Letters To A Young Poet

Chronicle, 1903-1908

The life of one that laboureth and is contented shall be made sweet.--Ecclesiasticus.

Introduction 

When the Young Poet made his appeal to Rilke, he must have had some inkling of the sort of sympathy he might look for, but he could scarcely have realized what discords of bitter memory he had jarred. Perhaps no single episode of his youth had left such lasting impress upon Rilke's development as his experience at Military school; hence its importance in relation to that later period in which the Letters to a Young Poet fall. He had been sent to Sankt-Pölten as a matter of course by a conventional officer father and a self-absorbed, religious-fanatical mother who in her letters only excited him to further unhappiness with expressions of sympathy and seemed to have no idea of mending the situation either by strengthening him to endure the ordeal by removing him. Although he entered in good condition, sunburned and well after summer holidays and of normal development for his age, he was by temperament totally unfitted to stand the physical discipline of any such establishment and, which was even worse, soon became the victim of his comrades' active and often cruel contempt. Doubtless they found him a romantic sentimentalist and prig, for which his early childhood would have been much to blame. Any ten- or twelve- or fourteen-year-old boy who, on being vigorously struck in the face, could say "in a quiet voice . . . 'I endure it because Christ endured it, silently and without complaint, and while you were hitting me I prayed my good God to forgive you,'" need have expected nothing but the derisive laughter of his contemporaries. But this sort of thing drove him to nights of weeping, to far too many days in the infirmary, "more spritually afflicted," he says himself, "than physically ill." It drove him also to writing poetry "which already in its cildish beginning comforted" him--very fiery and noble and not at all original poetry, but still his most natural form of response to his environment and refuge from it. 

Many years later, in the fall of 1920, Rilke received a letter from a Major-General Sedlakowitz, who had taught him German at the Sankt-Pölten school and who, having recently heard Ellen Key lecture on the prominent lyric poet, ventured to express his admiration and to recall his early sympathy ( even though he had applied considerable red ink to the imaginative essays of his pupil ). He hoped for an answer--even a short answer. Rilke's reply covers, against his two pages, eight.* It is uncompromising and courageous and truthful, charming and kind; such a letter as only one who cared for honesty and had a fine sense of delicacy in human relationships would have troubled to write. He is grateful for his correspondent's desire to renew acquaintance, but tells him straight from the shoulder that he feels he would never have been able to make what he has of his life had he not totally suppressed for decades all recollection of those five years at military school; there were times when the least memory of them threatened the new creative consciousness for which he strove; and he has never been able to understand this visitation of his childhood. If his attitude seems 

* Both letters are given in full in Carl Sieber's René Rilke ( Insel-Verlag, Leipzig, 1932). Rilke's reply is included in both editions of the Briefe ( Insel-Verlag, Leipzig ), and in Volume II of the Letters, translated by J. B. Greene and M. D. Herter Norton ( W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1948 ). 

exaggerated he begs the Major-General to remember that he had left the school exhausted, physically and spiritually misused and retarded at sixteen, deprived of strength for the great task ahead of him, totally misprepared, and growing always more aware of how different an introduction to life he should have had, suffering from the sense that the time and effort spent in those preparatory years were irretrievable. He would like to acknowledge any friendly incident that chanced to befall him during that time, but anything of the sort was so scarce that it seems only natural he should have sought protection in later moments of his youth by including the whole experience "in the feeling of one single terrible damnation."