Letters To A Young Poet

Chronicle, 1903-1908 (Letter Two & Three)

Letter Two 

As the Parisian winter worked no good to his health, he fled in March to a warmer climate, to the sea at Viareggio, not far from Pisa--the spot near which almost a hundred years earlier, after the sad wrecking of the Ariel, Shelley's body was cast upon the pine-trimmed sandy shore. Rilke had been here before, in the spring of 1898, and had at that time written the Lieder der Müdchen (Girls' Songs) and the first draft of the Weisse Fürstin (The White Princess). During the present sojourn he was to be seen wandering about with his Bible and his Jacobsen (Niels Lyhne), in retreat from the persistent English and German tourist chatter of the Hotel Florence, finding solitary refreshment in sunbaths and ocean plunges and barefoot walks along untenated stretches of the beach. He describes his costume as a black-and-read-striped bathing-suit of which he wore only the trunks, keeping the top "to pull on in case of emergency, and the emergency is the Englishwoman who may bob up anywhere." The sea did him good; "it cleanses me with its noise and lays a rhythm upon everything in me that is disturbed and confused." When at times, to his surprise, it seemed not so beneficial, "too loud and too incessant," he would withdraw into the woods were he had found a great reclining tree root on which he "sat for hours as alone as on the first day of the world." He very soon wrote to Clara: "I already feel my solitude again a little and suspect that it will deny me nothing if I hearken to it with new strength." And again, a fortnight later: "Everyone must find in his work the center of his life and thence be able to grow out radially as far as may be. And no one else may watch him in the process . . . for not even he himself may do that. There is a kind of cleanness and virginity in it, in this looking away from oneself; it is as though one were drawing, one's gaze bound to the object, inwoven with Nature, while one's hand goes its own way somewhere below, goes on and on, gets timid, wavers, is glad again, goes on and on far below the face that stands like a star above it, not looking, only shining. I feel as though I had always worked that way; face gazing at far things, hands alone. And so it surely ought to be. I shall be like that again in time." 

Letter Three

This awakening creative urge found its outlet in the writing of parts of the Stundenbuch ( Book of Hours ). He delayed his return to Paris because of it, feeling that however slight it might prove to be it would not be good "to go with it in the great railway train and to new impressions in Genoa and Dijon"; while if it came to nothing it would be "better to experience the little dissapointment here, knowing that it was not one's own fault." He went back at the end of April, having "done nothing here but he write a few letters and read Walter Pater's Imaginary Potraits and a bad boring book by the Russian Merejkowski on Leonardo."