The Book of Images by Rainer Maria Rilke
“Great birds still threaten on all sides.” The starting-point for this poem is Ilya’s battle with and capture of Solovey-Razboynik (“Nightingale-the-Robber”), who lurks in the tops of many oaks in the dark forest of Bryn, swooping down on unwary travelers (for thirty years no one has been allowed to pass). In the legends Solovey is portrayed as earthy and folksy, a semihuman trickster or peasant-robber. The power of his cry is always stressed: once it even blows the roof off Prince Vladimir’s palace. Rilke translates all this rather quaint material into an abstruse metaphysical language, which attempts to describe both the terrors of a “prehistoric” spring bursting with voice and transformation, and its downfall in confrontation with the “staying-power” of the first heroes of civilization.
“His servants feed with more and more.” The subject of this poem is Ivan the Terrible, a paranoid psychopath who ruled as Tsar from 1547 to 1584, strengthening the empire and sowing the seeds of its decline. Rilke sketches Ivan’s madness with a series of oblique details. The “murderers” who “play the monk” are the oprichniki, a personal guard Ivan formed in 1565 out of the most hardened criminals in Russia. For a time he moved with three hundred of these guards into a fortress outside Moscow, had them dress in monks’ habits, and established a monastic rule that mixed sexual orgies and sick religiosity. “The iron on his stick” recalls the fit of rage in which Ivan struck and killed with his iron-tipped cane his best-loved son, Ivan.
“It is the hour when the empire vainly.” The subject of the last three poems is Feodor, the feeble-minded son of Ivan the Terrible, and the last of the Rurik line.
“Still in the surrounding silver-plating.” Icons in the Russian Orthodox Church were often covered over with gold or silver plating, into which holes were cut to let the face and hands of the underlying figure show through. The metal itself (in contrast to the austerity of the image) was often elaborately ornamented.
“The Singer Sings Before a Child of Princes.” Paula Becker-Modersohn died on November 20, 1907. (Her death occasioned one of Rilke’s greatest poems, the “Requiem for a Friend” of 1908.) The dedication first appeared in the fifth edition of The Book of Images, published in 1913. But a letter from Rilke to Paula of 5 November 1900 makes clear that the poem was written from the first with her in mind: “Next time I shall copy out for you the song: ‘You pale child, each evening shall…,’ and send you this poem. It does not really exist if you do not possess it—for, after all, it so to speak began with you.”
“Those of the House of Colonna.” Colonna: the name of an aristocratic Italian family which between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries played a dominant role in the history and politics of Rome. This poem is contemporaneous (Rome, late 1903/early 1904) with three of the earliest of the New Poems: “Hetaerae-Tombs,” “Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,” and “Birth of Venus.”
“The Voices.” These poems, written in early June of 1906, when Rilke was in Paris working on the New Poems and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, were the last composed for The Book of Images. Rilke sent them to his publisher with a note expressing hope that they would prevent the volume as a whole from being “purely aesthetic.”
“Requiem.” On November 20, 1900, Rilke received news from Clara Westhoff (whom he would marry in March 1901) that her friend Gretel Kottmeyer had died. (The dedication in the 1902 edition reads “For Gretel. Dedicated to Clara Westhoff.”) He paraphrased her letter in his diary:
Clara W. writes today about a black ivy-wreath, and what she relates is already a poem in its own right. How she speaks of this heavy black wreath which she took unsuspectingly from the gable of her house out of the gray November air and which then became so monstrously serious in the room, a thing unto itself, a thing more suddenly, and a thing which seemed to become constantly heavier, drinking up all the sorrowing in the air of the room and the early dawn. And all this then shall lie on the thin wooden coffin of the poor girl who has died in the South.… The black wreath will perhaps impress itself on the coffin, and its long roots will crawl up the white shroud and grow into the folded hands and grow into the never-loved hair and grow into the heart which, full of clogged blood, has also become black and flat and in the twilight of the dead one will scarcely be distinguishable from the heartlike leaves of the ivy.… And through the empty corridors of the blood the ivy will go, leaf upon leaf on its long roots, like nuns who lead one another along a single rope and who pilgrimage to the deceased heart, whose doors are only slightly left ajar.
To this entry Rilke adds a postscript: “I would like to write a requiem with this image.” That Rilke imagines the poem as spoken by Clara herself is made clear in a parenthetical remark in his letter to her of February 9, 1902: “… like the poet of the Requiem, who indeed you yourself are.”
Also by Edward Snow
PROSE
A Study of Vermeer
TRANSLATIONS
Rainer Maria Rilke: New Poems [1907]
Rainer Maria Rilke: New Poems [1908]: The Other Part
Rainer Maria Rilke: Uncollected Poems
North Point Press
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Translation copyright © 1991 by Edward Snow
All rights reserved
First published in 1991 by North Point Press
This revised edition published in 1994
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Massachusetts Review, in which “The Guardian Angel” and “Fragments from Lost Days” first appeared.
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ISBN-13: 978-0-86547-477-2
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eISBN 9781466872615
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1. For a more detailed account of the sculptural analogy of the New Poems, see my introductions to New Poems (1907) (North Point Press, 1984) and New Poems: The Other Part (1908) (North Point Press, 1987).
2. Briefe und Tagebücher aus der Frühzeit, 1899–1902 (Leipzig: Insel, 1933), p. 203.
Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Images