The sonnets to orpheus

 

The sonnets to Orpheus.

Writer: Rainer Maria Rilke Field: Poetry. Composition: two parts: one of 26 sonnets, the second of twenty-nine.

Main theme: song

Secondary themes: music, appearances, animals, mirrors, praise and complaint. Poetry. Orpheus. 

Historical context: After the end of the First World War, a world fell apart. Rilke, born in Prague, saw the end of his native Austria-Hungary. A man of travel, a cosmopolitan, the poet saw the end of the country of his birth. Orpheus, often seen as the man who must not turn back so as not to lose his most prized possession, is at the same time the man of song: "for once for all, when it sings, it is Orpheus" says the fifth sonnet of the first part.  The question of identity is raised most forcefully when it is the world itself that disappears. Here, the evidence of being is an affirmation and a claim that fights against oblivion. The last lines of the poem say it well: "And if you have been forgotten by the earth, to the resting earth, say, I sink: to the swift water, say, I am". It is through the spoken word that being finally overcomes oblivion, the last form of barbarism. Through song, poetry seeks to distance itself from the commercialisation of the world, knowing it to be ephemeral and non-tradable.

Why are we interested in this collection today?

A naturally naive question! Because poetry is of no interest to anyone except a few marginal men who subsist only on a few subsidies paid for by the state. There is all the less reason to be interested in Rilke because he is a German-language poet, and poetry is by nature resistant to translation. Rilke therefore seems to belong to a bygone world, the one loved by Lou Andreas Salomé, the woman who loved writers with ostentatious moustaches (Nietzsche or Rilke himself).

What should interest us, perhaps, is the poetic nature of Rilke's being and this constantly renewed affirmation of song. Poetry is not meaning simply as intellectual meaning. It is meaning as song. This sensitive anchoring of meaning changes everything. It took Rilke ten years to compose the Duino Elegies and three weeks for the Sonnets to Orpheus. But he felt that the two works flowed from the same vein.

The question for every being is ultimately that of breathing. Every being, that is to say, every individual being, every civilisation, every nature, every human being and every living thing. It is breathing that seems to guide the opening up of being: "Breathing, oh you invisible poem! / Incessant exchange of being in itself within / pure universal space. Counterbalance / in which rhythmically, I survive myself". Breath commands the song and allows us to express our presence in the world. For the being who sings, singing constitutes the threshold, this being that is neither entirely interior nor entirely exterior, on the boundary of two places. Hence the sensation of inhabiting the strange and the magical.

What is special and interesting about Rilke's poetry is that it creates a space where being can be expressed both in the form of praise and in the form of complaint. Poetry is the place of balance and therefore the place of justice. As with Yves Bonnefoy, this is the anti-Platon. Justice is summoned everywhere. But the philosophical language of the concept is disgraced everywhere. It is philosophy in the Platonic sense of the term that must be disgraced here. It is reflexive philosophy, the kind that never stops looking back to check that Eurydice is still there, that must disappear. In Hades, in the land of the invisible, you don't look back, you go forward and flee. To pursue, to turn back, or to flee? asks the Cartesian or Platonic philosopher. The philosopher-poet, like Rilke, will always say: we must flee and go forward. The mystical dimension of such poetry. For the mystic, as we all know, the question is not how the world is, but rather that it is. That the world is, that is the Rilkean mystery. It is finally resolved by the song and the breath of the poem.