Rilke's Duino Elegy: All this was mission
How the "Beloved" Comes to Stay All Night, lines 27-36
Jan 3, 2009
27 Yes—the springtimes needed you. Often a star
28 was waiting for you to notice it. A wave rolled toward you
30 out of the distant past, or as you walked
31 under an open window, a violin
32 yielded itself to your hearing. All this was mission.
33 But could you accomplish it? Weren’t you always
34 distracted by expectation, as if every event
35 announced a beloved? (Where can you find a place
36 to keep her, with all the huge strange thoughts inside you
37 going and coming and often staying all night.)
Introduction: World’s Most Introverted Poet
Rilke was and remains the world’s most introverted of poets. His ability to sustain the interior life through his art, to bring it to expression in poetry, to bring the inner light of the soul into the bright life of the day is his sublime gift to poetry.
These lines follow the incandescent image of the birds of lines 25-26 who must now fill the air with more “passionate flying”. But what of humankind not at home in his “interpreted” world? Ah, here is Rilke’s material: how does one find a home in both worlds: the one taken in through the senses and the other one, that inner world of soul where the transcendent lives?
The Mystic’s Question
No, the outer world is the one that needs you, he seems to be saying in lines 27-28. But how to stay true to this outer world as all the “strange thoughts coming and going all night." For isn’t one always being invaded by the powers of this other world, the imagination, dreams, the full onslaught of inner life? Here is truly the introvert’s poet, the mystic’s voice asking the question that plagues those whose lives are driven by the interior angels.
The World that Needs You
For this world needs you and yet it is also so difficult to truly know. Here the theme of the first 28 lines are being more developed. “Springtime” “star” “tree” these large and small things of the exterior sensory world are in need of being “seen” with the inner eye as well as the outer. And what of this “wave that rolled toward you/ out of the distant past” (lines 28-30) and this violin being heard in passing as you walked under a window? What to make of these?
“All this was mission” (line 32) asserts Rilke, meaning these are the very things one’s life is here to accomplish. To see and to know the exterior world but without losing sight or knowledge of the interior world. “But could you accomplish it?” he asks. “Weren’t always just a little bit “distracted” (lines 33-34)?
Distracted by the " Beloved"
By what? By your own expectations, of course. Here in the “interpreted world” one’s thoughts are always rubbing up against the purity of any moment. As are one's feelings. Unlike animals, he says, humans are continually besought by voices from the inner worlds. Carl Jung might call these voices coming from the shadow self. (For more about the shadow, see my article What is the Shadow in Jungian Psychology.)
“As if every event announced a beloved”(34-35), he says. Meaning that with every encounter with the exterior world, a huge part of the psyche wants only to see itself, to see its very nature. Again, this is reminiscent of Jung's ideas about the great call of life is for the individual to know itself entirely or individuate.
"And Staying All Night"
To understand the way Rilke thinks of the word beloved in these poems, consider the feeling of longing that lives alongside the unrequited lover. The strong presence of that feeling, says Rilke, is the very thing that distracts. But where does this come from? Can it be seen in terms of the psychology of the self? Or among mystics and those attuned to prayer and a lively connection with the transcendent. This presence accompanies all of life. The mission is to make a room for it and praise its presence.
Source: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell (1989). New York: Vintage International.
 |
