So having imagined that the level of personal reference is present here, we should take the next logical step and imagine a particular context and psychological significance informing the heroine's utterance in the poem.
That's not too difficult. Put yourself into any rejected lover's shoes and imagine yourself, say, on a rainy night passing after a protracted hiatus the all-too-familiar entrance of your beloved's house, stopping, and pressing the bell. And imagine the voice coming over, say, an intercom, inquiring who is there, and imagine yourself replying something like, "It's me, John." And imagine the voice, familiar to you in its slightest modulation, returning to you with a soft, colorless "Who?"
You would assume then not so much that you'd been entirely forgotten as that you'd been replaced. This is the worst possible interpretation of "Who?" in your current situation, and you may go for it. Whether you're right is a different matter. But if eventually you find yourself writing a poem about alienation or the worst possible thing a human being can encounter, for instance, death, you might draw on this experience of being replaced to add, so to speak, local color. All the more so because, being replaced, you seldom know by whom.
XXXIX
This is what might or might not have been behind this line, which cost Rilke an insight into the nature of the forces running the Orpheus-Eurydice hiatus. It took him seven more lines to get to the myth's own story, but it was worth waiting for.
The myth's own story is like this: Orpheus and Eurydice seem to be pulled in opposite directions by conflicting forces: he, to life; she, to death.
Which is to say, he is claimed by finality while she is by infinity.
Ostensibly, there is a semblance of parity between the two, with life showing perhaps some edge over death, for the latter allows the former to make an inroad into death's domain. Or it may be the other way around and Pluto and Persephone allow Orpheus to enter Hades to collect his wife and bring her back to life precisely because they are confident that he is going to fail. Perhaps even the taboo they issue, forbidding him to turn and look back, reflects their apprehension that Orpheus may find their realm too seductive to return to life, and they don't want to offend their fellow god Apollo by claiming his son before his time.
Ultimately, of course, it appears that the force that controls Eurydice is stronger than the one that controls Orpheus. This stands to reason, for one remains dead longer than one may be alive. And it follows that infinity yields nothing to finality—save perhaps in verse—for, being categories of time, neither can change. And it also follows that these categories use mortals not so much to manifest their forces' presence or power as to mark the boundaries of their respective domains.
XL
All this is pretty absorbing, no doubt, but in the final analysis it doesn't explain how or, for that matter, why the divine taboo works. For that, it turns out, the myth needs a poet, and it's this myth's great fortune that it finds Rainer Maria Rilke.
Here is the poem's final part, which tells you about the mechanism of that taboo as well as who is using whom: a poet a myth, or a myth a poet:
But in the distance, dark in the bright exit, someone or other stood, whose countenance was indistinguishable. Stood and saw how, on a strip of pathway between meadows, with sorrow in his look, the god of message turned silently to go behind the figure already going back by that same pathway, its paces circumscribed by lengthy shroudings, uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
Now, the "bright exit" is obviously the exit from Hades into life, and the "someone or other" who is standing there, and whose "countenance" is "indistinguishable," is Orpheus. He is "someone or other" for two reasons: because he is of no relevance to Eurydice and because he is just a silhouette for Hermes, the god, who looks at Orpheus standing on the threshold of life from the dark depth of the netherworld.
In other words, Hermes at this point is still facing in the same direction as he did before, throughout the poem. Whereas Orpheus, as we've been told, has turned. As to Eurydice . . . and here comes the greatest job of the entire poem.
"Stood and saw," says the narrator, emphasizing by the change of tense in the verb "to stand" Orpheus' regret and acknowledgment of failure. But what he sees is truly remarkable. For he sees the god turning, but only now, to follow "behind the figure/already going back ..." Which is to say that Eurydice has turned also. Which is to say, the god is the last to turn.
And the question is, when did Eurydice turn? And the answer is "already," and what it boils down to is that Orpheus and Eurydice turned simultaneously.
Our poet, in other words, has synchronized their movements, telling us thereby that the forces controlling finality and infinity themselves are controlled from a certain—let's call it panel, and that this control panel is, on top of that, automatic.
Our next question is, presumably, a soft "Who?"
XLI
The Greeks certainly would know the answer and say, Chronos, since he is the one to whom all myths point anyway. At the moment, though, he is beyond our concern or, for that matter, reach. We should stop here, where roughly six hundred seconds, or ten minutes, of this poem written ninety years ago leave us.
It is not_a bad place, though it is only a finality. Except that we don't see it as such—perhaps because we don't wish to identify with Orpheus, rejected and failed. We see it rather as an infinity, and we even would prefer to identify with Eurydice, because it's easier to identify with beauty, especially dissipating and "given far and wide like fallen rain."
These, however, are the extremes. What makes the place where we are left by this poem indeed attractive is that while we are here, we have the chance to identify with its author, Rainer Maria Rilke, wherever he is.
Toro, Sweden 1994
Letter to Horace
My dear Horace,
If what Suetonius tells us about your lining your bedroom walls with mirrors to enjoy coitus from every angle is true, you may find this letter a bit dull. On the other hand, you may be entertained by its coming to you from a part of the world whose existence you never suspected, and some two thousand years after your death, at that. Not bad for a reflection, is it?
You were almost fifty-seven, I believe, when you died in 8 B.C., though you weren't aware of either C. Himself or a new millennium coming. As for myself, I am fifty-four now; my own millennium, too, has only a few years to run. Whatever new order of things the future has in store, I anticipate none of it either. So we may talk, I suppose, man to man, Horace. And I may as well begin with a locker-room kind of story.
Last night I was in bed rereading your Odes, and I bumped into that one to your fellow poet Rufus Valgius in which you are trying to convince him not to grieve so much over the loss of his son (according to some) or his lover (according to others). You proceed for a couple of stanzas with your exempla, telling him that So-and-so lost this person and Such-and-such another, and then you suggest to Rufus that he, as a kind of self-therapy, get engaged in praising Augustus' new triumphs. You mention several recent conquests, among them grabbing some space from the Scythians.
Actually, that must have been the Geloni; but it doesn't matter. Funny, I hadn't noticed this ode before. My people—well, in a manner of speaking—aren't mentioned that often by great poets of Roman antiquity. The Greeks are a different matter, since they rubbed shoulders with us quite a bit. But even with them we don't fare that well. A few bits in Homer (of which Strabo makes such a meal afterward!), a dozen lines in Aeschylus, not much more in Euripides. Passing references, basically; but nomads don't deserve any better. Of the Romans, I used to think, it was only poor Ovid who paid us any heed; but then he had no choice. There is practically nothing about us in Virgil, not to mention Catullus or Propertius, not to mention Lucretius. And now, lo and behold, a crumb from your table.