New Poems

In the best poems the subtractive test finds no line to remove. “Der Panther” is three quatrains: the bars, the circling, and the image that enters the heart and dies there; none can go. The Torso turns on its last half line, and everything before it is needed to make the statue look back. But the unit is the book, and the book was made by accumulation over six years, by a method that produced poems in series: go and look, then make the thing. In the second part above all, the courtly portraits, some of the biblical pieces and several of the Paris townscapes read as exercises of the method; a score of them could go, and the book would still know what it knows. The two Apollos and the closing Buddha give the whole an armature, not an argument that compels its scale.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure is a condition, not a mood: a thing seen wholly, without the observer’s feeling laid over it, gives back an inwardness the observer did not bring, and the seeing is a discipline with moral consequence. The Torso states it as a claim that holds: “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” (“You must change your life”). The work of art is not looked at; it looks, and its completeness judges the incomplete life. “Der Panther” discloses captivity as the death of the world behind perception. “Morgue” and “Leichen-Wäsche” show the dead as strangers to the living who handle them, without consolation. Held lower because the disclosure is largely one, repeated across objects, and concerns perception and the artist’s vocation more than family, love, society and work: the beggars and the blind man of Paris are seen, not inhabited.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Elevation is frequent, and of several kinds. The terror of the Torso’s last line; the Panther’s final image, going into the heart and ceasing there; Eurydice in the underworld, so full of her death that she no longer knows the man ahead of her, the one great tragic summit of the book; the cold beauty of “Die Flamingos” and the “Blaue Hortensie”; the fountain in Rome passing its water from basin to basin; and the comic, uncanny lift of the white elephant that comes round again on the carousel. Few books of lyric rise so often. Held below 9.0 because the heights are mostly of a held, sculptural kind, and the book seldom reaches the overwhelming scale of the greatest lyric sequences. It was Rilke’s own later work that went there.

Score: 8.8 / 10

In “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes.” myth is built, not evoked. The descent, the forbidden look and the guide god are retold so that the archetype carries a new meaning: Eurydice does not want to return, and her death is a fulfilment the living cannot reach. “Alkestis” and “Geburt der Venus” do the same work with less force. The two Apollos frame the book as a passage from the early god to the archaic torso, and the closing Buddha sets the whole under a figure of completed being. The animal poems lift the beast to archetype while it stays this panther in the Jardin des Plantes. Held lower because many of the mythic and biblical poems are tableaux, myth as subject rather than structure, and a collection has no load-bearing archetypal spine of the kind a long poem can build.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The departure is large and its cost was real. Rilke turned from the effusive, musical, devotional subjectivity of Das Stunden-Buch, which had made his name, to the thing: the poem made as Rodin, and later Cézanne, made things, with the self withheld. German lyric after Goethe and the Romantics had no settled form for this. He paid in years of labour and in a doubt he recorded in his letters. The swerve is formal too: the rhymed sonnet is bent by enjambment until its rhymes become hinges in mid thought. Held below 9.0 because the turn has precedents, Parnassian objectivity, Mörike’s “Auf eine Lampe” and C. F. Meyer’s “Der römische Brunnen”, which the fountain poem answers. It is a radical deepening of a line already present; no predecessor made the thing poem the ground of a whole book.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The Panther’s bars are in the metre: the regular iambic line paces, the run-on from “der Stäbe” to “so müd” is the gaze sliding past them, and the short last line of the third stanza is the image dying. “Römische Fontäne” is one sentence that overflows its lines as the water overflows the basins. The Torso’s sonnet makes its turn the moment of being seen. “Das Karussell” brings its refrain round as the animals come round. The thing poem is by conception a form in which the shape is the meaning, and at its best the book proves it. Held off the top because across so many poems the method sometimes becomes manner, and a number of sonnets carry their matter rather than know it.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence rather than promise: a century of return. “Der Panther” and the Torso have been reread, glossed, set as examples of what a lyric is and argued over for a hundred years without exhaustion, and the argument is live: is the Torso’s command aesthetic, moral or religious? “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes.” yields differently at each reading. The formal depth is as deep as the semantic: the rhyme schemes reward close analysis, and a rhyme placed on an article or a preposition is itself a meaning. Held lower because the depth is concentrated in perhaps forty poems. Much of the second part is less returned to and yields less, and the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus have drawn the deeper share of the commentary on Rilke.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The field is the German lyric of the twentieth century and, through translation, the English. The intrinsic force is high: the book constitutes the Dinggedicht as a mode of modern lyric, and it is the strongest proof in German that a poem could be an object made of attention. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: in German the thing poem became a lasting option, taught as such, and “Der Panther” is the type case in German schooling; in English the poems drew versions from poets of the first rank, Robert Lowell in Imitations and Randall Jarrell among them, and the attentive object poem of mid century English and American verse is in part in their debt. That debt is shared with Imagism and with William Carlos Williams, who came to the same ground by other roads, and Rilke’s widest reach runs more through the Elegies, the Sonnets and the Letters to a Young Poet than through this book.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over about 118 years. The text is whole and stable, published by Rilke himself in 1907 and 1908 and never in doubt. Presence has been continuous: in print in German since 1907, standard in anthologies and in schools, translated many times into English alone, whole by Edward Snow and by Stephen Cohn and poem by poem by many others, and into the major languages. Nothing in the book’s fabric is lost, and nothing in its reception has lapsed. Held at 9.1 and not higher because the book does not have the widest presence: among Rilke’s books that belongs to the Duino Elegies, and beyond them to a few lyric books of the world.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Rilke’s German, and the command of the line is among the highest of its century. Rhyme is constant and almost never forced; it falls on prepositions, articles and the ends of clauses broken across lines, so that the sonnet’s music is kept and its closure suspended. Vowel and consonant are worked to the subject: the slow, tired iambs of the Panther; the rising and spilling syntax of the fountain; the swift, spun movement of “Spanische Tänzerin”, where the dance catches like a match. The craft is load-bearing; the making is the poem’s claim. Charged: the virtuosity can show, some rhymes in the weaker poems are ingenious rather than necessary, and certain words recur as preciosity, “wunderlich” and the abstractions in “-heit”. The sound of the German is partly beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.

Score: 9.2 / 10

One law governs: the thing is seen until it gives back its inwardness, and is made in a closed form. Take the most distant elements, a flamingo in the Jardin des Plantes and Saul among the prophets, or the carousel and the corpses in the morgue: they obey the same law. The range is wide, beast, flower, building, myth, Bible, Paris street and the dead, and the law holds across all of it; this is an achievement, and not the coherence of a narrow book. Held off the top because the law is held more loosely in the second part, where portraits and narrative poems drift toward anecdote, and because some of the sacred and mythic poems bring back the older, effusive Rilke the method was meant to exclude.

Score: 8.7 / 10

For a book of lyric the reach of orders is large. The natural order, in the animals and the flowers; art, in the torso, the cathedral and the Buddha; the sacred, in the Old Testament poems and the same cathedral and Buddha; myth; the city; death and the body, in the morgue and the washing of a corpse. Consciousness is present chiefly as the act of seeing. What holds the axis lowest is what is thin or absent: the family, labour, the state, and history as lived. The social world appears only as things seen. The orders are held in one method, but they are often listed poem by poem rather than integrated. The figure describes the form; it does not punish it.

Score: 7.8 / 10