Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke

First published:Die Sonette an Orpheus, 1923 (English translation, 1936)

Type of work: Poetry

The Work

Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the great lyric poets of the twentieth century, wrote Sonnets to Orpheus in memory of Vera Ouckama Knoop, the nineteen-year-old daughter of a Dutch friend. When she was about seventeen, the girl was stricken with an incurable glandular disease. As her body became heavier and more massive, she stopped dancing and began to play music, and when her body became still heavier, she began to draw. Although Rilke barely knew the girl, he was touched by her story and shaken by the news of her death. At the time the poems in Sonnets to Orpheus were written, Rilke was staying at a château in Muzot, Switzerland, where he took refuge during several periods in his life after World War I and where he found the solitude he needed to work. It was here that in 1923 that Rilke, in a burst of creative genius unlike any that he had ever before experienced, completed Duineser Elegien (1923; Duino Elegies, 1931) and Sonnets to Orpheus (a complement to the Duino Elegies).

In Greek mythology, Orpheus, the son of Apollo, was the master magician, able to animate nature with his song. When his wife Eurydice died, he obtained her release from the underworld on the condition that he would not look at her until they reached the upper world, but he could not resist glancing back at her at the last moment. Legend had it that he was subsequently dismembered by Thracian women and scattered throughout the universe until all of nature became his song. This introduced a second phase, during which Orpheus became the religious center of a Dionysian sect (Dionysus was the god of uninhibited desire, vegetation, and wine) and presided in his magical divinity over the ancient religious mysteries of Greece. Sonnets to Orpheus incorporates this second, magical, aspect of the god.

Rilke’s Orpheus symbol is the culmination of a number of themes and motifs dating back to the poet’s earliest writing, which coalesce into the figure of the singing god who redeems out of time into space. His function links him with Duino Elegies through the principle of transformation. Orpheus is also equated with the poet, and by alluding to his special role as a singer of both realms, Rilke reiterates the need to unite life and death through song and praise. Orpheus literally sings among the dead. The mortal poet is to do the same.

The two main attributes of the Orpheus symbol are openness toward all experience—a fullness that includes both life and death—to an extent that Rilke refers to as an “overflowing”; and the ordering or forming of this experience through music, that is, art or poetry. The elevation of music as the final court of appeal, after suffering, love, and death have individually failed to reveal their secret, is declared in sonnet 1.

Sonnets to Orpheus speaks of “we,” “you,” and “I” interchangeably and is thus directed toward no particular person but to humanity in general (the exceptions are the two Knoop sonnets and the one addressed to a friend of Knoop). Rilke maintains a certain distance by the sparing use of the first-person pronoun. Although the poems cannot be arranged in any unified metrical scheme, Rilke adheres to a thoroughly symmetrical sonnet composition, with divisions into quatrains and tercets; the individual metrics are flexibly varied. He seems to have set himself the challenge of modifying the sonnet form while at the same time not destroying it altogether.

A kind of metaphorical primitivism may account for the simplicity, grammatical and otherwise, of most of Sonnets to Orpheus. In Rilke’s later poetry, words are used as signs, and images become “points” or “cosmic configurations.” Only in such a pattern, endorsed by Orpheus, can the totality of forms be preserved, a totality no longer viewed in isolation but adapted to the requirements of a universal myth.

Both part 1, which consists of twenty-six sonnets, and part 2, with its twenty-nine sonnets, form a cycle. Rather than forming thematic or chronological groups, the poems may be loosely characterized as the Orpheus sonnets, the sonnets incorporating poetic memories, and the sonnets of a didactic, reflective nature. Twelve poems (all but one in part 1) deal with the Orphic legend. Sonnets, 1, 7, and 26 in part 1 contain the main elements of the Orpheus theme, which opens the series and, as the circle widens to include other motifs, gradually disappears, to resurface finally in part 2, sonnet 26. The initial sonnet of part 1 is pure myth making: At the beginning of the world (or of the poet’s art consciousness) stands Orpheus, whose music instills life into trees and stones, breaking down the rigid forms of nature and lending them new rhythms and dimensions. As the archetypal poet, Orpheus does not sing about a tree, he sings a tree, and as he sings the visible ascends into invisibility, while a temple to receive it rises in the ear. Here, as elsewhere, Rilke interchanges acoustic and visual imagery.

The functions of Orpheus in relation to the poet’s world are expressed in part 1 in the key sonnet 7. Orpheus is the poet’s surrogate, alone able to cross the threshold and, by virtue of his adherence to both the realms of the living and of the dead, to praise the things of earth before the dead. In fact, the poet identifies himself with his symbol, and they unite. The creative process operates within the paradox of silence and song, perishable and imperishable. It is visualized in the landscape and in the warm vineyards of the south, for whose infinite wine the poet’s heart is the perishable wine press.

Praise is only one function of Orpheus’s song; the chord of lamentation is its complement. In sonnet 8 in part 1, lamentation is personified and acted out. Sorrow is the youngest sister of Rejoicing, who knows, and Longing, who confesses. Sorrow is still young enough to learn from grief-stricken nights and yet, in abrupt reversal and by virtue of that very experience, is able to represent mortality among the constellations.

Part 1 further defines the Orphic double nature with the aid of nature symbols. In the second quartet of sonnet 6, Rilke draws effectively on folklore and superstitions about the spirits of the dead. To these primitive superstitions, Rilke opposes the gentle knowledge and memory of the dead. Only those who eat poppies with the dead (sonnet 9) can register the full scale of Orphic praise. Sonnet 3 contrasts the divine art of the god with human inadequacy resulting from humanity’s divided nature. The phrase “Song is being” balances non-Being, humanity’s unrelatedness to earth and stars. After the antithesis, the real definition of poetry, its stability and inevitability, provides the final lines. That leads logically to sonnet 4, which introduces the theme of the lovers to whom the Orphic attributes are applied.

Once Rilke establishes the basic Orphic myth, about twenty-eight sonnets incorporating poetic memories explore the varied material of the poet’s artistic world. Roses, mirrors, dancing, and breathing are transformed into legend. The greatness of Rilke’s best poetry lies in the insight offered by individual subjects or themes, even though they seem to possess only aesthetic implications. The underlying tensions in Rilke’s poetry are between art and life, permanence and change, the formed and the formless. His problem is essentially linguistic rather than metaphysical, and it is to be solved by the transformation of the idea through language. The work’s Orphic music is the very element calculated to activate inert space, for it is dynamic. In the “dancer” sonnet in part 2, Rilke fuses the dancer and the dance, the transient motion and the permanent form. The dance actually grows, step by step, out of the functions of language. Rilke perpetuates the movement of the final whirl by projecting the dancer into art forms.

The third type of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus—the didactic, reflective ones—are among his best. In them, the Orphic lyre conjures up the problems of a machine age and the metaphysical problems of time and eternity, God, and the possibilities of regeneration. Time is present in all of Rilke’s poetry, and this is particularly true of these sonnets. Time enters into the unfolding of the machine motif, into the conception of historical and cultural evolution—those “splendid excesses of our own existence”—and into modes of belief. The genetic evolution of human beings, who create their own gods that fate destroys, is a hopeful projection, for eternity still lies before them. This is the timeless Orphic realm of spatial fullness.

Six sonnets deal directly with the role of the machine in the modern age, in the context of aimless motion versus contained repose. In Rilke’s view, technology has its function as a means but not as an end. Many sonnets deal negatively with the acoustic unpleasantness of a mechanistic age, the “droning and drumming” of machines. The spiritual impasse invoked by the machine is described in sonnet 24 of part 1, in which humanity loses the “primeval friends of ours, the unfated,/ ever unsuing gods.”

Escape from time, the destroyer, is possible through transformation in Orpheus. Some of Rilke’s finest sonnets are concerned with this theme, but none so profoundly as the final ones of part 2, which make up a small cycle of their own. Sonnet 12 urges the readers to be prepared for transformation, like a flame altering all things that slip from their grasp. The theme ends in a mythological figure: Daphne in laurel can desire only that her lover transform himself into the wind that blows through her leaves. Two sonnets describe the inner landscape of transformation, the summer dreamworld with continuously watered gardens. These gardens of oriental profusion have symbolic reality for those who, with Orpheus, have advanced into another dimension of experience.

Sonnet 13 in part 2 is also concerned with the transformation theme. It is didactic and contains at least six categorical commands to the reader. The full scope of the transformation process is contained in the first verse, its stoic implications in verses 2 and 5: To anticipate departure is to be ever ready for the transformation into new forms. Whatever ultimate moment of experience this may mean, readers are to look forward to it as they look backward at the winter, “almost gone.” The poet then moves from the human to the mythical plane in the command to be “ever dead in Eurydice.” The poet-god may overcome love that vanished into the shades by transforming it into art. The conquest of loss restores the individual or the artist to the pure relationship that encloses that more adequate and inviolate world people create in themselves. This world is a declining one, and the realization and full acceptance of this fact is the highest possible accomplishment. Submission to this twofold act of Being and at the same time non-Being, of life and death, raises human beings above themselves, completing the spiral of life. Thus time and destiny can be overcome, and the circle of fullness can be completed.

Beyond exemplifying brilliant structure and innovative use of tradition, Sonnets to Orpheus brings the physical and the spiritual together and interchanges their qualities and meanings. The marriage of human being and god, and of concrete and abstract, of grief and celebration, of changelessness and change makes reading Sonnets to Orpheus a challenging and uplifting experience.

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