And what fills her up is her death. The underlying metaphor of the next four lines is that of a vessel defined by its contents rather than by its o^ shape and design. The cum- bersomeness, or, more accurately, bulkiness of that shape ushers in the oblique but nonetheless extremely palpable imagery of pregnancy highlighting the richness and myste- riousness of Eurydice's new state, as well as its alienating aspect of total withdrawal. Naturally, "one whose time is near" comes off loaded with grief translated into the guilt of surviving, or, to put it more accurately, of responsibility for perceiving death from the outside, for filling up, as it were, the beloved with that perception.
This is Rilke at his best. He is a poet of isolation, and isolating the subject is his forte. Give him a subject and he will tum it immediately into an object, take it out of its context, and go for its core, inhabiting it with his extraordinary erudition, intuitions, and instinct for allusion. The net result is that the subject becomes his, colonized by the intensity of his attention and imagination. Death, somebody else's especially, certainly warrants this approach.
XXX
Notice, for instance, that there is not a word about the heroine's physical beauty—which is something to expect when a dead woman, and the wife of Orpheus at that, is being eulogized. Yet there is this line, "She had attained a new virginity," which accomplishes a lot more than reams of the most imaginative praise. Apart from being, like the above allusion to pregnancy, one more take on the notion of Eu- rydice's total alienation from her poet, this is obviously a reference to Venus, the goddess of love, endowed like many a goddess with the enviable (by some) capacity for self- renewing virginity—a capacity that had much less to do with the value the ancients placed on virginity as such than with their notion of divine exemption from the standard principles of causality binding mortals.
Be that as it might have been, the underlying meaning of this line is that our heroine even in death resembles Venus. This is, of course, the highest compliment one can possibly be paid, because what comes to your mind first is beauty synonymous with the goddess, thanks to her numerous depictions; her miraculous properties, including her regaining virginity after each sexual encounter with a god or a mortal, you recall later if at all.
Still, our poet here seems to be after something larger than imaginative compliments per se, since that could have been accomplished by the just quoted line. The line, however, ends not with a period but with a line break, after which we read "and was intangible." Naturally, one shouldn't read too much into lines, especially translated ones; but beyond this wonderfully evocative, very much fin-de-siecle qualifier lies a kind of equation between a mortal and a goddess which the latter could regard only as a backhanded compliment.
Of course, being a product of a later civilization, and a German on top of that, our poet can't avoid making a bit of heavy weather ofEros and Thanatos once he sees an opening. So the suggestion that, to the goddess, the outcome of a sexual encounter is never anything other than le petit mort can be put down to that. Yet what appears dramatic to a mortal, to the immortals, whose metier is infinity, may be less so, if not downright attractive. And the equation of love and death is presumably one of those things.
So in the end Venus perhaps wouldn't be much disturbed to be used as a vehicle to Eurydice's tenor. What's more, the goddess might be the first to appreciate the poet's resolution to drive the whole notion of existence, of being, inside: for that's what divinity in the final analysis is all about. So his stressing the heroine's corporeality, indeed her carnality, seals the vessel further off, practically promoting Eurydice to divine status, and infinity to sensual pleasure.
XXXI
That the narrator's and Orpheus' perspective on Eurydice diverge here is beside the point. To Orpheus, Eurydice's death is a pure loss that he wants to reverse. To the narrator, it is his and her gain, which he wants to extend.
A seeker of autonomy for his objects, Rilke certainly couldn't fail to detect this property in either his notion of death or that of love. What makes him equate them is their common rejection of the previous state. To wit, of life or of indifference. The clearest manifestation of that rejection is, of course, oblivion, and this is what our poet zeroes in on here with understandable gusto:
her sex had closed like a young flower at the approach of evening, and her pale hands had grown so disaccustomed to being a wife that even the slim god's endlessly gentle contact as he led her disturbed her like a too great intimacy.
For oblivion is obviously the first cry of infinity. One gets here the sense that Rilke is stealing Eurydice from Orpheus to a far greater degree than the myth itself calls for. In particular, he rules out even Hermes as a possible object of Orpheus' envy or jealousy, which is to say that her infinity might exclude the entire Greek pantheon. One thing is certain: our poet is far more interested in the forces pulling the heroine away from life than in those that might bring her back to it. In this, however, he doesn't contradict the myth but extends its vector.
XXXII
The question is, who uses whom—Rilke the myth, or the myth Rilke? Myths are essentially a revelatory genre. They deal in the interplay of gods and mortals or, to put it a bit more bluntly, of infinities with finalities. Normally the confines of the story are such that they leave a poet very little room for maneuvering the plot line, reducing him to the role of a mouthpiece. Faced with that and with his public's assumed prior knowledge of the story, a poet tries to excel in his lines. The better the myth is known, the tougher the poet's job.
As we said before, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice
is a very popular one, tried by an extraordinary number of hands. To embark on rendering it anew, one should have a compelling reason indeed. Yet the compelling reason (whatever it might be), in order to be felt as such, itself must have something to do with both finalities and infinities. In other words, the compelling reason is itself myth's relative.
Whatever it was that possessed Rilke in 1904 to undertake a rendering of this myth, it is not reducible to personal anguish or sexual anxiety, as some of his modem critics would have it, since those things are manifestly finite. What plays to a big audience in, say, Berkeley wouldn't ruffle the ink pot of the twenty-nine-year-old German poet in 1904, however much such things might happen to trigger a particular insight or—more likely—might themselves be the by-product of that insight's effects. Whatever it was that possessed him to write this poem must have had an aspect of myth, a sense of infinity.
XXXIII
Now, a poet arrives at this sense fastest by employing metrical verse, since meters are a means of restructuring time. This is so because every syllable has a temporal value. A line of iambic pentameter, for instance, is an equivalent of five seconds, though it could be read faster, especially if not out loud. A poet, however, always reads what he has written out loud. The meanings of words and their acoustics are saddled in his mind, therefore, with duration. Or, if you will, the other way around. In any case, a line of pentameter means five seconds spent differently from any other five seconds, including those of the next pentameter line.
This goes for any other meter, and a poet's sense of infinity is temporal rather than spatial practically by default. But few other meters are capable of generating the dispassionate monotone of blank verse, all the more perceptible, in Rilke's case, after a decade of practically nonstop rhyming. Quite apart from alluding to the poetry of Greco-Roman antiquity, habitually rendered in blank verse, this meter must have smelled to Rilke in 1904 of pure time, simply because it promised him neutrality of tone and freedom from the emphasis inevitable in rhymed verse. So up to a certain point in Eurydice's detachment from her previous state one discerns an echo ofthe poet's attitude to his previous diction, for she is neutral and free of emphasis. This is about as autobiographical as it gets.