It does; but the rhyme principle makes itselffelt through this poem like a muscle through a shirt. A poet is a con- ceptualist if only because his mind is conditioned by the properties of his means, and nothing makes you connect heretofore disparate things and notions like rhyme. These connections are often unique or singular enough to create a sense of their result's autonomy. Furthermore, the longer our poet is at it, at generating or dealing with autonomous entities, the more the notion of autonomy rubs off on his own psychological makeup, his sense of himself.
This line of thinking may take us, of course, straight into Rilke's biography, but that's hardly necessary, since biography will avail us much less than the verse itself. For the shuttling and oscillating of verse, fueled by that rhyme principle while questioning conceptual consonance, offers a far greater mental and emotional reach than any romantic endeavor. That's why one settles for a literary career in the first place.
Underneath the exposition's alternative landscape, with all it contains, including the perfect sphere, runs, like a painter's signature, the wonderfully meandering "pale strip of the single pathway/like a long line oflinen laid to bleach," whose alliterative beauty should be credited, no doubt, to its English translator, J. B. Leishman.
This is a remarkably good circumlocution for an untrav- eled road, which, we learn a line before, is the only one in this alternative, wholly autonomous world just created by the poet. This is not the only such creation in this poem; more are to come, and they, retroactively, will explain to us the poet's appetite for self-contained scenes. But this is indeed an exposition, and Rilke proceeds here as a good stage designer setting the scene for the movement of his characters.
So last comes the pathway, a meandering horizontal line "between meadows, soft and full of patience," i.e., accustomed to the absence of movement but implicitly waiting for it: like us.
Landscapes, after all, are to be inhabited; the ones sporting a road, in any case, are. In other words, now the poem ceases to be a painting and becomes a story: now he can start moving his figures.
And on this single pathway they approached.
In front the slender man in the blue mantle, gazing in dumb impatience straight before him.
His steps devoured the way in mighty chunks
they did not pause to chew; his hands were hanging,
heavy and clenched, out of the falling folds,
no longer conscious of the lightsome lyre,
the lyre which had grown into his left
like twines of rose into a branch of olive.
It seemed as though his senses were divided:
for, while his sight ran like a dog before him,
turned round, came back, and stood, time and again,
distant and waiting, at the path's next turn,
his hearing lagged behind him like a smell.
It seemed to him at times as though it stretched
back to the progress of those other two
who should be following up this whole ascent.
Then once more there was nothing else behind him
but his climb's echo and his mantle's wind.
He, though, assured himself they still were coming;
said it aloud and heard it die away.
They still were coming, only they were two
that trod with fearful lightness. If he durst
but once look back (if only looking back
were not undoing of this whole enterprise
still to be done), he could not fail to see them,
the two light-footers, following him in silence . . .
"The slender man in the blue mantle" is obviously Orpheus himself. We should be interested in this depiction for a variety of reasons, above all because if there is anyone in this poem to tell us about its author, it is Orpheus. First, because he is a poet. Second, because in the context ofthis myth, he is a suffering party. Third, because he also has to imagine what is going on. Among the three, the emergence of some semblance ofthe author's self-portrait is inevitable.
All the same, we shouldn't lose sight of the narrator,
for it is he who gave us this exposition. It's the narrator who provided the poem with its deadpan title, thus gaining our confidence as regards the rest. It's his version of the myth we are dealing with, not Orpheus'. In other words, Rilke and the poet shouldn't overlap in our minds completely, if only because no two poets are alike.
Still, if our Orpheus is only an aspect of our author, that's already of sufficient interest to us, because through his portrayal of our ur-poet we can espy the great German's own vantage point and what—as he stands at that point— he envies or disdains in the figure of Orpheus. Who knows, perhaps the whole purpose of this poem for its author was in sorting these things out.
So as tempting as this might be, we should avoid fusing in our minds the author and his character. It's more difficult, of course, for us to resist this temptation than it was for Rilke himself, for whom total identification with Orpheus would be just plain unseemly. Hence his rather hard look at the legendary bard from Thrace. We should attempt to follow suit as we look at them both.
XV
". . . the slender man in the blue mantle" gives you very little, save the complexion and perhaps the height. "Blue" doesn't seem to denote anything in particular; it simply makes the figure more visible against the colorless background.
"Gazing in dumb impatience straight before him" is a bit more loaded and appears unflattering. Although Orpheus is understandably anxious to get it over with, the author's choice of psychological detail is quite telling. Theoretically, there must have been some other options: Orpheus' joy at regaining his beloved wife, for instance. However, by selecting ostensibly negative characterization, the author achieves two goals. First, he distances himselffrom Orpheus. Second, "impatience" underscores the fact that we are dealing with a figure in motion: with human movements in the domain of gods. This couldn't be otherwise, since in our visual habits we are to the ancients what their gods are to us. And equally inevitable is the failure of Orpheus' mission, as human movements in divine precincts are doomed from the threshold: theyare subject to a difi'erent clock. Sub specie aeternitatis, any human movement would appear a bit too choleric and impatient. Come to think of it, Rilke's rendition of the myth, removed as he is in time from antiquity, is in itself the product of that eternity's small part.
But like a germ that each spring shoots up a new leaf, a myth engenders its mouthpiece century after century in every culture. So Rilke's poem is not so much a rendition of the myth as its growth. For all the differences between the human and divine time patterns—a difference which is at the core of this myth—the poem is still the story of a mortal told by a mortal. A god perhaps would present Orpheus in a harsher light than Rilke—since, to the gods, Orpheus is just a trespasser. If he is to be clocked at all, it's just to time his expulsion, and the gods' epithets for Orpheus' movements would be, no doubt, tinged with Schadenfreude.
"Dumb impatience" is an utterly human characterization; it has an air of personal reminiscence, of hindsight, if you will, of belated regret. Airs of that kind abound in this poem, imparting to Rilke's retelling of this myth an aspect of recollection. But myths have no other seat in men save memory; and a myth whose subject is loss only more so. What makes this sort of myth memorable is one's own experience of a similar nature. When you talk of loss you are on home ground, antiquity or no antiquity. Let's jump the hurdle, then, and let's equate myth with memory; this way we'll spare ourselves likening the life of our psyche to the vegetable kingdom; this way we might get some explanation for myth's haunting powers over ourselves and of the detectable regularity of their recurrence in every culture.