Rainer Maria Rilke Essay

Rainer margon Rilke was born in Prague in 1875, a city with a communicatory element. He attended the University of Prague and Linz, and soon set out on his change qualified life of wandering among comrades and countries. In 1899 and 1900 he went to Russia with Lou Andreas-Salome and her professor husband, where he met tolstory and the mountain lion Pasternak (father of the poet Boris). He was fascinated by Russian Orthodox mysticism and the l wizardsome(a) life of the monks. Russia was the foundation of his agencys of absorbing the being he was to suppose at the end of his life.He took trips to North Africa, Sweden, and Denmark, and in 1901 married to Clara Westhoff, a German, and had a daughter Ruth by her. by and by a twelvemonth 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 twelve years, part of which time he was the sculptor Rodins private secretary. The first of his Duino Elegies were writt en in 1912 at Duino, Italy, in a castle which looked onto the Adriatic.Then, following a period of productive frustration, in 1921 he settled in Chateau de Muzot, in Switzerland, a sm either, un puff of airable, thirteenth-century treasure house, with a bedroom and virtuoso tall room, where he remained the rest of his life. There, in the month of February 1922, he completed the Duino Elegies, the fifty-five poems in Sonnets to Orpheus, and a potpourri of otherwise poems. After 1924 he was sick and by November 1926 he was at the Valmont Sanatorium. That month he anaesthetiseed Vergers, a collection of his French poems.After pricking his finger on a rose thorn and wretched pain from severe blood poisoning, he died of leukemia at Valmont on declination 29, 1926. By the time he wrote Sonnets to Orpheus, Rainer maria Rilke was at once the most classically informed and innovatively redbrick writer of his generation (Rilke 1972). Unembarrassed by precursors, using them to his adva ntage, he stood apart from his immediate experimental contemporaries and created a sophisticatedism at once unique, cyclical, and enduring.Rilkes Sonnets to Orpheus, prompted by the end of a teenage woman, Vera Oukama Koop, is an occasion of perfectly crafted poems, which Rilke shaped and misshaped in every practical way to suit the few days of their compelling creation. The blind backer entered him and spoke his message, and Rilke completed the first book in about cardinal days. He returned to the Duino Elegies, and then turned back to the praises and completed the endorsement book, in addition 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 imploring face, a free-flying kite, a young childhood cousin who will die, a teenage Dutch dancer, Vera Ouckama Koop, who dies in her eighteenth year and to whom his volume is dedicated. He also contemplates the indifferent modern machine that threatens the soul, contrasted with a virgin and her white unicorn that he discovers on a medieval textile in the Musee de Cluny in Paris. Finally, he addresses the silent friend of many another(prenominal) distances, who may be Koop or Rilke himself.In this last sonnet, affirming the seek of life and art that may lead 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. temporary hookup he may find an backer 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 touching the sky and the fields and comprehend all that is elsewhere and around him.Rilke had many friends, only he was of all time a guest, an uprooted monk of art, and his most accomplished wo rk was completed in a month of 1922 in that tiny dingy castle where he sentenced himself to solitary confinement. Orpheus is a calendar of search, remembrance, and acceptance of Orpheus, the art-god of descent and resurrection, who is everywhere. Rilke succeeds in round grief into pathos and ultimately into an ecstasy of absence and presence.Following a familiar pattern of his relation backs 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 vocalizer moves from the burning senses, to the dark night of their negation, and to light and union which in the instance of both Rilke and the Spanish mystic is the evidence of the poem. Rilkes Interpretation of the classic Myth OrpheusThere are three moments of the myth of Orpheus as cogitate 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 novel and Medieval Latin folklore, is the symbol for a poetical synthesis that joins all things in harmony and joins what appears and what by its very nature does not, Orpheus is ideal to go along surface what Rilke will call a dual 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 jibe to legend, sing so divinely that all of nature hearkened to his call, Orpheus was thus able to charm the god Hades and bring back his unwarranted wife, Eurydice, from the chthonicworld, belongings open what Rilke calls the pure relation between the here and the beyond. And so the Sonnets to Orpheus serial publication is about the access of poetic language to appearance and to what transcends it.Ril kes language itself, through its elusive but also vertiginously concrete references, realizes a world that encompasses the actual and the unseen, the special favorable position (1972189-192) of potentiality. This is why Rilkes poetry emphasizes the other side of even ordinary things and other side not faded by the actuality that foreshadows it. The inspiration for Rilkes Sonnets is twofold. First of all, it is grateful to the Orpheus legend an congressman of which hung in the Chateau de Muzot, where Rilke was staying in February 1922 when the series was written.Equally 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 girl symbolizes.In a commentary Ri lke writes that the Sonnets are placed under the name and protection of the dead girl whose incompletion and innocence holds open the doorstep of the grave, so that she, gone from us, belongs to those powers who keep the half of life fresh and open towards the other wound-open half(1972 136). Rilke is fascinated by the legendary poet, who is said to require interpret so beautifully that all beings, even gods, were enchanted by his song, but it is primarily the invisible potential horizon 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 tenderness 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 profile m onth of February 1922, the figure of the angel which Rilke takes pains to distinguish from the Christian symbolism of the same serve sum of distinct realms.The Orpheus myth for both Rilke and his predecessor Ovid concerns the relation between this know 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 invocation 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 logical 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 become a god, trans cended 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 indicate a crossing of much(prenominal) 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 transience. Their transience renders them intimate with our own and so we must according to Rilke resist the will to run heap and note 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 kind 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 extent to which the movement had entered the general instinct of an entire period from the 1890s on.For many readers and writers, the dispersed and fragmented overt was doubtless little more than 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 excellent indicator of what was generally in the air and had an exceptionally creative way of integrating it into his own superior and powerfully imagined poetic universe.Influence studies of the conventional type cannot do nicety to the kind of problem he poses. Throughout his life, as an almost mundane custom, Rilke wrote letters of such exceptional grace and expressive force that they have come to represent a significant part of his artistic legacy. He also preserved co nscientiously letters written to him by others. Family members, friends, and more incidental acquaintances collected his letters as precious gifts, in belongings 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 number 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 face-to-face life and disposition, as well as, and perhaps even more so, the especially pessimistic historical climate that became obvious 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 crank to the deeply disturbing signs of this cultural unrest and without any s ustained disport in theoretical discourse, learned to draw 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 audience without losing the mysticism and lyrical gauge of Rilkes poems.