North Carolina's gentle winter began last night and today the sun is bright through the skylights and slanted. Outside under oak leaves, my perennials are laying out their tough base leaves. It was dry this fall, but I don't think I lost my roses. We'll see about the one that sickened after bloom this year. I left the rot on because I've found that with some of the rots that strike here pruning just means the rot spreads to the good branches that are left. So I leave what's bad to fester and hope.

If people know anything about Rilke, often it is that he died from blood poisoning that set in after he'd scratched his finger working on his roses. It was more complicated than that--the blood poisoning was as severe as it was because of what was probably a leukemia. Still, he was only 51 when he died in 1926. His contemporary, Robert Frost lived into the 1960's. I often wish I had just a few more poems.

After completing his two  great poem cycles—The "Duino Elegies" and the "Sonnets to Orpheus", Rilke began, in his last years, to compose poems in French instead of German. It has been suggested this was because of despair about Germany's post-war politics, but no letter I've seen is good evidence for that thought. I like to think that, having finished these two really major pieces, he knew he was going to have to work against the grain, and shifting to a second language—one he spoke well enough—was a good way of keeping things interesting.

The only published English translations of Rilke's Fench poems that I know of are by A. Poulin.[i] Poulin is an adequate if sometimes angular translator, and the editions are bilingual so one move between Rilke's French and Poulin's renderings. Rilke's French is a bit pretty, but what is interesting to me is the way his language is transformed by the possibilities he is given in French. All of the basic moves are there, but the poems weigh so much less (like birch instead of dense hickory). What makes a poet distinctive is often a burden—a way of working or hearing that constrains other possible moves, a controlling preference. It's nice to get the sense, reading these late poems, that the weight of this had become lighter for Rilke.

Among the last poems are a set of twenty seven on roses—each poem is a double quatrain on a single rose. The poems read like line drawings which attempt an image with a single gesture, the hand dropping through the lines of the poems. Here's my translation of one:[ii]

            II

            I see you, rose, book half-opened,

            having so many pages

            of detailed happiness

            we will never read. Mage-Book,

            which is opened by the wind and can be read,

            eyes shut...

            from which butterflies scatter, confused

            to have had the same ideas.

Now, I imagine talking about these poems in a bar, someone rolling their eyes as I start to talk about such "pastoral crap", and in one way I think that is fair. I remember taking my son for a walk along Eno River—Durham's "nature"; he was maybe fourteen and he remarked that it wasn't nature, it was just land no one wanted to use because of the steep banks. I was struck that, for his generation, and maybe even for people in their thirties, there was the quite true observation that there was little wilderness, and what wilderness there was was for skiing and other paid adventures. So I understand the mistrust of the pastoral--what could be more dishonest, for instance, than all the children's books about farms?

But I don’t read these poems primarily as pastoral, because I am aware that the rose is one of Rilke's major conceits, a motif to which he returned again and again, in order to say the complicated self. So I read these poems alongside several earlier rose and flower poems—notably "The Rose Interior"[iii] and "The Bowl of Roses" from the New Poems.

Several months back, I wrote about the "other" in Rilke's poetry and now the second shoe drops: the rose is one of his major tropes for the self. Of course, to speak of the self is to enter a vast tournament of ideas and ambitions, and there are all kinds of contestants, ranging from the horrific (Ayn Rand's super-isolated individual Zarathustra) to the kind of thing hip Buddhist-inspired cognitive scientists say ("there is, to be sure, no actual self"), and all of this gets conflated by the quasi-political jousting about the "subject", and its death or conscription. For me, Barthes' observation of the "death of the author" has been totalized in ways that go far beyond his modest targets, and most American versions of Buddhist selflessness err, in my estimation, towards nihilism—selflessness as freedom from moral contingency.

But, in a larger sense, it seems to me that the issue is still open, and I've found Rilke's notion of the self—hidden in what he says about roses—to be a useful avenue in these current debates.

What I like most is that the image is not the kind of valentine you'd think it would be. Instead, Rilke's roses are split/doubled and, generally, plural—they exist among other roses (whether the several roses considered in "The Bowl of Roses", the twenty-seven separate stems of the French sequence, or the endless field of tomb-roses evoked in his epitaph).[iv]

Back again a moment to what I've said about the "other" in Rilke's poems: surface forms with a hidden depth. And of course, the self too, with its outward shows but also its unplumbed interior depths (the rooms never visited, slumbering animals and roots that live in the thigh). And, because unplumbed, never whole, always open (where "open" is not freedom but "in relation").

Two more roses:[v]

I

            If your cool freshness sometimes so astonishes us,

            happy rose,

            it’s that, petal against petal, you rest,

            within yourself, inside.

            Your fully awake petals, the center of whom

            sleeps, while being numberless, meet

            this silent heart’s tendernesses

            which end in these urgent lips.

            III

            Oh Rose, you perfect thing beyond compare,

            infinitley restrained

            and infinitely lavished, oh, head

            of a body with far too much wandering sweetness,

            nothing is equal to you, oh you supreme essence

            of this inconstant hour,

            your perfume wanders all about

            this space of love we have scarcely entered.

Both inward and outward, both surface and depth (making me think that maybe people who say "everything is a surface" or who say "everything has depth" are, after all, even in this, hoping for something total and whole (immortal), a mode of being that is complete (completely of one kind, completely turned in one direction). But, instead, split beyond repair. And yet, rather than as a sign of ruin, Rilke speaks of this sign as a consolation:[vi]

X

            Friend of hours where no one remains,

            where all is denied to a bitter heart,

            Consoler whose appearence is shown

            in such caresses which drift in the air.

            If we renounce life, if we forswear

            that which was and that which might come,

            we never think enough of the insistent friend

            who performs his enchantment beside us.

A last thought about these: one of thing that constantly astonishes me about Rilke is how effortlessly he bends formal convention to task, and how often, across a body of work he both uses and breaks a style. With respect to the French poems, it would be easy enough to see these as simple double quatrains, almost ditties. Rilke, however, so often works in the Italian sonnet that one notices that these can also be seen as sonnets that lack the final triads. That is, as sonnet shards, gestures that break off into silence, where, in fact, the "turn" is a turn to silence. How much this form is like what he says about roses--and the self—anyway: surfaces and space, color and answering depth.

No doubt there is still too much of the pastoral here, as if evoking an Eden we have passed from into these, more commercial, hours. The pastoral doesn't worry me so much because I've never believed in myths of the Fall, whether biblical or modern. The sheer blue of the first winter sky is already enough for me. The spiritual is this world, which is terror enough. (Even Kafka says this!] No, what worries me is that so often we are blind to that. And so much of what we say to each other about all this--from the death of the author, to the "new sincerity"—is a strategy by which we hope to evade the costs.

A last rose:[vii]

XXVII

Rose, was it necessary to leave you outdoors,
            exquisite dear?
            What is a rose doing out there, where fate
            exhausts itself on us?

            Point of turning back. It’s you

            who share

            with us, desperately, this life, this life

            which is not your time.

Next month, I will write about another of Rilke's main conceits, one intimately related to the rose, that he speaks of under the terms "raum"—space (but with delightful echoes of "room"), and "offen"—the open.

© David Need 2005-2006

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