The god of faring and of distant message, the traveling-hood over his shining eyes, the slender wand held out before his body, the wings around his ankles lightly beating, and in his left hand, as entrusted, her.
The pitch rises here as much because of the subject's elevated nature as because of the open-endedness of "faring," propped up by the caesura and followed with the spacious "distant message." Both designations are far more suggestive than they are precise; one registers their vowels rather than their meaning. Connected by a preposition which is supposed to link them, they end up qualifying their respective vagueness and limitlessness as notions. In other words, one hears here the meter itself rather than the mental properties of what it deploys, which are eroded, washed out by the meter's own flow. There is quite a lot of "airing" in "faring," and the "distant message" expands to "distant passage." But then poetry has always been a melic art, especially in Orpheus' time, and it is, after all, Orpheus' vision of Hermes that we get here, so we may let our meter go. Anyhow, the English here is as inviting as "Den Gott des Ganges und der weiten Botschaft."
Well, not yet. There may well be other opportunities warranting song more than this one. And the poet knows this not only because he knows the plot and that Eurydice's turn in the poem, for instance, is coming up. He knows this because of the accumulation we mentioned a while ago of the meter's critical mass: the longer he keeps it in check, the greater will be its vocal explosion.
So for the moment it's back to the business-like, matter- of-fact tonality of"the traveling-hood over his shining eyes," although with this poet the matter-of-fact approach is extraordinarily rich.
Hermes' eyes are described as "shining" not simply because we are in the netherworld with its absence of light and color and the hood's shadow makes his eyes more prominent. No, it's because Hermes is a god, and his eyes shine with—as Rilke's contemporary, the great Greek poet Con- stantine Cavafy, put it about one of those Greek gods—"the joy of being immortal in his eyes."
"Shining" is, of course, a standard epithet for "eyes"; however, neither Orpheus' nor, as we shall see shortly, Eurydice's —which would be most appropriate—eyes are referred to in this manner. Moreover, this is the first epithet with positive connotations to appear in the thus far opaque body of the poem. So it's not stylistic inertia that lies behind this adjective, although the remainder of Hermes' description proceeds indeed along very traditional lines for that god's representation:
the slender wand held out before his body, the wings around his ankles lightly beating . . .
The only interesting things about these lines is the second appearance in the poem of "slender," perhaps not the most evocative choice in this case and making you think that, at the moment of the poem's composition, it was one of our poet's pet words. But then, he was twenty-nine years old, so his attachment to this epithet is perhaps understandable.
The wings around Hermes' ankles are, of course, as standard a detail of his attire as the lyre is of Orpheus'. That they are "lightly beating" denotes the slow pace at which the god moves, as Orpheus' hands 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" denote the opposite: the speed with which he moves as well as where he moves, both excluding the use of his instrument to the point of turning it into a decorative detail, a motif, worthy of adorning some classical'cornice.
Yet two lines later, it is all going to change.
XXV
Given human utterance's vocal properties, the most puzzling aspect of our ecriture is its horizontality. Whether it runs from right to left or vice versa, all that it is armed with to convey numerous tonal modulations is the exclamation point and question mark. Comma, semicolon, colon, dash, parentheses, period—all these things punctuate the linear, which is to say horizontal, version of our verbal existence. In the end, we buy this form of representation of our speech to the point of imparting to our utterances a certain mental, to say the least, tonal equivalent of horizontality, billing it now as equipoise, now as logic. Come to think of it, virtue is horizontal.
This stands to reason, for so is the ground underfoot. Yet when it comes to our speech, one may find oneselffeeling envious of Chinese characters, with their vertical arrangement: our voice darts in all directions; or else one may long for a pictogram over an ideogram. For late as we are in our happy process of evolution, we are short of means of conveying on paper tonal changes, shifts in emphasis, and the like. The graphics of our phonetic alphabets are far from being sufficient; typographic tricks such as line breaks or blank intervals between words fail as a system of notation and are plain wasteful.
It took ecriture so long to emerge not necessarily because the ancients were slow-witted but due to the anticipated inadequacy of ecriture to human speech. The potency of myths has to do perhaps precisely with their oral and vocal precedence over the written. Every record is reductive by definition. Ecriture is essentially a footprint—which I believe is the beginning of ecriture—left by a dangerous or benevolent but elsewhere-bound body in the sand.
So two thousand years later (two thousand six hundred, to be precise, since the first mention of Orpheus took place in the sixth century B.C.) our poet, by using structured verse—structured precisely to highlight the euphonic (i.e., vocal) properties ofwritten words and the caesuras that separate them—returns, as it were, this myth to its pre-ecrifure vocal origins. Vocally speaking, Rilke's poem and the ancient myth are one. More exactly, their euphonic difference equals nil. Which is what he is to show two lines later.
XXVI
Two lines below, Eurydice is introduced, and the vocal explosion goes off:
and in his left hand, as entrusted, her.
She, so belov'd, that from a single lyre
more mourning rose than from all women-mourners—
that a whole world of mourning rose, wherein all things were once more present: wood and vale and road and hamlet, field and stream and beast— and that around this world of mourning turned, even as around the other earth, a sun and a whole silent heaven full of stars, a heaven of mourning with disfigured stars— she, so beloved.
The lyre motif erupts here into full-blown singing. What triggers this is not even Eurydice herself but the epithet "belov'd." And what we get here is not her portrait but the ultimate characterization of Orpheus, which comes extremely close to being the author's self-portrait, or, at any rate, the desc-ription of his metier.
This passage is very similar to the autonomous sphere we encountered at the poem's beginning, except in this case we have, as it were, a universe—also, if you will, a sphere, though not static but in the process of expansion. At the center of this universe we find a lyre, initially engaged in a mimetic reproduction of reality but subsequently increasing its reach, sort oflike the traditional depiction of sound waves emitted by an antenna.
This, I daresay, is very much a formula for Rilke's own art, not to mention his vision of himself. The quoted passage echoes very closely the 1898 entry in his diary in which he, twenty-three years old and reasonably low on self-esteem, ponders restructuring himselfinto a semblance ofa demiurge omnipresent at every layer of his creations and traceable to the center: "There will be nothing outside this solitary figure [i.e., himself], for trees and hills, clouds and waves will only be symbols of those realities which he finds within himself."