A rather exalted vision, perhaps, to go by, but surely
transferrable, and, when applied to Orpheus, a fitting one. What matters is not so much the ownership or authorship of the emerging universe but its constantly widening radius; for its provenance (the lyre) is less important than its truly astronomical destination.
And the astronomy here, it must be noted, is very appropriately far from being heliocentric. It's deliberately epi- cyclic or, better yet, egocentric, since it's an Orphic, vocal astronomy, an astronomy of imagination and mourning. Hence its disfigured—refracted by tears—stars. Which, apparently, constitute the outer end of his cosmos.
But what I think is crucial for our understanding ofRilke is that these ever-widening concentric circles of sound bespeak a unique metaphysical appetite, to satisfy which he is capable of detaching his imagination from any reality, including that ofhimself, and proceeding autonomously within a mental equivalent of the galaxy or, with luck, beyond it. Herein lies the greatness of this poet; herein, too, lies the recipe for losing anything humanly attained—which is what presumably attracted him to the myth of Orpheus and Eu- rydice in the first place. Mter all, Orpheus was known specifically for his ability to move the inhabitants of the Celestial Mansions with his singing.
Which is to say that our author's notion of the world was free of any definable creed, since for him mimesis precedes genesis. Which is also to say that the origin of this centrifugal force enabling him to overcome gravitational pull to any center was that of verse itself. In a rhymed poem with a sustained stanzaic design this happens earlier. In an iambic pentameter blank-verse poem, it takes roughly forty or fifty lines. That is, if it occurs at all. It's simply that after covering such a distance, verse gets tired of its rhymelessness and wants to avenge it. Especially upon hearing the word Geliebte.
XXVH
This efl'ectively completes the portrait of Orpheus, son of Apollo and the Muse Calliope, husband of Eurydice. Here and there a few touches will be added, but on the whole, here he is, the bard from Thrace whose singing was so enrapturing that rivers would slow down and mountains would shift their places to hear his song more clearly. A man who loved his wife so much that when she suddenly died he went, lyre in hand, all the way to Hades to bring her back, and who even after failing in this mission kept mourning her and proved unsusceptible to the wiles of the Maenads with their understandable designs on him. Angry, they killed him and dismembered his body and threw it into the sea. His head drifted away and ended up at the island of Lesbos, where it was buried. His lyre drifted much farther away and became a constellation.
We see him at a point in his mythic career which promises to be high but ends up very low. And we see him depicted with, for all we can tell, unflattering sobriety: a terrified, self-absorbed man of genius, alone on a single, not much traveled pathway, concerned no doubt about making it to the exit. Were it not for the set piece about his mourning, we wouldn't believe him much capable of loving; perhaps we would not wish him success either.
For why should we empathize with him? Less highborn and less gifted than he is, we never will be exempt from the law of nature. With us, the journey to Hades is a one-way trip. What can we possibly learn from his story? That a lyre takes one farther than a plow or a hammer and anvil? That we should emulate geniuses and heroes? That perhaps audacity is what does it? For what if not sheer audacity was it that made him undertake this pilgrimage? And where does that audacity come from? Apollo's genes, or Calliope's? From his lyre, whose sound, not to mention its echo, travels farther than the man himself? Or is this belief that he may return from no matter where he goes simply a spin-off from too much boustrophedon reading? Or does that audacity come perhaps from the Greeks' instinctive realization that loving is essentially a oneway street, and that mourning is its continuation? In the pre- ecriture culture, one could arrive at this realization rather easily.
XXVIII
And now it's time to move the third figure:
But hand in hand now with that god she walked,
her paces circumscribed by lengthy shroudings,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
Wrapt in herself, like one whose time is near,
she thought not of the man who went before them,
nor of the road ascending into life.
Wrapt in herself she wandered. And her deadness
was filling her like fullness.
Full as a fruit with sweetness and with darkness
was she with her great death, which was so new
that for the time she could take nothing in.
Here she goes, Eurydice, Orpheus' wife, who died of snakebite, fleeing from the pursuit of Aristaeus (also sired by Apollo and thus her husband's half brother). Now she moves very slowly: like somebody just woken up, or else like a statue, whose marble "lengthy shroudings" interfere with her small steps.
Her appearance in the poem presents the author with a number of problems. The first among them is the necessity of changing the pitch, especially after the vocal outburst of the preceding passage about Orpheus' mourning, to a more lyrical one, as she is a woman. This is partly accomplished by the repetition of "she, so beloved," which comes off as a choked wail.
More important, her arrival calls for the author's altering his entire posture in the poem, that of manly restraint fit for dealing with the figure of Orpheus—whose place the narrator may occasionally occupy—being unseemly (at least in Rilke's time) vis-a-vis a female heroine, and one who is dead at that. The narrative, in other words, will be infused with a substantial portion of eulogizing and elegiac tonality, if not wholly subverted by them.
This is so much so that "uncertain, gentle, and without impatience" sounds more like the author's inner monologue, like a set of commands he issues to himself on embarking on the description of Eurydice, than like an account of this statue's progress. Clearly a certitude—or a definitive attitude, at any rate—displayed by the poet in the Orpheus part of the poem is lacking: our poet is groping here. But, then, she is dead.
And to describe the state of death is the tallest order in this line of work. This is so in no small part because of the number and quality of the jobs already done in this, shall we say, vein. Also, because of the general affinity of poetry with this subject, if only because every poem, in its own right, gravitates toward a finale.
Rilke chooses, assuming that the process is at least in part conscious, a tactic we may expect from him: he presents Eurydice as an utterly autonomous entity. The only distinction is that instead of the centrifugal procedure employed in the portrayal of Orpheus—who was, for the poem's intents and purposes, after all alive—he goes here for the centripetal one.
XXIX
And the centripetal treatment starts, naturally, at the outer limits of an autonomous entity. For Eurydice, it's the shroud. Hence the first word of her description, "wrapt"; Rilke, to his great credit, proceeds not by unwrapping his heroine but by following the shroud itself to the entity's center.
"Thought not of the man who went before them" approaches the mental, subjective layers of herself, going, as it were, from the more outer ones to the more inner and, in a manner of speaking, more warm, since time is more abstract a notion than man. She is defined by these notions, but she is not them: she fills them up.