To be sure, "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" is as much a flight from biography as it is from geography. Of Sweden there is at best the diffused, gray, somber light enveloping the entire scene. Of Italy there is still less, save the frequently made claim that it was a bas relief in the Museo Nazionale in Naples depicting the poem's three characters that set Rilke's pen in motion.
The reliefdoes exist, and that claim could be valid, but, one would think, of self-defeating consequence. For the copies of this particular marble are innumerable, as are this myth's vastly various other renditions. The only way for us to hook said relief with the poem and the poet's personal circumstances would be to come up with proof that our poet recognized, for instance, a physiognomic resemblance between the relief's female figure and either his sculptress wife, at the time estranged, or better yet his great love, Lou Andreas-Salome, estranged from him at that time as well. Yet we possess practically no evidence on that score. And even had that evidence been in abundance, it would be of no use. For a particular union, or its dissolution, is of interest only so far as it avoids metaphor. Once metaphor is introduced, it steals the show. Besides, the features of all the relief's characters appear too general—as befits a mythological subject treated for the past three millennia in every art form with relentless frequency—for any particular allusion.
Estrangement, on the other hand, is everyone's forte, and estrangement is what this poem, in part, is about. It is to this part in particular that the poem owes its perennial appeal; all the more so because it deals with the essence of that sentiment rather than with the personalized version specific to our poet's predicament. On the whole, what lies at the core of "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" is a common enough locution which formulates that essence and goes approximately like this: "If you leave, I'll die." What our poet, technically speaking, has done in this poem is simply cross all the way over to the far end of this formula. That's why we find ourselves at the outset of "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" squarely in the netherworld.
I I
As conceits go, a journey to the netherworld is about as ur as is the first traveler to undertake it: Orpheus, the ur-poet.
Which is to say that this conceit rivals in age literature as such, or perhaps even predates it.
For all the obvious attractions of a round-trip story, the origins of this conceit are not literary at all. They have to do, I believe, with the fear of being buried alive, sufficiently common even in our own time but, one imagines, quite rampant in days of yore, with their sweeping epidemics— particularly those of cholera.
As fears go, this one undoubtedly is a product of mass society—of a society in any case where the ratio between the mass and its individual members results in the former's relative disregard for the latter's actual end. In the days of yore such a ratio would be provided chiefly by an urban setting or perhaps by a military camp—fertile ground for epidemics and literature (oral or not) alike, since, in order to spread, both require human amassment.
It is suitable, then, that the subject of the earliest works of literature known to us is the military campaign. Several of them incorporate various versions of the myth of descent into the netherworld, with the subsequent return of the hero. That has to do as much with the underlying mori- bundity of any human endeavor, warfare in particular, as with the congeniality of such a myth—with its equivalent of a happy end—to a narrative suggesting the loss of life on a mass scale.
I I I
The notion of the netherworld as a ramified, subway-like underground structure derives in all likelihood from the (practically identical) limestone landscapes of Asia Minor and the northern Peloponnesus, rich in what used to serve as both a prehistoric and a historic human habitat: in caves.
The kingdom of Hades is essentially an echo of the pre- urban past, as the intricacy of the netherworld's topography suggests, and the most probable place of this notion's origin is ancient Cappadocia. (In our own civilization, the most audible echo of a cave, with all its otherworldly implications, is obviously a cathedral.) Any given cluster of Cappadocian caves might indeed have housed a population similar in size to that of a small modern township or big village, with the most privileged occupying presumably the spaces closer to fresh air and the rest more and more remote. Often, the caves meander for hundreds of meters into the rock.
It seems that the least accessible among them were used by the inhabitants for storage and as burial grounds. When a dweller in such a community died, he would be taken to the most remote end of the cave network, laid there, and the entrance to his resting place would be barred with a stone. With such a start, the imagination wouldn't have to work too hard to conceive of the caves' patterns' continuation farther into the porous limestone. On the whole, finality ushers in the idea of infi nity more readily than the other way around.
IV
Some three thousand years of that imagination's steady work later, it's natural to liken the netherworld's domain to an abandoned mine. The opening lines of "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" bespeak the degree of our fluency with the notion of the kingdom of the dead, whose familiarity somewhat wore off or fell into disuse because of more pressing matters:
That was the strange unfathomed mine of souls. And they, like silent veins of silver ore, were winding through its darkness . . .
"Strange" serves here as an invitation to suspend the rational approach to the story, and the translator's amplification of wunderlich, as "unfathomed" suggests both the mental and the physical depth of the place we find ourselves in. These epithets qualify the only tangible noun the poem's opening line contains, which is "mine." However, whatever tangibility there is to speak of is blown away with another qualifier: "of souls."
As the netherworld's depictions and definitions go, a "mine of souls" is extremely effective, because "souls" here, meaning in the first place simply "the dead," carries with it also both its pagan and its Christian connotations. The netherworld thus is both a storage and a source of supplies. This warehouse aspect of the kingdom of the dead fuses the two metaphysics available to us, resulting, whether from pressure, shortage of oxygen, or high temperature, in the next line's "silver ore. "
Such oxidation is a product of neither chemistry nor alchemy but of cultural metabolism, most immediately detectable in language; and nothing shows this better than "silver."
v
Museo Nazionale or no Museo Nazionale, this "silver" comes, as it were, from Naples, from another cave heading into the netherworld, about ten miles west of the city. This cave, which had about a hundred openings, was the dwelling place of the Sibyl of Cumae, whom Virgil's Aeneas consults about his descent into the kingdom of the dead, which he undertakes in Book VI of the Aeneid, to see his father. The Sibyl warns Aeneas about various difficulties attendant on this enterprise, chief among them breaking the Golden
Bough off a golden tree he will encounter along the way. Presenting this bough to Persephone, the Queen of Hades, is his only way to secure admission to her dark realm.
Now the Golden Bough, as well as its tree, obviously stands in for underground deposits of golden ore. Hence the difficulty ofbreaking it off, which is the difficulty of extracting a whole vein of ore from the rock. Unwittingly, or consciously trying to avoid imitating Virgil, Rilke changes the metal and, with it, the color of the scene, aspiring evidently to a somewhat more monochromatic rendition of Persephone's domain. With this change, of course, comes also a change in the trade value of his "ore," which is souls, suggesting both their plenitude and the narrator's own unemphatic posture. "Silver," in short, comes from the Sibyl via Virgil. This is what that metabolism is all about; but we've just scratched the surface.