Rilke's Duino Elegy Continued, Lines 8 to 25
Jung's Archetypes, Projection and Transference in Rainer Maria Rilke
Dec 31, 2008 Megge Hill Fitz-Randolph
Like the great psychological thinker Carl Jung, Rilke understood that beneath the surface value of human emotion, thought and perception lay its true gold. As a poet, he refused to be seduced by angelic presences. Instead, he strove to encounter every object on its own terms. In his first Elegy, Rilke begins by rejecting the angels even as he seems to invoke them. (Refer to opening lines at "Rilke's Duino Elegies Address Angel Archetype" lines 1--8. )
Carl Jung's theories of archetype, projection and transference can shed light on lines which can seem dense and abstract. Rilke’s First Elegy from lines 8 though 18 reads as follows:
Lines 8 though 10
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note
of my dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we turn to
in our hour of need?
Here the poet states that he resists calling on the angels not because he cannot, but because he understands that angels alone are of no help. For instance, after asking the following:
Lines 10 through 13
Ah, whom can we ever turn to
in our need? Not angels, not humans,
he writes these astonishing lines:
and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in
our interpreted world.
The interpreted world Rilke refers to includes what he sees as the sentimentality of much of the poetry being written in his day, including his own earlier work. Now Rilke's ambition has become to write poetry as purely as Rodin, his former mentor, made sculpture. Or, another inspiration to his art, as honestly as Cezanne painted pictures. To write what he saw, was his credo. To call up the deep truth of the thing in front of him was his poetic mission.
Lines 13 through 15
Perhaps there remains for us
some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take
into our vision
Only the tree or some other commonplace thing, he says, remain accessible to him because it exists in its own right. It does not rely upon the poet's "interpretation" or sentimentalizing. But look at what he says about daily habits such as buying a loaf of bread or sitting at a cafe sipping some coffee.
Even these can be so interlaced with the past that it's as if they are happening to someone else. This is exactly what Jung means by transference. One sees the present in terms of what happened in the past. One is made captive by one's habits.
Lines 15 though 17
... there remains for us yesterday’s street
and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
And what of the mildly disillusioning presence which the solitary heart so painfully meets? Could this be the soul Jung meets within himself as he investigates his own life? Like Jung, Rilke's mission was to live and write from the authentic self, not from a persona or false self.
Lines 18 through 22
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space
gnaws at our faces. Whom would it not remain for—that longed-after,
mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart
so painfully meets. Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep using each other to hide their own fate.
Lovers, especially, say Jung and Rilke, are so full of their own projections that they hardly see each other at all. Once they do the courageous work of withdrawing their projections and learn to love the authentic person in front of them, everything changes.
Lines 23 through 25
Don’t you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will fill the expanded air with more passionate flying.
For more about angels and archetypes, please see Angels and Archetypes: The Same or Different.
Source: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell (1989). New York: Vintage International.
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