For all the recent popularity of the subconscious, our dependence on the conscious is still greater. If responsibilities begin in dreams, as Delmore Schwartz once put it, poems are where they are ultimately articulated and fulfilled. For while it's silly to suggest a hierarchy among various realities, it can be argued that all reality aspires to the condition of a poem: if only for reasons of economy.
This economy is art's ultimate raison d'etre, and all its history is the history of its means of compression and condensation. In poetry, it is language, itself a highly condensed version of reality. In short, a poem generates rather than reflects. So if a poem addresses a mythological subject, this amounts to a reality scrutinizing its own history, or, if you will, to an effect putting a magnifying glass to its cause and getting blinded by it.
"Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes" is exactly that, as much as it is the author's self-portrait with that glass in hand, and one learns from this poem a lot more about him than any life of him will offer. What he is looking at is what made him; but he who does the looking is far more palpable, for you can look at something only from the outside. That's the difference between a dream and a poem for you. Say, the reality was language's, the economy was his.
IX
And the first example of that economy is the title. Titles are a quite difficult affair: they run so many risks. Of being didactic, overly emphatic, banal, ornate, or coy. This one eludes any definition and has the air of a caption underneath a photograph or a painting—or, for that matter, a bas relief.
And presumably it was intended as such. This would suit the purpose of a poem treating a Greek myth very well, proclaiming the subject matter and nothing else. Which is what this title does. It states the theme and is free of any emotional investment.
Except that we do not know whether the title preceded the composition of the poem or was thought up afterward. One is tempted, naturally, to assume the former, given the largely dispassionate tone throughout the poem. In other words, the title offers the reader a cue.
Well, so far, so good, and one may only marvel at the remarkable shrewdness of a twenty-nine-year-old putting full stops after each name here to avoid any semblance of melodrama. As on Greek vases, one thinks, and marvels at his intelligence again. But then one looks at the title and notices that something is missing. Did I say "after each name"?
There is no full stop after Hermes, and he is the last. Why?
Because he is a god, and punctuation is the province of mortals. To say the least, a period after a god's name won't do, because gods are eternal and can't be curbed. Hermes, "the god of faring and of distant message," least of all.
The use of divinity in poetry has its own etiquette, which goes at least as far back as the medieval period, and Dante, for instance, advised against rhyming anything in the Christian pantheon with low-level nouns. Rilke, as it were, takes this etiquette a dot further, pairing Orpheus and Eurydice in their finality but leaving the god literally open-ended. As far as giving cues is concerned, this is a superbly emblematic job; one almost wishes it were a typo. But then it would be divine intervention.
X
This blend of matter-of-factness and open-endedness is what constitutes the diction of the poem. Nothing could be more suitable for retelling a myth, which is to say that the choice of diction was as much Rilke's own achievement as it was the product of this myth's previous renditions—say, from the Georgics onward. It's those innumerable previous versions that push our poet into the flight from any flourish, into adopting this dispassionate timbre tinged now and then with a note of somber wistfulness, equally befitting the age and the tenor of his story.
What is more Rilke's own is, in the opening lines of the poem, the use of color. Its bleached pastel tones of gray, of opaque porphyry, all the way down to Orpheus' own blue mantle are straight out of the Worpswede-soft bed of Northern expressionism, with its subdued, washed-out sheets wrinkled by the pre-Raphaelite-cum-Art-Nouveau aesthetic idiom of the turn of the century.
That was the strange unfathomed mine of souls. And they, like .silent veins of silver ore, were winding through its darkness. Between roots welled up the blood that flows on to mankind, like blocks of heavy porphyry in the darkness. Else there was nothing red.
But there were rocks
and ghostly forests. Bridges over voidness and that immense, gray, unreflecting pool that hung above its so far distant bed like a gray rainy sky above the landscape. And between meadows, soft and full of patience, appeared the pale strip of the single pathway, like a long line of linen laid to bleach.
Now this is the exposition; so, naturally, the emphasis on color is substantial. You may count up to two "grays," a couple of "darknesses," three "reds." Add to that the "ghostly" of the forests and the "pale" of the pathway—as belonging to the same monochrome-gravitating family of epithets, since the source of light is withdrawn.
This is a scene devoid of any sharp color. If anything stands out, it is the souls' "veins of silver ore," whose glitter also amounts to an animated version of gray at best. "Rocks" project a further absence of color, another degree of gray perhaps, especially being preceded by the spectrum- thwarting "Else there was nothing red."
It is an anticlimactic palette, fashionable at the time, that Rilke uses here, obviously running the risk of turning the poem into a period piece. Having read thus far, we learn at least what kind of art was inspiring for him, and we may wriggle our modern noses at this dated aesthetic idiom: at best, it's somewhere between Odilon Redon and Edvard Munch.
XI
Yet for all his slaving as a secretary for Rodin, for all his tremendous sentiment for Cezanne, for all his immersion in the artistic milieu, he was a stranger to the visual arts, and his taste for them was incidental. A poet is always a concep- tualist rather than a colorist, and having read thus far, we realize that his eye in the quoted passage is subordinate to his imagination, or, to put it more accurately, to his mind. For while we can trace the application ofcolor in these lines to a certain period in European painting, the spatial construction of
Bridges over voidness and that immense, gray, unreflecting pool that hung above its so far distant bed like a gray rainy sky above the landscape
has no detectable origin. Save, perhaps, a standard textbook figure of a river (or lake) in profile in a high-school geometry lesson. Or both.
For "Bridges over voidness" echoes an arc chalked upon a blackboard. Similarly, "and that immense, gray, unreflecting pooVthat hung above its so far distant bed" evokes a horizontal line drawn on the same blackboard and supplemented with a semicircle underneath joining that line's two ends. Add to this "like a gray rainy sky above the landscape," which is yet another semicircle arching over that horizontal line, and what you get is the figure of a sphere with its diameter within it.
XII
Rilke's poems are brimming and bristling with such depictions of things-in-themselves, in Neue Gedichte particularly. Take, for instance, his famous "Panther," with its "dance of forces around their center." He does this sort of thing with relish, sometimes gratuitously, just at a rhyme's suggestion. Yet arbitrariness in poetry is a better architect, because it supplies a poem's structure with its climate.
Here, of course, this sketch of a sphere fits rather well into the notion of his subterranean landscape's utter autonomy. It performs nearly the same function as his use of "porphyry," with its strictly geological connotations. What's more interesting, however, is the psychological mechanism behind this drawing full circle, and I believe that in this iambic pentameter blank-verse job, the equivalence of the two semicircles is the echo of the rhyme principle—of, to put it rudely, the inertia of pairing and/or equating one thing with another—whose application this particular poem was meant to eschew.