Letters To A Young Poet

Chronicle, 1903-1908 (Letter Six & Seven)

Letter Six

In the middle of November he moved in. But now he complained of prolonged rains, of inability to get to work, of waiting for the propitious hour, and how this waiting makes it always harder to begin, "and the happiness of being a beginner, which I hold to be the greatest, is small beside the fear of beginning. . . ." He wrote on December 19th: "I am now pretty well installed in the little house, it lacks nothing save that which I cannot give it--save life, which is in all things and in me; save work, which binds one thing to another and links everything with the great necessity; save joy, which comes from within and from activity; save patience, which can wait for what comes from afar." 

Christmas brought the beginnings of "a sort of spring" after the long rains, but to Rilke and his wife its eve was to be "only a quiet hour, no more; we shall sit in the remote little garden house and think of those who are having Christmas; of our small dear Ruth and of ourselves, as though somewhere we were still the children we once were--the expectant, glad-timid Christmas children, upon whom great surprises descend like angels from within and without. . . ." It was not till the middle of January that one day, after a bit of "real work" sweeping the heavy pools of rainwater from his roof and clearing away the dried and fallen oak leaves, with the blood singing in him "as in a tree," he felt for the very first time after a long spell "a tiny little bit free and festive." He had now resumed after a considerable pause the translation of "The Song Of the Host of Igor," an ancient Russian epic, and at this he was working every morning. Some reading, a book review or so--he did not want for occupation. 

The good mood continued in February. He wrote to Ellen Key on the 6th: "It really seems as though things were quieting down around me, and even if my nerves, which are jumpy, sometimes dread disturbance from outside or uncertainty in health, there is yet much in me that is gathering itself together, and my longing to do something good, something really good, was never so great as now. I feel as though I had been sleeping for years or had been lying in the lowest hold of a ship that, loaded with heavy things, sailed through strange distances-- -- Oh to climb up on deck once more and feel the wins and the birds, and to see how the great, great nights come with their gleaming stars . . ."

He had embarked upon "a sort of 2nd Part to the Stories-of-God book"; but by the middle of March (having also finished the Russian translation, which remains in manuscript) he was "stuck somewhere in the middle of it" and didn't know whether he would continue it or not. 

Letter Seven

Whatever its up and down, this Roman winter proved an important one in his own growth. With hiw new work--whether he refers only to the second part of the Stories, or includes here the beginning of the Notebooks, which took place some time during this period--came the discovery that his way of working had changed, his powers of observation had grown more absorptive so that he would probably never again manage to write a book in ten days or evenings ( as he had the Stories of God ), but would spend a long time over each endeavor. "This is good," he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé on April 15th; "it marks progress toward that always-working which at any cost I must achieve for myself; perhaps a first step toward it. But in this change there lies a new danger too: to hold off outside disturbances for eight or ten days is possible--; but for weeks, for months? This fear pressed upon me, and is perhaps itself primarily to blame for the fact that my work wavered and with the beginning of March broke off. And what I took to be a little break and pause has become like heavy holidays hanging over me, that still continue. . . . My progress is somehow rather like the steps of a convalescent, uncommonly weightless, tottering, and beyond all measure needing help. And the help is lacking." 

By May he was already suffering from the heat, feeling good for-nothing with headache, longing for more northerly realms, yet having no plan, no place to turn to. "Alas, that I have no parental country home, nowhere in the world a room with a few old things in it and a window looking out into great trees. . . ."