Now Immeasurable

Evening

Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternatively stone in you and star.



Let's talk about Rilke. I don't read or speak German even in the slightest. He tends towards the Romantic spectrum of early modernism. Half the time I'm not sure I understand what he means or what he means to mean. From Kafka I expect that, welcome it, but Rilke is hard to grasp.


Maybe it's because he's so precise and so tender. He has an authority that doesn't come around much anymore. Really, Eliot and Auden were the final word when it came to poetry in English, but they were the last of those who could give a final word. It's kind of the last vestige of empire, an illusion that there is a way things ought to be, a precise, immovable truth universally accepted. 


Rilke has some of that, but not by puffing out his chest. He does it by making you feel there is no other possible way for things to be. I mean, really, what's the alternative? Is there truly any other way to feel by yourself as the night settles down around you and the stars come out? I find him incredibly persuasive and difficult to argue with.


This poem, especially, was what drew me into the world he depicted. I knew him from "The Panther," which I've discussed earlier. But this showed me he could really compose with words, he wasn't a jingle-writing hack who got lucky. 


A lot of this is owed to the translation, let me grant you. Mitchell's is definitely the best of what few I've read. But from what I can tell, it's relatively easy to set down a workman-like version of what Rilke is getting at. Most of the translations are pretty similar one to the other, with minor variations in degree and tone. The difference here is how well the poetry works in English - I don't care if it has a very different weight or even denotation in German: "it is alternatively stone in you and star" is an incredible line that enriches the language. Almost every poem in Mitchell's version has some line or phrase like that.


But in the final view, what draws me to Rainer Maria Rilke is the wistfulness and the world-building in the poetry. The land he lives in is elegant, old, somewhat quiet and restrained, and very very sad. The sadness isn't maudlin; it's bittersweet like the heartbreak of watching someone struggle hard within themselves for composure. It's being overcome without letting the emotion be what is overcoming you.


My very first post on here was a Rilke poem, and all along I planned to get back to him at the very end. His poetry helps me to calibrate what I'm feeling: when evenings fall, do I have the same kinds of sensations? Can I peer at an armless statue and teach myself life-changing lessons? 


Sometimes you must change your life. And sometimes you must almost inexpressibly unravel it.