Rilke on the Transformative Power of Human Achievement

One of the most beautiful modern poems is Rainer Maria Rilke's Ninth Elegy. Rilke, who was Czech and wrote in German, died at age 51 in 1926. There is considerable mystery in the poem, which is the ninth of ten "Duino Elegies", his most famous work. The poem acclaims the transformative nature of the human mind and seems to be related to Kantian Idealism, the idea that the real depends on the construction of the human mind. In this article Jan Wojcik argues that Rilke was influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the most famous American Kantian or "Transcendentalist". Although Kant was not a libertarian (he bases his philosophy of justice -law or right- on Rousseau's social contract), you can read Kant in a libertarian way. For the categorical imperative requires that each individual be treated as an end, and state compulsion treats human beings as means. The welfare state is inconsistent with Kantian ethics. To be fair, Kant held that it is required to obey the law and that revolution is immoral. He was not Lockean. I wonder if that's what got the Germans into trouble.

Notice the reference to laurel in the opening stanza. When a Greek athlete won a contest, an agon, he was awarded a laurel crown. So too, the poet. Thus, the phrase "poet laureate" was a medieval reference to the laurel crown awarded to poets in classical Greece. Note too that the poem refers to words, to "logoi", that are the poet's materials of transformation, as when he asks:

"Are we here perhaps just to say:
house, bridge, well, gate, jug, fruit tree, window--
at most, column, tower... but to say, understand this, to say it
as the Things themselves never fervently thought to be."

If words transform being, or create being as the reality of human experience, then might not human achievement be our ultimate purpose and the world's fulfillment? In my favorite passage Rilke writes of the angel who is more advanced spiritually and emotionally but is not familiar with achievement in the material world:

"Praise the world to the angel, not the unutterable world;
you cannot astonish him with your glorious feelings;
in the universe, where he feels more sensitively,
you're just a beginner. Therefore, show him the simple
thing that is shaped in passing from father to son,
that lives near our hands and eyes as our very own.
Tell him about the Things. He'll stand amazed, as you stood
beside the rope-maker in Rome, or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how blameless and ours;
how even the lamentation of sorrow purely decides
to take form, serves as a thing, or dies
in a thing, and blissfully in the beyond
escapes the violin."


Rainer Maria Rilke (C. F. MacIntyre, translator)

"The Ninth Elegy"

Duino Elegies

Why, if it's possible to spend this span
of existence as laurel, a little darker than all
other greens, with little waves on every
leaf-edge (like the smile of a breeze), why, then,
must we be human and, shunning destiny,
long for it?...

Oh, not because happiness,

that over-hasty profit of loss impending, exists.
Not from curiosity, or to practise the heart,
that would also be in the laurel...
but because to be here is much, and the transient Here
seems to need and concern us strangely. Us, the most transient.
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.
And we also once, Never again. But this having been
once, although only once, to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.

And so we drive ourselves and want to achieve it,
want to hold it in our simple hands,
in the surfeited gaze and in the speechless heart.
want to become it. give it to whom? Rather
keep all forever...but to the other realm,
alas, what can be taken? Not the power of seeing,
learned here so slowly, and nothing that's happened here.
Nothing. Maybe the suffering? Before all, the heaviness
and long experience of love--unutterable things.
But later, under the stars, what then? They are better untold of.
The wanderer does not bring a handful of earth,
the unutterable, from the mountain slope to the valley,
but a pure word he has learned, the blue
and yellow gentian. Are we here perhaps just to say:
house, bridge, well, gate, jug, fruit tree, window--
at most, column, tower... but to say, understand this, to say it
as the Things themselves never fervently thought to be.
Is it not the hidden cunning of secretive earth
when it urges on the lovers, that everything seems transfigured
in their feelings? Threshold, what is it for two lovers
that they wear away a little of their own older doorstill,
they also, after the many before,
and before those yet coming...lightly?

Here is the time for the unutterable, here, its country.
Speak and acknowledge it. More than ever
the things that we can live by are falling away,
supplanted by an action without symbol.
An action beneath crusts that easily crack, as soon as
the inner working outgrows and otherwise limits itself.
Our heart exists between hammers,
like the tongue between the teeth,
but notwithstanding, the tongue
always remains the praiser.

Praise the world to the angel, not the unutterable world;
you cannot astonish him with your glorious feelings;
in the universe, where he feels more sensitively,
you're just a beginner. Therefore, show him the simple
thing that is shaped in passing from father to son,
that lives near our hands and eyes as our very own.
Tell him about the Things. He'll stand amazed, as you stood
beside the rope-maker in Rome, or the potter on the Nile.
Show him how happy a thing can be, how blameless and ours;
how even the lamentation of sorrow purely decides
to take form, serves as a thing, or dies
in a thing, and blissfully in the beyond
escapes the violin. And these things that live,
slipping away, understand that you praise them;
transitory themselves, they trust us for rescue,
us, the most transient of all. They wish us to transmute them
in our invisible heart--oh, infinitely into us! Whoever we are.

Earth, isn't this what you want: invisibly
to arise in us? Is it not your dream
to be some day invisible? Earth! Invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your insistent commission?
Earth, dear one, I will! Oh, believe it needs
not one more of your springtimes to win me over.
One, just one, is already too much for my blood.
From afar I'm utterly determined to be yours.
You were always right and your sacred revelation is the intimate death.
Behold, I'm alive. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows less...surplus of existence
is welling up in my heart.