendid. Nor may we imagine, even for a moment, that Hardy believes that a portion of this yew is a man his grandsire knew. So what does he believe? Will he pick the rose his fair girl may have entered, mow the grass? How is one to reconcile the facts (false) and the sentiments (goody, they are not underground, what a comfort!) with what I take to be the excellence of the poem—a poem whose sole purpose, it appears, is to make the poet momentarily feel better?
Can the poet really wish his fair girl were entering a rose? What is genuine here, beyond the rhyme? Is poetry the elevation of silliness into the sublime? Speaking of the silly sublime, let us risk blindness and take a look at the Angels.