Rainer Maria Rilke Essay

Rainer m be Rilke was born in Prague in 1875, a city with a German-speaking element. He attended the University of Prague and Linz, and soon fasten out on his unsettled life of wandering among friends and countries. In 1899 and 1900 he went to Russia with Lou Andreas-Salome and her professor husband, where he met tolstory and the painter Pasternak (father of the poet Boris). He was fascinated by Russian Orthodox mysticism and the solitary life of the monks. Russia was the foundation of his charges of take up the humankind he was to say at the end of his life.He took trips to labor union Africa, Sweden, and Denmark, and in 1901 married to Clara Westhoff, a German, and had a young lady Ruth by her. After a year he left them, though he and Clara remained close friends. In 1902 Rilke went to Paris, where he lived off and on for the next dozen years, part of which time he was the sculptor Rodins private secretary. The prototypal of his Duino Elegies were written in 1912 at Duino, Italy, in a castle which looked onto the Adriatic.Then, followers a period of creative thwarting, in 1921 he settled in Chateau de Muzot, in Switzerland, a sm each(prenominal), uncomfortable, thirteenth-century st integrity ho spend, with a bedroom and one leggy room, where he remained the rest of his life. There, in the month of February 1922, he completed the Duino Elegies, the cardinal poems in Sonnets to Orpheus, and a miscellany of separate poems. After 1924 he was barf and by November 1926 he was at the Valmont Sanatorium. That month he published Vergers, a collection of his French poems.After pricking his finger on a rose thorn and suffering pain from severe blood poisoning, he died of leukemia at Valmont on December 29, 1926. By the time he wrote Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer Maria Rilke was at once the most classically informed and innovatively modern author of his generation (Rilke 1972). Unembarrassed by precursors, using them to his advantage, he stood apart from h is speedy experimental contemporaries and created a modernism at once unique, cyclical, and enduring.Rilkes Sonnets to Orpheus, prompted by the death of a young woman, Vera Oukama Koop, is an occasion of perfectly crafted poems, which Rilke influence and misshaped in e rattling possible way to suit the few long time of their compelling creation. The blind backer entered him and spoke his message, and Rilke completed the first account book in about troika days. He reproductioned to the Duino Elegies, and accordingly turned moxie to the sonnets and completed the second book, give carewise in a few days. So this most interior, metaphysical, secular-religious poet of the century yielded.In the poems he moves away from what might be an ordinary life of friends, lovers, and artists to one of remembrances a dogs implore face, a free-flying kite, a young childhood cousin who impart die, a teenage Dutch dancer, Vera Ouckama Koop, who dies in her eighteenth year and to whom his v olume is dedicated. He also contemplates the indifferent modern machine that threatens the soul, contrasted with a virgin and her exsanguinous unicorn that he discovers on a medieval textile in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. Finally, he addresses the silent friend of some(prenominal) distances, who may be Koop or Rilke himself.In this last sonnet, affirming the risk of life and art that may postulate to jubilance, Rilke tells the friend, lost in darkness, to let he go and ring out. In the sonnets, Rilke exchanges his outer and inner worlds with agility. eon he may find an angel or two or Orpheuss resounding tunes inhabiting his realms, no salvific god shows up to comfort or make promises. The poet resides in loneliness, homelessness, silence, and change, his conditions for piteous the sky and the fields and hearing all that is elsewhere and around him.Rilke had some(prenominal) friends, but he was always a guest, an uprooted monk of art, and his most effect work was completed i n a month of 1922 in that piffling dingy castle where he sentenced himself to solitary confinement. Orpheus is a calendar of search, remembrance, and adoption of Orpheus, the art-god of descent and resurrection, who is everywhere. Rilke succeeds in turning grief into pathos and ultimately into an turn of absence and presence.Following a familiar pattern of his relations with women, Rilke moves from desire, to its frustration and negation, to the transformation into art. It is not different, emotionally and artistically from the pattern of the mystical poets as in St. John of the Cross, where the speaker moves from the burning senses, to the dark night of their negation, and to lightsomeness and union which in the instance of both Rilke and the Spanish mystic is the depict of the poem. Rilkes Interpretation of the Greek Myth OrpheusThere are three moments of the myth of Orpheus as related and commented by Rilke, first, the creation of a world through manner of speaking, second, the turn which Orpheus makes at the threshold of Hades, and third, the death of Orpheus. In Rilkes Sonnets to Orpheus, the poet-figure Orpheus, whom we know from Greek legend and Medieval Latin folklore, is the emblem for a poetical synthesis that joins all things in harmony and joins what appears and what by its very nature does not, Orpheus is thought to keep open what Rilke will call a triplex realm amidst the actual and the potential that lies beyond it.The poet-figure to whom Rilkes sonnets are addressed, of course, is the Greek poet Orpheus, who according to legend, sang so divinely that all of nature hearkened to his call, Orpheus was thus able to charm the god Hades and conduct back his dead wife, Eurydice, from the underworld, holding open what Rilke calls the pure relation between the here and the beyond. And so the Sonnets to Orpheus series is about the feeler of poetic language to appearance and to what transcends it.Rilkes language itself, through its elusive but also vertiginously concrete references, realizes a world that encompasses the actual and the unseen, the special transcendence (1972189-192) of potentiality. This is wherefore Rilkes poetry emphasizes the other side of tied(p) ordinary things and other side not exhausted by the actuality that foreshadows it. The inspiration for Rilkes Sonnets is twofold. showtime of all, it is grateful to the Orpheus legend an illustration of which hung in the Chateau de Muzot, where Rilke was staying in February 1922 when the series was written. as importantly, it was occasioned by the untimely death in youth of Vera Duckama Knoop( a daughter of a friend of Rilkes), to whom the sonnests are dedicated. (1958 185). One can infer then that Rilke takes the task upon himself, as Orpheus did for Eurydice, of establishing a relation to the mysteriousness of the other side, which Rilke claims, in a letter about the Sonnets, the dead lady friend symbolizes.In a explanation Rilke writes that the Sonnets are placed under the name and protection of the dead girl whose incompletion and innocence holds open the door of the grave, so that she, gone from us, belongs to those powers who keep the fractional(prenominal) of life fresh and open towards the other wound-open half(1972 136). Rilke is fascinated by the legendary poet, who is say to soak up sung so beautifully that all beings, even gods, were enchanted by his song, but it is primarily the invisible potential purview of things that Rilkes own poetry, by invoking Orpheus, aims to bring into poetical intimacy.Through this horizontality, Rilke finds an access to what he often refers to as the essence of things. The girl is a symbol of that horizonality, a symbol of incompleteness itself as a young girl, she was half yet to be. Her death transports her to the other side of life which illuminates lifes own incompleteness. In the Duino Elegies,(1994 154 ),the second part of which was finished during the same indite month of Februa ry 1922, the figure of the angel which Rilke takes pains to distinguish from the Christian symbolic representation of the same serve unification of distinct realms.The Orpheus myth for both Rilke and his predecessor Ovid concerns the relation between this known side of life and the mysterious beyond. Orpheus is the one who has lifted the lyre among shadows, who has entered the underworld, and so the one to whom is allowed the infinite praise of poeticizing. It is because the figure of Orpheus, like the dead girl, is characterized by transcendence that he serves Rilke well here.Rilke devices in his thaumaturgy of Orpheus, a decidedly modern poetical access to the transcendent by presenting in condensed and abbreviated form, a lyrical total without translating that total into tenacious or even associative statements. From the first sonnet of the series, Orpheus and his song are associated by Rilke with pure transcendence. Orpheus who sang so sublimely that he was said to have beco me a god, transcended the ordinary relation that language gives us to things, a relation which Rilke conceives as relying upon opposites, the cleavage between being and non-being.Rilkes reference to Orpheus is marked by a repetition of German verbs that tell a crossing of such boundaries. His word transcends( ubertrifft) the being-here ( das Hiersein), because it overstep ontological boundaries even as he obeys them and so Orpheus enters into relation with the mystery of things and their transitoriness. Their transience renders them intimate with our own and so we must according to Rilke resist the will to run down and degrade everything earthly, just because of its temporariness which it shares with us.Things too belong to the dual realm to which Rilkes sonnet series repeatedly refers. This is suggested in these lines from Rilkes Sonnet on the relationship of poetic song and the nature. Conclusion While Rainer Maria Rilkes relation to empiricist psychology is marginal at best, his relatively unreflecting use of its imagery allows us to estimate with some accuracy the purpose to which the movement had entered the general consciousness of an entire period from the 1890s on.For many readers and writers, the dispersed and fragmented subject was inquiryless little more than a fashion, just as many saw impressionist painting more as a technique than as the outgrowth of a philosophy. Rilke seems to have used empiricist vocabulary and turns of thought somewhat eclectically throughout his career, he was an thin indicator of what was generally in the air and had an exceptionally creative way of integrating it into his own original and powerfully imagined poetic universe.Influence studies of the effected type cannot do justice to the kind of problem he poses. throughout his life, as an almost daily custom, Rilke wrote garner of such exceptional dress and expressive force that they have come to represent a epochal part of his artistic legacy. He also preserved conscientiously letters written to him by others. Family members, friends, and more incidental acquaintances collected his letters as precious gifts, in keeping with old European traditions.After his return from Paris to Muzot, Rilke set down his last will and testament in which he authorized his heirs to publish his correspondence. He realized how much of his creative energies had flowed into the letters. He had spent days and weeks just answering the growing follow of questions on his work and way of life and thinking about concerns with which others had approached him. In its totality, Rilkes work reflects his personal life and disposition, as well as, and maybe even more so, the curiously pessimistic historical climate that became plain at the turn of the century.He felt and recorded the insidious doubt in the strength or adequacy of a modern rationalistic society. He was extraordinarily sensitive to the deeply disturbing signs of this cultural turmoil and without any sustai ned interest in theoretical discourse, learned to immerse conclusions from the work of contemporary artists. Rainer Maria Rilke is a master at lining, and his use of contemporary meters, rhythm, and diction makes his translations more readable to a contemporary reference without losing the mysticism and lyrical quality of Rilkes poems.