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| Orpheus, Imploring - August Rodin |
Thinking of Rilke on All Hallows Eve
Oh, the pleasure of it, always emerging
New from the loosened clay. Those who
dared to come first had hardly any help.
Nevertheless cities arose on sun-favored
coasts, and pitchers filled with water
and oil…...
We are endlessly offered into
life: all time is ours. And what any one
of us might be worth, death alone knows—
and does not tell.
Sonnets to Orpheus II
I do not meet you on the sun-favored coast
But in the Tuscan cypress at twilight
Where you walked alone, song stirring in you
Your hands at your sides.
When I first heard you calling from the page
I thought who is it that emerges
From the loosened clay
Of the underworld
Alive—a fellow seer and traveler
An Orpheus and Dante, brave interrogator
Out of the infernos of loneliness;
My vagabond heart went out
Into the forest crepuscule and saw how pale
You were, kneeling over a gravestone;
Behind the century’s curtain do you too
Bear witness to the pas de deux
Of the Gemini, two stars
in conjoined burning;
Did you as well, conjuring a Eurydice
of the garden,
dream of a counterpart?
And I knew you as both brother and lover
In language and spirit
In the kinship of deprivation, when I heard
That your mother incarnated
A lost daughter in you;
That is the Prufrockian infamy
We endured together:
How it was when we were small,
Vulnerable, and the profaned world
Slipped the axis of our sensibility.
Beloved to me is our unaccountable
Intimacy before the unseen:
And that we are each afflicted
With inner music sustains me now
As like you at the end, I am at odds with time
Striving to lend my voice and to stir those
Encountering my declarations.
If we could remake each other from wet clay
Reincarnate those we have lost
But instead lyrical volleys
Reverberate like bells peak to peak
And the passing grief-stricken moon
Yearns to stay behind to unite and
Succor us in the milk of her light.
Rilke, as many poets before him, was captivated by the myth of
Orpheus and Eurydice. In many respects his work reveals his own unfulfilled quest for a Eurydice wooed by his singing into his arms. He reinvents the myth in that Eurydice rises from death and imbues the natural world so that he senses her everywhere—a risen Eve, in a sense and a metaphor for the extent to which Rilke felt that world calling to him, evoking response from him. In this poem I am trying to comprehend Rilke's pull on me rather than writing for a wider audience but I hope that others feel kinship with it.
Rilke was, in our terms today, the victim of child abuse; his mother, mourning a lost infant daughter, dressed him in girls' clothing for a time.
My allusion to Prufrock of course refers to the great poem The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock of T.S. Eliot—a maimed and alienated modern persona also thwarted in a quest for intimacy, and who sees carnal/romantic love as linked to meaning and fullness of being.
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Copyright Jenne' R. Andrews 2011
