Letters To A Young Poet

Chronicle, 1903-1908 (Letter Eight - Ten)

Letter Eight

These efforts of Ellen Key, however, brought him some "sympathetic invitations in the North" and some of these he promptly accepted, traveling, when he finally left Rome in the month of June, 1904, to Sweden via Copenhagen. Borgeby gård, Flädie, was a great farming estate in the southern province of Skåne. Rilke had soon found out the whole long story of the old castle, a tower of which had been rebuilt into living quarters; he enjoyed the gardens and the orchards and ate with pleasure and benefit their vegetables, fruits and berries, served at a well-set table; he loved the fields and the peace of pasturing creatures ("we have 200 cows," he wrote on the night of his arrival ), the horses, oxen, dogs; found entertainment in the weak-jointed endeavors of a new foal to get about, and the learning of young storks to clapper; took delight in the great trees of the park and the long well-kept chestnut-bordered driveways, in the winds and the storms as they passed over this fertile land. His letters are full of feeling for the productive life about him and reflect a contentment of spirit that goes with it; it was one of the most tranquil episodes of his life. No wonder he spent the whole summer here. He was not creatively occupied: "Summer was never my high time." But he read and wrote letters, taught himself Danish largely by reading Jacobsen and Hermann Bang and translating Sören Kierkegaard's letters to his fiancée, made acquaintance with Scandinavian literaure generally, while inwardly he felt himself building, preparing something invisible but fundamental. He deliberately thought it best to look upon this time really as one of recreation and live it accordingly, although the old sense of not having achieved what he was bound to do sometimes creeps through: "I miss the gladness, miss something or other that I should have previously done. A point of departure, some evidence, the passing of a test in my own eyes."

He wrote to Clara on the evening of July 27th: ". . . Thanks for Kappus' letter. He has a hard time. And this is only the beginning. And he is right about it: in childhood we have used up too much strength, --that may be true for a whole generation. Or true over and over again for individuals. What shall one say about it? That life has unending possibilities of renewal. Yes, but this too: that the using of strength in a certain sense is always increase of strength also; for fundamentally we have to do only with a wide cycle: all strength that we give away comes over us again, experienced and altered. Thus it is in prayer. And what is there, truly done, that is not prayer?

"And another thing, with regard to the recreation idea. There are here, amid this realm of fields, spots of dark ploughed land. They are empty, and yet lie they here as though the bright culms round about them were there for their sakes, rows of fencing for their protection. I asked what was doing with these dark acres. They told me: c'est de la terre en repos. So lovely, you see, can rest be, and so it looks alongside work. Not disquieting, but so that one gathers a deep confidence and the feel of a big time. . . ."

Letter Nine

When after this prolonged sojourn he went in the autumn to visit other friends of Ellen Key in the country house near Göeborg, he had still not settled to anything that in his own eyes amounted to a specific piece of work. This does not mean that he was ever idle. He continually worked, writing letters, articles, book reviews, always following to some extent the outlines of study he had made for himself. Two visits to the Samskola, a modern community school for boys and girls, made such an impression upon him that he wrote an essay on it which he was later asked to read at the school and which had a wide influence when it was soon afterward published. He cared enough about it to consider whether he and his wife could not start something of the sort in North Germany, but doubted whether they were right people t do it "with our small strength which should not be divided. And I with my great ignorance and never having learned anything! . . . But it was good for us to see the Samskola; an encouragement goes forth from it in far-reaching waves as from a fine, happy future that is sure." During November he finished the Weisse Fürstin in its final form.

He still fostered the idea of studying somewhere: "Since I cannot arrive from within at the solution for work. It will probably have to come from without." He needs to open up his work to new tributaries; not that he lacks experiencing and living but he has not the power to arrange, coördinate: must learn to seize and hold, must learn to work. The not having achieved this bothers him like a bad conscience. Still, he senses an advance and hopes that he can now make certain resolves to lead a more industrious and conscious life than heretofore.

This state of mind remains characteristic of him for some time to come, with the fluctuations inevitable to such a temperament, such a physique. For the next four years, which concern this chronicle only because at their expirations he once more communicated with the Young Poet, Rilke moved about without any fixed abode, much as we have seen him do within the time discussed and as he was to do for most of his life. This condition of affairs often oppressed him: "It costs so much effort and good will and imagination to set up anywhere an appearance of four walls out of the contents of a few trunks, and I would like so much to use what I have of such equipment directly for work, not on the preparation for it." Oberneuland and Worpswede, Capri, Berlin, visits to friends in various parts of Germany; lecture tours including Dresden and Prague, Vienna and even Venice; and for the most part Paris. He takes a growing interest in Cèzanne; he is in touch with Hammershöj, Bojer, Verhaeren, von Hofmannsthal, Stefan Zweig; meets Bernard Shaw, who comes to pose for Rodin; sees something of Zuloaga and Bourdelle. Meanwhile he has been adding poems to the Buch der Bilder for its second edition. In October 1907 the essay on Rodin appears; a new volume of verse, Neue Gedichte ( New Poems ), about the same time. He is now more closely thrown with Rodin, even living in a little stone house in the garden at Meudon and acting as "a sort of secretary."

The value of Rodin's example for Rilke lay, as we have seen before, in its showing him the possibility of taking hold, of persisting, in bringing him finally to realize that he must and could do the same in his own way, making him eager to get at his own labors again. The very dominance of the personality which as a living precept taught him this, made him restive, full of desire for a year or two of hard work by himself. For behind all his hesitations and delays there was the persevering will that held him to his purpose. In May 1906 a misunderstanding over some small matter of Rodin's correspondence caused a break in their relations, which, however, was healed again in November 1907. It greatly distressed Rilke, but in the light of his own development it fell perhaps as a fortunate coincidence. Aware of the irritability of the aging artist, who had not been well just then, he took a large view of it from the start, and it did not injure the roots of the profound influence Rodin's way of working and of living had had upon him.

Letter Ten

To Rodin, "mon cher et seul Ami," Rilke wrote on December 29th: "I am able more and more to make use of that long patience you have taught me by your tenacious example; that patience which, disproportionate to ordinary life which seems to bid us haste, puts us in touch with all that surpasses us."

He is making good use of that patience. His task is the writing of The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, "that difficult, difficult book" which, despite the intense effort and the mental anguish it has cost him, he is now bringing through. It is a good moment at which to leave him, calmer, more content, because he is working.

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( This is the end of the book. If there's any typo, please comment so i can fix it. I want to thank you so much for those who have made it to the end and for those who votes. I think people especially young readers should know or read Rilke's work at least once in their lives because it is incredible, essential, and timeless. )