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PLace into Poetry
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Place into Poetry
Time and Space in Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
Helen Bridge, University of Exeter
The tension between referentiality and hermeticism inherent inRilke’s Neue Gedichte has produced a divide in the criticalliterature, where either one pole or the other tends to be privileged.Studies of the relationship between Neue Gedichte and space eitherread the poems biographically in relation to real places, orconcentrate on the classic Dinggedichte, showing how thesetransform objects into self-contained patterns of motion. Thisarticle argues instead that the references to places in Neue Gedichtereinforce the ambivalence between referentiality and hermeticism.Close comparative readings of three poems which are neitherobvious examples of the Dinggedicht nor exercises in visualperception or ‘sachliches Sagen’ – ‘Der Turm’, ‘VenezianischerMorgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ – demonstrate Rilke’sconcern with the relationship between real space and aestheticspace, and with the nature of poetic ‘space’, given the temporalnature of language. It is shown how the poems both give space atemporal dimension and transform temporal processes intoaesthetic space. Beyond Rilke’s own concern with learning moreproductive ways of seeing, vision plays an important aesthetic rolein making it possible to convey space as a temporal process.
The relationship between time and space was central to Rilke’s aesthetic
concerns during the period in which he wrote the Neue Gedichte. In a letter
of 8 August 1903 to Lou Andreas-Salome he describes Rodin’s sculpture as
a process of rescuing beauty from the transience of time and transforming
it into the permanence and security of space:
Rodin […] sah besser als irgendeiner, daß alle Schonheit an Menschen undThieren und Dingen gefahrdet ist durch Verhaltnisse und Zeit, daß sie einAugenblick ist, eine Jugend die in allen Altern kommt und geht, aber nichtdauert. […] Er wollte daß sie sei und sah seine Aufgabe darin, Dinge (dennDinge dauerten) in die weniger bedrohte, ruhigere und ewigere Welt des Raumeszu passen;1
Orbis Litterarum 61:4 263–290, 2006Printed in Singapore. All rights reserved
While a poem may be said to have the same effect in transforming a
transient phenomenon into a permanent form, it is more problematic to
define this overcoming of time as a transformation into space. The
question arises as to what kind of space can be created by an art form
whose medium is traditionally regarded as a temporal one. As Manfred
Engel and Ulrich Fulleborn have noted, the striving of the poems in Neue
Gedichte towards spatial form, in combination with their inevitable
temporality as language, provides the basis of Rilke’s poetological solution
at this stage in his career. Rilke emphasizes the tension ‘zwischen dem
innersprachlichen Prozeß des Gedichts als einem Zeitphanomen und dem
auf raumliche Konturierung und ‘‘Dingwerdung’’ zielenden Gestaltungs-
willen’, in order then to attempt to create a balance between the temporal
and spatial dimensions.2
This article will examine the forms that this relationship between time
and space takes in three poems which do not easily fit the aesthetic
paradigms often used to understand the Neue Gedichte. ‘Der Turm’,
‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ are not classic
examples of the Dinggedicht; nor are they exercises in visual perception or
‘sachliches Sagen’, though each does involve vision. By examining poems
that exemplify particularly clearly the tensions within the Neue Gedichte,
this article will highlight the variety of ways in which the poems of the two
volumes explore solutions to the problem of representing and constructing
space within the temporal medium of language. In some respects ‘Der
Turm’ and the two Venice poems represent opposite ends of a spectrum of
poetic possibilities in Neue Gedichte. While the former is unusual for its
overt focus on a subjective experience of space, the latter are unusual
because of the marginality of any subjective perspective. Through close
readings of these poems, I shall suggest that both the Dingasthetik and the
interest in seeing and the visual are facets of a broader concern with space
which encompasses both the referential relationship to the spaces of reality
and the construction of poetic space. Criticism on the Neue Gedichte, as on
Rilke’s other works, has been dominated by the poet’s own aesthetic
categories and terminology.3 The poems’ significance in the context of
literary modernism derives from the more general questions that they raise
about the relationship between real space and aesthetic space, and about
the nature of poetic space, and the solutions that they offer to these
problems.
264 Helen Bridge
The Neue Gedichte are frequently read in relation to a Dingpoetik
derived from the aesthetic principles espoused in Rilke’s writings on
Rodin’s sculpture. Alternatively, or often simultaneously, the two volumes
of poetry are approached as reflections on, and exercises in, seeing;
attempts at a ‘sachliches Sagen’ based on precise and unprejudiced visual
perception, such as Rilke admired in Cezanne’s paintings and outlined in
his ‘Briefe uber Cezanne’. There is clearly some overlap between these two
ideas: sculpture, after all, is a visual art, and Rilke saw both his time with
Rodin at Meudon and his study of Cezanne’s work as schoolings in visual
perception. However, the tension between the two models has often been
overlooked, as has the fact that, taken together, they embody an
ambivalence which is at the heart of the Neue Gedichte. While the
Dingasthetik outlined in the monograph and lecture on Rodin emphasizes
the autonomy and self-containment of the art object, as well as – rather
surprisingly, in the case of Rodin’s sculptures – insisting on its non-
referential quality,4 learning to see and practising ‘sachliches Sagen’ imply
a strong connection between art and reality. Engel and Fulleborn regard
the Neue Gedichte as spanning the ‘Gegensatz zwischen der Symbolik und
zum Teil handfesten Allegorik Rodinscher Provenienz, die noch der
Jahrhundertwende zugehoren, und der nicht mehr symbolischen Formen-
und Farbensprache Cezannes, mit der die Geschichte der modernen Kunst
anhebt’. These critics see the unifying basis of these two poles in the fact
‘daß Rilke durchgehend seinen Ausgangspunkt bei einer gegenstandlich
aufgefaßten Welt, ihrem reichen Vorrat an ‘‘Dingen’’, nimmt’.5 In fact, this
basis itself – which needs to be seen in conjunction with the autonomy that
Rilke persistently claims for the finished art object – manifests the
ambivalence I have mentioned: the tension between referentiality and
hermeticism runs through all Rilke’s reflections on the visual arts – and
consequently also his own poetics and poetic practice – between 1902
and 1908.6
Criticism on the Neue Gedichte tends to privilege either the referentiality
of the poems or their hermetic quality. The predominance in critical studies
of analyses of those poems which take as their subject matter relatively
self-contained objects indicates that the term Dinggedicht has frequently
been understood (whether this assumption is explicitly stated or not) as
referring primarily to the object represented by the poem. At the other end
of the spectrum, critics have attempted to emancipate the poems
265Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
completely from their referential relationship to real space, and to locate
their significance and value in abstract shapes constructed in poetic space.7
While the first approach reduces the variety within the Neue Gedichte to
one kind of subject matter, the second is perhaps even more reductive,
since it risks regarding all the poems as interchangeable examples of a
single poetic strategy.
This critical divide is the result of the ambivalence within Rilke’s poetics
and the poems themselves. As Hartmut Engelhardt has pointed out,
Rilke’s conception of Rodin’s artistic practice as the creation of art objects
which exist autonomously and are not bound by their relationship to the
real objects or people that inspired them becomes problematic when
applied to the practice of a poet. Whereas in the case of Rodin’s work the
word Ding can apply both to the original model and to the sculpture, since
representation and form in sculpture are identical, poetry’s medium is of a
different order to spatial reality, so that it is unclear whether the Ding in a
Dinggedicht is the object represented or the poem as an aesthetic form: ‘die
stillschweigende Ubereinkunft, der Dichter forme wie der Plastiker, laßt
Ding als Sujet des Gedichts und Ding als Gedicht selbst ineinanderspie-
len’.8 Engelhardt sees this ambivalence negatively, and it is true that
Rilke’s quest to conceive of his own art by analogy with Rodin’s involved a
certain amount of anguished self-delusion.9 Yet the conception of writing
a poem as the creation of a physical, spatial object which is at once a
representation and an autonomous construction, can equally be seen as a
highly successful strategy which enabled Rilke to move beyond the poetics
of his early works and resulted in a collection of poems which took
German poetry in new directions. By the time he encountered Cezanne’s
work in autumn 1907, the tension between representation and material
form was at the centre of Rilke’s attention. It is precisely the balance in
Cezanne’s paintings between depicting recognizable objects and construct-
ing abstract patterns of colours on a two-dimensional surface which
fascinates him. Like these paintings, which mark the threshold between
traditional representational art and modern abstraction, the Neue Gedichte
move in the direction of hermeticism, but without leaving reality behind.
The idea of art as a process of transformation, in which the term Ding is
used to designate both the real object which is transformed and the
resulting aesthetic form, expresses the ambivalence inherent in Rilke’s
poetics of this period. This tension, at times the source of contradictions in
266 Helen Bridge
the writings on Rodin, is reconciled to some degree by the idea of balance
between reality and autonomous artistic form which Rilke develops
through his engagement with Cezanne. As he comments on the portrait of
Madame Cezanne in a red armchair:
so sehr sorgt jede [Stelle] in ihrer Weise fur das Gleichgewicht und stellt es her:wie das ganze Bild schließlich die Wirklichkeit im Gleichgewicht halt. Denn sagtman, es ist ein roter Fauteuil (und es ist der erste und endgultigste rote Fauteuilaller Malerei): so ist er es doch nur, weil er eine erfahrene Farbensummegebunden in sich hat, die, wie immer sie auch sein mag, ihn im Rot bestarkt undbestatigt. Er ist, um auf die Hohe seines Ausdrucks zu kommen, um das leichteBildnis herum ganz stark gemalt, daß etwas wie eine Wachsschicht entsteht; unddoch hat die Farbe kein Ubergewicht uber den Gegenstand, der so vollkommenin seine malerischen Aquivalente ubersetzt erscheint, daß, so sehr er erreicht undgegeben ist, doch andererseits auch wieder seine burgerliche Realitat an einendgultiges Bild-Dasein alle Schwere verliert.10
Two different kinds of critical study have been concerned with the
relationship between the Neue Gedichte and space. First, the connections
between the poems and real spaces – places – have been examined.
‘Nachtliche Fahrt’, for instance, is frequently considered in the context of
studies of Rilke’s relationship to Russia.11 More broadly, the biographical
connection between the collection as a whole and Rilke’s experience of the
modern city in the form of Paris is widely acknowledged.12 While critical
studies of the influence of actual places on the poems tend either to be
strongly biographical in orientation or to read selected poems in the
context of discourses connected with a particular place, the second kind of
study examines the role of space, in a more abstract sense, within the
poems themselves. The most detailed study of this kind concerned
specifically with space in Rilke’s poetry is Richard Jayne’s monograph of
1972. Like many other commentators, Jayne concentrates on the classic
Dinggedichte, those poems that represent objects and their movements in
space. He analyses ‘Der Panther’, ‘Das Karussell’, ‘Spanische Tanzerin’,
‘Schlangen-Beschworung’, ‘Der Ball’ and the Buddha poems, showing how
each poem transposes its object out of a concrete physical context and into
abstract patterns of motion and repose which open up symbolic dimen-
sions, connecting inner and external reality.13 Selecting only poems of this
kind for analysis makes it easy to reduce the Neue Gedichte to the
Dingasthetik developed in the writings on Rodin. Like a Rodin sculpture
which, according to Rilke, occupies its own space, separated from ordinary
267Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
reality, and unites within itself stability and constant, self-contained
motion,14 poems such as ‘Der Panther’, ‘Das Karussell’ and ‘Der Ball’
present their objects as self-contained patterns of motion which seem to
exist outside real space. In contrast with Das Stunden-Buch in its cyclical
unity, the Neue Gedichte can thus be seen as a collection of independent
aesthetic objects which, like sculptures or other artefacts in a gallery or
museum, are on display alongside each other, removed from any context in
real time and space.
‘Der Turm’, ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ are
amongst the many poems in Neue Gedichte that refer, either in the title or
– more usually – in a subtitle, to a place. In a recent analysis of ‘Der
Turm’, Engel has drawn attention to the ‘Dialektik von Ge-
genstandsbezug und Abstraktion’ produced by the generic title which is
given specificity by the subtitle.15 This dialectic is characteristic of all the
poems which employ locative subtitles in this way: the abstraction from
real time and space inherent in the Dingasthetik is counteracted, in poems
like ‘Der Panther’ and ‘Romische Fontane’, by this connection of the
subject matter to specific locations. These subtitles have occasionally
given rise to a quest to identify the original object which inspired a
particular poem,16 but have more commonly been overlooked in readings
of the poems, or dismissed in the light of evidence suggesting an
alternative form of inspiration.17 With the exception of Engel’s comment,
the tensions which they introduce into the poems – between the abstract
and the concrete, the generic and the specific – have received little critical
consideration. The effect of the subtitles is to reinforce the ambivalence
in the poems between referentiality and hermeticism. On the one hand
they evoke an original experience of reality which has been transformed
into the poem; on the other, they allow the poem to be regarded as a self-
contained art object comparable to a painting or museum artefact which
is labelled with a place.18
The positioning of ‘Der Turm’ and the two Venice poems in cycles of
poems concerned with Flanders and Venice respectively gives a special
prominence to their association with a place, as well as diminishing their
self-containment as individual poems. Both the Belgium cycle of poems
and those at the heart of the Venice sequence (‘Venezianischer Morgen’,
‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ and ‘San Marco’) were written in Paris, the former
between 18 and 21 July 1907, almost exactly a year after Rilke’s trip to
268 Helen Bridge
Flanders, and the latter in early summer 1908, drawing on Rilke’s most
recent visit to Venice in November 1907. This retrospective treatment of a
place he had experienced is typical of Rilke’s way of working. Despite the
time lapse between the original experience and a poem’s genesis, many of
the poems that name places in their subtitles create an impression of
immediacy. As Judith Ryan has noted, the idea that the poems were
created ‘sur le motif’ was one of the myths about Neue Gedichte that Rilke
was keen to uphold.19 However, even though the processes of memory
involved in writing about a place retrospectively are not made apparent in
the poems themselves, their importance as part of a poetological strategy
anticipates the more explicit role that memory plays in Rilke’s later
understanding of space. Beda Allemann was the first to recognize that the
concept of ‘Weltinnenraum’ has a temporal dimension, that it exists only
‘als erinnerter, aus dem Vergangenen vergegenwartigter Raum’.20 More
recently, Manfred Koch, emphasizing the continuity between Neue
Gedichte and the late work, has pointed out that Rilke’s programme of
‘sachliches Sagen’ operates ‘unter der Intention der Vergegenwartigung
eines Abwesenden’, and so anticipates the later ‘Weltinnenraum’ idea.21 In
the ‘Briefe uber Cezanne’, Rilke’s attempts to convey the visual space of
individual paintings are simultaneously exercises in remembering what he
has seen and giving it a new, linguistic form of presence.22 His
transformation of impressions of place into poems in Neue Gedichte is
similarly mediated through the internal space of memory.
There are strong thematic parallels between the Belgium and the Venice
poems, a consequence partly of the similarities between the cities they take
as their subject matter. Both Venice and the Belgian cities – particularly
Bruges, the ‘Venice of the North’ – interest Rilke because of the way they
still embody a past in which they enjoyed more glory than in the present.
In literary discourses around 1900 both Venice and Bruges were associated
with decadence, decay and death.23 Bernhard Blume has pointed out
Rilke’s predilection for cities like Venice, Bruges and Toledo – ‘Stadte, in
denen der Schatten einer großen Vergangenheit hineinragt in einen
gestaltlosen Alltag’.24 My concern here, however, is less with the thematic
parallels between Rilke’s poetic treatment of Venice and Belgium than with
the question of how the poems construct the specific geographical spaces to
which they refer, and with their configuration of the relationship between
time and space.
269Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
Each of the Belgium poems is given a title signifying an individual
architectural or topographical feature (and, in the case of ‘Die Marien-
Prozession’, an event), and a subtitle indicating a broader geographical
location. Accordingly, the cities Furnes, Bruges and Ghent are presented
from specified perspectives within their geographical space. Each poem is
structured by a shifting vantage point, but in most cases this is not the
perspective of an observing human subject. Instead, perspective and
motion are attributed to personified elements of the scenes themselves. In
‘Der Platz’ the perspective is at first that of the square looking outwards
(‘ladet der Platz zum Einzug seiner Weite/die fernen Fenster unaufhorlich
ein’), then later that of the houses looking inwards (‘In die Giebel
steigend,/wollen die kleinen Hauser alles sehn’). In ‘Quai du Rosaire’ the
perspective is provided by the personified ‘Gassen’, whose form in space is
described as movement. Just as Rilke’s poetological approach to place as a
product of memory emphasizes the interdependence of time and space, so
the spaces represented by these poems are made dynamic and given a
temporal dimension by a perspective which projects the movement of a
human subject in time onto the spaces themselves.
‘Der Turm’, the first poem of the group, is an exception. Here, space is
constructed from the perspective of an experiencing subject – typically for
the Neue Gedichte, a ‘du’, rather than an ‘ich’.25 As we have seen, the title
and subtitle create a tension between the generic and the geographically
specific. In this poem, however, the reference to a specific place – the tower
of St Nicolas in Furnes – is less dominant than in most of the other
Belgium poems. In Engel’s analysis the poem’s ‘Mitteilungslinie’ – the
spiral upward movement of the second person subject’s climbing the tower
staircase, followed by the movement of his gaze from the sky down to the
ground and then away into the distance – is overshadowed by its
‘Gemutslinie’, the emotional dynamic that determines the linguistic
structure of the poem.26 Even the more concrete ‘Mitteilungslinie’,
however, is less dependent on specific geographical space than is the case
in other poems. The same pattern of motion could be produced by
climbing any tower. Some commentators have drawn on biographical
details of Rilke’s visit to Flanders in July and August 1906 and on local
information in attempts to explain the imagery of the poem. H.
Uyttersprot, for example, associates the fear felt by the poem’s speaker
with the story of the Furnes bell-ringer’s falling to his death which was
270 Helen Bridge
related to Rilke during his visit, and attempts to explain the reference to
Patenier by pointing out how the view from the top of the tower of St
Nicolas is restricted by the roof and parapet of the church, so that the
landscape can only be seen in small fragments at a time.27 Such details may
help to explain aspects of the poem’s genesis, but the poem as a finished
product does not transform essential characteristics specific to Furnes into
linguistic structures in the way that, as we shall see, the Venice poems do.
In this case the experience of climbing the church tower is taken as a
starting-point for exploring more abstract questions about the subjective
experience, and poetic construction, of space.
‘Der Turm’ is structured by a contrast between the speaker’s experience
of climbing the tower in the first half and his feeling of liberation upon
emerging into daylight and seeing the surrounding landscape in the second
half. The poem has given rise to widely varying – and sometimes rather
fanciful – interpretations which grapple with the bewildering combination
of images and attempt to explain the enigmatic twelfth line (‘o wenn er
steigt, behangen wie ein Stier’). Uyttersprot sees the bull image as central
to the poem’s meaning and, by associating it, rather surprisingly, with
Switzerland (‘der Stier von Uri’) and with an old Flemish dialectal
expression, interprets it as a symbol of the unity of life and death. Heidi
Heimann’s reading revolves around the equally implausible assumption
that the bull represents Orpheus.28 Franz Schuppen reads the climb of the
tower as an expression of the Leistungswille central to both Rilke’s own
biography and social and philosophical developments of his age.29
Unfortunately, Schuppen’s otherwise intriguing argument remains rather
distanced from the poem itself. In a recent analysis Judith Ryan has
explained the poem’s imagery by uncovering various intertextual refer-
ences, in order to offer a reading of the poem as an expression of Rilke’s
rejection of aestheticism and attempt to move towards a new aesthetic
ideal based on the ‘clarity, orderliness and connectedness’ of Patenier’s
paintings.30 Ryan’s approach is the most able to provide convincing
explanations of the assortment of images.31
The contrast between the two halves of the poem is most obviously one
between two different experiences of space. In the first half the subject’s
interaction with the space of the tower is felt bodily and psychologically.
The long, convoluted sentence conveys both the physical effort of climbing
the seemingly never-ending staircase and the increasing fear and confusion
271Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
felt by the speaker. The effects of the climb on the senses, body and
emotions are emphasized in the phrases ‘wohin/du blindlings steigst’,
‘durch die/sich dein Gesicht […] drangt’ and ‘erschreckt und furchtend’. In
the course of the climb an increasing sense of confusion about subject–
object relations is felt, so that the speaker has the impression that the
movement is not his own, but in his surroundings, which threaten to
collapse onto him. In the second half of the poem, by contrast, the speaker
is a stationary and sovereign observing subject, able to survey the extensive
and well-lit space around him from a safe and superior position. As Ryan
notes, the speaker’s address to himself gives way to a focus on external
objects.32 Now feeling physically weightless (‘fast fliegend’), he is able to
take in his surroundings visually, without their posing any physical or
emotional threat. The convoluted hypotactic syntax of the first half is
replaced by clearer paratactic structures.
Despite the strong sense of opposition between the two halves, certain
elements in the poem suggest connections between the two experiences they
convey. In both the first and the fourth stanza the speaker perceives the
space around him in terms of a vertical opposition between above and
below, the ‘Himmel’ and ‘Tiefen’ of the second half echoing – and
reversing – the ‘Erd-Inneres’ and ‘Erdenoberflache’ of the opening. In both
cases the deictic ‘dort’ indicates that the poem is constructing space from
the perspective of the experiencing subject. However, whereas at the outset
the ‘du’ is caught between the two poles, laboriously moving from one
to the other, so that the ‘dort’ is a projection of the goal he is attempting to
reach, after emerging into the daylight he has the whole vertical axis within
his vision, and the ‘dort’ conveys an effortless movement of the eyes. The
idea of blindness also features in both of these stanzas. Whereas the effect
of the darkness is conveyed adverbially as a quality of the speaker which
affects his physical activity (‘blindlings steigst’), the subsequent blinding
effect of the light remains separate from the speaker, expressed in a
nominal abstraction (‘Blendung uber Blendung’), and indeed seems not to
impede his ability to perceive and describe his surroundings.
Both halves of the poem convey a similar process in which the subject
attempts to make sense of the space around him. In the first half the
darkness and consequent absence of visual information about his
surroundings mean that the speaker orients himself using an imaginary
image – the metaphor of an underground river bed. This imaginary
272 Helen Bridge
landscape, lacking in identifiable topographical features and bearing
similarities to the psychological landscapes in ‘Orpheus. Eurydike.
Hermes’ (‘der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk’) and the Third Duino Elegy,
forms a contrast to the geographical specificity of the subtitle: the speaker’s
– and the poem’s – imaginary construction of the space of the tower has
the effect of abstracting from the specific location. In the following two
stanzas, as the speaker’s eyes become accustomed to the darkness, and the
underground imagery gives way to a perception of his actual surroundings
in the tower, his sense of orientation does not become stronger as might be
expected. On the contrary, the physical impressions of the long climb in the
darkness have the effect of disrupting the spatially logical image which
initially provided orientation. As the speaker begins to rely instead on his
vision, his ability to distinguish between himself and his surroundings
diminishes, resulting in terrifying confusion. Moreover, the greater his
sense of insight, the more confused he becomes. The emphatic ‘die du
plotzlich siehst’ (emphasis mine) conveys the speaker’s impression of
sudden visual clarity; however, the object of his vision is ‘die Dunkelheit’,
and the result is a new mental construction of his surroundings which
introduces paradoxical inversions in place of the clearly fixed co-ordinates
of the underground landscape imagery (‘als fiele sie/aus diesem Abgrund,
der dich uberhangt’). In the third stanza the speaker’s renewed sense of
insight (‘den du […] erkennst’) is contradicted by the awkward interruption
of the clause by a further long subordinate clause in which the abyss
becomes the subject, defying the speaker’s attempt to gain the distance and
cognitive sovereignty implied by the verb ‘erkennen’. In the climactic
twelfth line the speaker makes a renewed attempt to capture his
impressions of his surroundings in an image. The reference may, as Ryan
suggests, be to the moment in a bullfight when the bull’s head is uncovered
and it is driven out of a narrow tunnel, known as the toril, into the arena.33
However, in the context of the speaker’s thoughts, the motivation for the
image, whose opacity is increased by the lack of an obvious referent for
‘er’, is far from clear. The line represents a climax not only in the speaker’s
fear, but also in the failure of his attempts to conceptualize his
surroundings in a meaningful way.
With his emergence from the tower the speaker gains the clarity of vision
and sovereignty of perspective which he had struggled to attain in the
darkness.34 In contrast to the threatening enclosure of the tower, the open
273Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
space of the landscape now before him seems to offer itself up for
utilization and appropriation (‘voll Verwendung’). These different condi-
tions mean that the speaker’s attempt to make sense of what he sees and to
impose a conceptual structure on the space around him is more successful
than in the first half of the poem.35 Although his actual surroundings are
now clearly visible, after registering elements of the landscape in very
general terms (‘windiges Licht’, ‘Himmel’, ‘Tiefen’), the speaker once again
abstracts from the specific scene before him by using imagery, this time
likening the landscape to a painting by Patenier. Unlike the initial
underground imagery, which was disrupted by visual perception, the
painting simile is able to provide a way of structuring the speaker’s vision
and offering a perspective for the poem. By the final stanza the landscape
has become the painting to which it was compared (‘im Hintergrunde’ – as
opposed to ‘in der Ferne’ – implies a painting).
This aestheticization of the landscape involves a conflation of time and
space. First, the space of the landscape is presented through a temporal
metaphor (‘kleine Tage’), then the dimension of time is removed
(‘gleichzeitige, mit Stunde neben Stunde’) and the simultaneous hours
become part of a spatial image (‘durch die die Brucken springen wie die
Hunde’). The comparison of the landscape with Patenier’s painting
provides an image of the transformation of real space as it is experienced in
time into aesthetic space which is able to overcome temporal differenti-
ation and embody time as a totality. A similar image occurs in ‘L’Ange du
Meridien’, where human time is contrasted with the angel’s time, which is
embodied by
der vollen Sonnenuhr,auf der des Tages ganze Zahl zugleich,gleich wirklich, steht in tiefem Gleichgewichte,als waren alle Stunden reif und reich.36
In ‘Der Turm’ and some of the other Belgium poems, the spaces of the
Belgian landscape provide images in which time is spatialized and
transformed into a totality, so that past and present exist simultaneously
in the aesthetic image. In ‘Quai du Rosaire’ and ‘Beguinage II’ reflections
serve to create a unity between past and present.37
Transforming a place into an aesthetic space in which time is overcome,
and drawing on painting in order to create a poetic perspective on space,
274 Helen Bridge
are ideas which Rilke explores in a variety of poems in Neue Gedichte.
However, it seems problematic to equate the thematic and formal contrast
between the two halves of ‘Der Turm’ with a transition in aesthetic style
which Rilke was struggling to achieve in Neue Gedichte, as Ryan suggests.
This reading follows the poem’s speaker’s own emotional responses to the
experience of climbing the tower, associating his fear and confusion with
the ‘solipsism and self-reflexivity’ of the aestheticist mode Rilke is,
according to Ryan, trying to leave behind, and the subsequent relief and
clear-sightedness with a new aesthetic ideal which might point the way
forward. In fact, the meaning of the contrast between the two halves is
rather more ambiguous. The speaker may respond positively to his
emergence from the tower and the sovereignty his new position gives him,
but aspects of the poetic form counteract this sense of liberation. The
rhyme scheme in the second half of the poem is in tension with the
referential emphasis on clarity and regularity: the self-contained and
regular, though variable, patterns of the first half give way to a less ordered
scheme with rhymes across stanza breaks. The echoes of ‘Stier’ in the
rhymes of the second line of the fourth stanza and the first line of the fifth
belie the impression that the fear and confusion of the climb have been left
behind. Similarly, the fact that the final stanza consists of only three lines,
and so disappoints the expectations created by the preceding five regular
quatrains, undermines the peace and harmony which are the focus of the
last line. This shortened last stanza also points back to the line ‘o wenn er
steigt, behangen wie ein Stier – :’, because the absence of a fourth line
means that the poem as a whole is a symmetrical structure with the twelfth
line as its central axis. While the referential content of the poem follows the
speaker’s gaze and consciousness into the distance, its form insists on the
unity of the two halves: the sovereign aestheticization of space is possible
only as the result of the climb in the darkness. The tower which causes the
terrifying claustrophobic experience of the first half is also the means by
which the speaker is able to attain the clear perspective over the landscape
in the second half.
The experience of climbing the tower is more fruitfully read as a
metaphor for the processes of artistic production by which the space of the
world is transformed into a poem, than as a programmatic statement of
aesthetic intent. It is the speaker’s attempts to translate his experience of
space into images – a fundamentally poetic activity – that provides
275Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
continuity between the two halves of the poem. The shape of the emotional
experience conveyed by the poem conforms to what Manfred Koch has
called ‘Rilkes poetologische Grundfigur des Ballwurfs’.38 Like ‘Der Ball’,
‘Der Turm’ is structured as a curve of motion around a central point, ‘an
dem die angestrengte, in zeitliche Spannung gestellte Eigentatigkeit mit
einemMale leicht wird und ubergeht in eine ‘‘fliegende’’ Zusammenfassung
und Verwandlung all dessen, was an muhseliger Erfahrung in die
Aufstiegsbewegung eingegangen war’.39 Koch associates this spatial
pattern with the unity of technique and inspiration in Rilke’s model of
poetic creativity. As well as being a metaphor for the shifting relationship
between poet and poem during the creative process, the two different
positions which the speaker of ‘Der Turm’ adopts in relation to the tower
also convey the dual nature of poetry. In the first half of the poem the
tower is experienced temporally, as a structure with its own internal
dynamic; in the second half it is a complete and unified object in space,
which provides a vantage point over its surroundings. Similarly, a poem is
at once a temporal structure – both for the poet and for the reader – and a
complete aesthetic object with its own (linguistic) space. Hellmuth Himmel
has shown how this duality is central to Rilke’s poetics at this stage:
Die ‘Neuen Gedichte’ dynamisieren das Objekt und schaffen damit etwasTransitorisches im Objekt, das durch das transitorische Element der Sprache als‘Handlung’ wiedergegeben werden kann; gleichzeitig bewirkt die Art der Sprach-und Versbehandlung jedoch, daß die unbegrenzte transitorische Sprachbewe-gung in eine abgeschlossene verwandelt wird und die sprachliche Gestaltung denCharakter eines ‘Dinges’ annimmt, das ‘ganz mit sich beschaftigt’ ist und nichtuber sich hinausweist.40
Interestingly, the principal characteristic of the tower as a Ding is precisely
that it does point beyond itself, by providing a view of the surrounding
landscape. Although many of Rilke’s seemingly self-contained objects –
the Roman fountain and the blue hydrangea, for example – point beyond
themselves because of the metaphors and similes used to describe them, the
shift in ‘Der Turm’ from an internal dynamic to an outward-looking
perspective cannot be seen as representative of the aesthetic direction of
the Neue Gedichte in general. The explicit presentation of a subjective
experience of space may be unusual in Rilke’s poetry of this period, but the
multiple perspectives and the interaction between subject and object in the
first half of ‘Der Turm’ are rather more typical than the return to a
276 Helen Bridge
conventional, post-Renaissance conception of perspectival space in the
second half. The final five lines of the poem imitate Patenier’s paintings in
their emphasis on spatial depth and their assumption of a single, stationary
and subjectively limited viewpoint.41 The secure, stationary standpoint of
an observer who is separated from and above the object of his vision, and
who naively attributes the limitations inherent in his perspective to features
of the landscape itself (‘den unbeholfne Hauser manchmal nur/verbergen’)
is far from typical of the Neue Gedichte, where vision is more usually
presented as a reciprocal process in which the object of perception is
capable of making demands of, or even posing a threat to, the viewer.42
The duality of poetry as both a temporal and a spatial structure is not
just evoked thematically by ‘Der Turm’: the poem itself demands to be
read as both temporal and spatial. Ryan’s reading privileges the temporal
process of experience which the poem describes, but plays down the spatial
dimension which undermines any sense of progress in time. As we have
seen, formal elements serve to connect the two halves of the poem,
counteracting the sense of liberation in the second half. The title refers to a
spatial structure, and the shape of the poem on the page resembles the
tower which is its subject matter. The two temporal experiences conveyed
are thus shown to be constitutive of a single spatial object. If the tower is
taken as the central subject matter of the poem, then the poem as a whole
can be seen to undermine the conventional construction of space from the
perspective of a stationary, distanced and sovereign viewpoint. In
presenting the landscape from such a perspective, the poem is simulta-
neously offering a rather more unusual perspective on the tower itself.
‘Der Turm’ thematizes the process of abstracting from a concrete
experience of a specific place by transforming it into poetry. This process
occurs both at the level of the speaker’s consciousness, as he attempts to
conceptualize his experience of space in aesthetic images, and at the level of
the poem itself, which allows us to interpret both the speaker’s experience
and the tower as metaphors for the creative process and the nature of
poetry. The Venice poems to which I will now turn transform a concrete
place into poetic space and time without reflecting on the process as ‘Der
Turm’ does.
In respect of their construction of geographical space, a contrast
between the two cycles is immediately apparent. Whereas the Belgium
poems focus on individual architectural and topographical features, the
277Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
subject matter of the Venice poems is the city as an entity in itself.43 Unlike
‘Der Turm’, which takes a concrete geographical location as the starting-
point for more general reflections, the Venice poems are concerned
centrally with the city and its qualities. Paul Requadt has pointed out that
it is appropriate to describe Rilke’s Venice poems as ‘Venedigdichtung’
because they represent the city ‘als Sinnganzes’ and engage with the
tradition of images associated with Venice, whereas he produced no such
‘Romdichtung’, since Rome features in the poems only in individual
motifs.44 The same contrast could be drawn with any other city named in
the Neue Gedichte: it is invariably on individual buildings, scenes or people
that Rilke focuses. ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’,
however, deal with Venice as a whole.45
The Venice poems represent a clear rejection of the tradition of
Stimmungslyrik about the city – a tradition to which Rilke’s own earlier
poems about Venice belonged.46 There is no impressionistic description
of the features usually associated with Venice, and specific sights are
named only twice (San Giorgio Maggiore in ‘Venezianischer Morgen’,
and San Marco in the sonnet of that title). ‘San Marco’ is the only poem
in the group that constructs space through the perspective of an
experiencing subject, but even here, as in the preceding poem, Rilke’s
topic is the history of Venice – in this case, as embodied in its
architecture – rather than its atmosphere. The poems owe as much to
Rilke’s studies of Venetian history as to his visit to the city in November
1907.47 The dedication of ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ to Richard Beer-
Hofmann, who lent Rilke some rare books about Venice during his 1907
stay there, supports this.48
Both ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ include
references to the process of perception: the opening lines of ‘Veneziani-
scher Morgen’ indicate that what follows is a description of Venice as
perceived by the personified ‘furstlich verwohnte Fenster’, while ‘Spat-
herbst in Venedig’ signals the presence of an observer with the phrase ‘an
deinen Blick’. The perspective from which each poem constructs the city,
however, is not that of a subjective viewer with a standpoint which is
confined in both space and time. Nor does the temporal dimension of each
poem construct a subject’s experience or perception as a process in time.
The two titles situate the poems in time and space in a way that might
appear at first to suggest a subjective perspective on the city at a particular
278 Helen Bridge
point in time. Yet the titles also create a unity of time and place. Whereas
‘Der Turm’ created a tension between a temporal subjective perspective
and the spatial structure of the title, time in these poems is a dimension of
the city itself.
K. Deleu has noted that the opening two lines of ‘Venezianischer
Morgen’ themselves form a frame or window through which Venice is
seen.49 Windows have been associated with perspectival space perceived
from a fixed subjective standpoint. Citing the nineteenth-century theoreti-
cian of the Renaissance Leon Battista Alberti, Erwin Panofsky defined
perspectival space in painting as, ‘wo sich das ganze Bild […] gleichsam in
ein ‘‘Fenster’’ verwandelt hat, durch das wir in den Raum hindurchzu-
blicken glauben sollen’.50 The windows in ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ have
the opposite function. These windows are not just a frame for human
vision, but are themselves the subjects of vision. The two kinds of vision
are both contrasted and set in parallel by the opening of the poem. The
object of the vision (‘die Stadt’) is the same in both cases; the contrast is
between the permanence of the windows’ vision (‘immer’) and the more
ephemeral vision of human subjects (‘manchesmal’), and between the
leisurely attitude of the ‘verwohnte Fenster’ and the effort on the part of
the human viewers (‘uns zu bemuhn’). Far from signalling a limitation of
perspective, these windows are associated with a (primarily temporal,
rather than spatial) totality of vision. As the confinement of the more
limited, momentary human vision to a subordinate clause suggests, it is –
despite the temporal specificity of the title – the unrestricted perspective of
the windows which constitutes the frame, or in fact absence of any frame,
through which the poem constructs its subject. The ensuing description of
the city’s form of existence as a constantly re-enacted (‘immer wieder’)
process of creation which never attains permanence (‘sich bildet ohne
irgendwann zu sein’) presupposes a perspective which is not temporally
limited. Similarly, the focus on ‘die Stadt’ as the object of vision suggests a
spatial perspective which cannot be reduced to a localized point within the
city. Until the specific reference to San Giorgio Maggiore at the end, the
poem presents only broad spaces (‘Himmel’, ‘Flut’, ‘Kanale’) from an
unspecified vantage point.
The personification of Venice has the effect of collapsing the space of the
city into a single figure. Unlike the personification in ‘Die Kurtisane’,
where the topographical features of Venice are mapped onto the
279Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
courtesan’s physical features, here the personified Venice seems to be
separate from the actual spaces of the city: the ‘Reihn von Spiegelbildern’
in the canal are not part of her, but the objects of her perception and a
reminder of the process of creation as it has occurred on previous
mornings. By the end of the poem Venice has become the subject of the
creation, but its object – San Giorgio Maggiore – is a separate entity. The
Venice which is the subject of this poem is not coextensive with the spatial
topography of the city: it is everywhere (‘wo ein Schimmer/von Himmel
trifft auf ein Gefuhl von Flut’), and yet, as this image suggests, it has no
internal space. Similarly, it is constantly taking shape, without ever existing
in time (‘ohne irgendwann zu sein’; emphasis mine).
The daily emergence of Venice is presented as a mythical creation in
which the city arises out of the union of sky and sea.51 This dimension
becomes explicit with the likening of Venice to ‘eine Nymphe, die den Zeus
empfing’. The product of this mythical process with cosmic dimensions,
however, is both a concrete, geographically specific entity (‘San Giorgio
Maggiore’) and a self-contained aesthetic object (‘das schone Ding’). Deleu
understands the poem in terms of a process of aesthetic transformation, in
which the visible is transformed into something internal (‘Reihn/von
Spiegelbildern’) and then into a ‘Ding’.52 The poem also presents a
temporal development from generalized spaces (‘Furstlich verwohnte
Fenster’, ‘Himmel’, ‘Flut’, ‘Reihn/von Spiegelbildern’) which signal a
totalizing perspective on the city, to a specific feature of the city, perceived
– implicity – from a particular standpoint.53 However, these developments
in the course of the poem are counterbalanced by a mirroring effect, or
circularity, in the poem’s structure. The poem begins and ends by focusing
on architectural features of the city (the palace windows and the Church of
San Giorgio Maggiore) and, like the opening two lines, the last two have
vision as their subject, this time the personified Venice’s gaze at San
Giorgio Maggiore. The form of the poem – a rearrangement of the sonnet
so that the tercets form one central section, preceded and succeeded by a
quatrain – allows a vertical symmetry around the central axis ‘Reihn/von
Spiegelbildern’, so that the poem itself re-enacts the process of reflection
which is at the heart of its subject matter. The reflections are presented as
emerging from the canal and so as independent of the buildings being
reflected; they also have a higher degree of reality than the personified
Venice – they pre-exist and trigger the creation of Venice itself. As in ‘Quai
280 Helen Bridge
du Rosaire’ and ‘Beguinage’, the reflections belong to a realm of
permanence and so are able to induce a consciousness of the past in the
present (‘und sie erinnern an die andern Male’). The symmetrical form of
the poem has a second function in its circularity: the creation of ‘das
schone Ding’ may be a climax, but it is not an end-point, and the process
the poem has described is one which is to be constantly repeated.
The poem creates a dialectic between permanence and ephemerality,
which is also one between the concrete features of the city and Venice as
an abstract idea: while Venice itself has no permanent form, its windows,
reflections and buildings do. This dialectic is embodied in the space of the
poem itself: although its subject matter is an ongoing process of creation,
the poem, as a ‘schones Ding’, lends permanent form to this process. As
in ‘Der Turm’, the poetic form creates a tension between a spatial and a
temporal dimension. By moving, at the referential level, from Venice’s
buildings to the reflections in the canal, and then to San Giorgio
Maggiore on the other side of the water, the poem’s space reflects the
spatial form of Venice. At the same time, the poem conveys a temporal
process occurring within this space, from a hazy totality in time and
space, through the awakening of consciousness in the personified Venice,
to clear temporal and spatial differentiation: the closing lines convey a
moment in time, in contrast with the ‘immer wieder’ of the opening
stanza, and the act of perception they construct is based on a distanced,
perspectival separation of subject and object. The direction of the poem is
thus away from the abstract quality of Venice as an idea outside time and
space, towards the city’s concrete reality in time and space. Paradoxically,
though, the clear vision of San Giorgio Maggiore remains dependent on
the viewpoint of the personified Venice, as an abstraction outside the
space of the city.
It has often been pointed out that the relationship between ‘Venezia-
nischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ is one of complementarity:
while the former presents Venice as a dream-like city which constantly has
to regain consciousness of its existence, in the latter the decaying Venice of
the present is contrasted with the will to power embodied by its past.54 This
difference of emphasis is reflected by the contrast in poetic form: despite its
radical departures from the internal rhythms of a conventional sonnet,
‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ uses the framework of the sonnet form to create an
impetus towards a triumphant final climax.55
281Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
In contrast to the temporal totality of perspective created by the opening
of ‘Venezianischer Morgen’, ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ opens with a deictic
‘nun’, which implies a fixed standpoint in the present. After the initial
general statement about the city as a whole, the speaker comments on
details in turn – the ‘glasernen Palaste’ and, rather less characteristically
for Venice, the gardens.56 The phrase ‘an deinen Blick’ suggests that these
details are the objects of a human subject’s perception, but the complete
absence of specific topographical reference points means that, as in
‘Venezianischer Morgen’, the poem’s perspective is not determined by a
limited spatial standpoint within the city. The perception of the city
rendered in the first three sentences of the poem is not constructed as a
process: the three statements seem to convey parallel, rather than
necessarily sequential, observations. Whereas ‘Venezianischer Morgen’
constructed the present as an ongoing process, here it is, as the ‘nun’
suggests, a point in time which enables comparisons with the past.
The present is contrasted with the past on two levels. The opening three
sentences define the late autumnal Venice according to how it differs from
Venice in high season. The ‘Aber’ half-way through the second quatrain
introduces a contrast to this tired, decaying city: the idea of a will rising
from the bed of the sea and from the depths of the past (‘vom Grund aus
alten Waldskeletten’). The remainder of the poem envisages a resurgence
of Venice’s former power. The poem is one of the most frequently analysed
in Neue Gedichte, and the relationship between its imagery and subject
matter, and thematically related passages in Rilke’s letters to Sidonie
Nadherny of 24 November 1907 and to Gisela von der Heydt of 24 March
1908, and in Malte, have received much commentary.57 The central
contrast in the poem, between the unreal Venice of the tourists and a real,
historical Venice which is not visible to visitors, is expressed more fully in
the Malte passage:
Das weiche, opiatische Venedig ihrer Vorurteile und Bedurfnisse verschwindetmit diesen somnolenten Auslandern, und eines Morgens ist das andere da, daswirkliche, wache, bis zum Zerspringen sprode, durchaus nicht ertraumte: dasmitten im Nichts auf versenkten Waldern gewollte, erzwungene und endlich sodurch und durch vorhandene Venedig.58
In ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ this contrast is constructed through the time
structure of the poem. The tourists’ Venice of high summer which is now
282 Helen Bridge
past is not described in any detail: as Bernhard Blume has pointed out,
only the word ‘Koder’ hints at its nature.59 It exists in the poem only as a
negative (‘nicht mehr’) and as an implied point of comparison (‘sproder’).
The continuing existence in the present of the will-power of the historical
Venice, by contrast, is stated as fact (‘steigt Willen auf’). The concluding
vision of Venice’s display of naval might is presented as a possibility which
is dormant in the present. However, the phrase that signals this
hypothetical status, ‘als sollte uber Nacht’, is separated from the details
of the vision, so that the two tercets construct this scene from Venice’s past
as a self-contained reality in the present of the poem. The syntactical shift
from verbal infinitives (‘verdoppeln’, ‘zu teeren’) to the active and finite
‘sich drangt’ reflects the transition from hypothesis to reality.
Whereas the poetic form of ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ constructed both
spatial and temporal dimensions of Venice, the emphasis in ‘Spatherbst in
Venedig’ is very much on the temporal. The city’s existence is conveyed
through a series of temporal contrasts, and the poem is also structured as a
progression in time: the focus on Venice in a present (late autumn) which is
defined entirely by its relation to the recent past (summer) gives way to a
vision of the near future (‘uber Nacht’) in which the Venice of a more
distant past is reborn. In contrast with ‘Venezianischer Morgen’, which
progresses from the abstract to the concrete, the movement here is from
the concrete features of Venice in the present to an abstract idea of Venice,
invisible in the present but expressed as a union of the future and the past.
However, at the referential level the poem gives this invisible, abstract
Venice a spatial reality, the ambiguity of the phrase ‘Grund aus alten
Waldskeletten’ creating a unity of time (the depths of the past) and space
(the depths of the sea). Furthermore, as an aesthetic form the poem creates
a space in which this abstract Venice can be realized as a visual image. As
Egon Schwarz comments, the form of the poem supports Rilke’s intention,
‘die empirische Zeit zu vernichten, das vergangliche Venedig aus der
Sichtbarkeit zu heben und in das unsichtbare Venedig in der Zeitlosigkeit
des Geistes zu verwandeln’.60
Whereas the tensions in ‘Der Turm’ between the temporal and the
spatial, and between the concrete and the abstract, resulted from a
subject’s experience of space, in ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst
in Venedig’ such tensions are presented as inherent in Venice itself.
However, despite the absence of an experiencing and conceptualizing
283Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
subject, and of reflection on the processes involved in transforming real
space into the aesthetic space of poetry, the abstract ideas of Venice
invoked by the two poems are ones which can be read as metaphors for
aspects of Rilke’s biography and work as an artist. In ‘Venezianischer
Morgen’ the daily creation of the city is presented as a process with clear
parallels to the act of artistic creation, whereas in ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’
Venice’s achievement of glory through sheer will-power to overcome its
unfavourable starting conditions can be read as a metaphor for Rilke’s
understanding of his own career as a poet.61
Critics have often taken up Rilke’s pronouncements on Rodin’s work
and applied them to the Neue Gedichte, to suggest that the poems effect a
transformation of time into space.62 Close analysis of these three poems
has made it clear that the relationship is not unidirectional. The poems
both give space a temporal dimension and transform temporal processes
into aesthetic space.63 In ‘Der Turm’ space is dynamized in three ways.
First, the space of the tower is transformed into the temporal process of the
speaker’s experience of it. Second, the space of the landscape is
transformed into the temporal sequence by which the speaker looks at
it. In each of these cases, this enables space to be conveyed through the
temporal medium of language. Third, the poetic image which likens the
landscape to a Patenier painting conceives of space as the juxtaposition of
units of time. Just as the painting simile transforms this temporalized space
into a higher, aesthetic space in which temporal distinctions disappear, so
the poem as a whole temporalizes space in order to create a new space: the
imaginary tower invoked by the poem, or the poem itself as an aesthetic
structure. The conception, in ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in
Venedig’, of the city as a space which has an integral temporal dimension
can be likened to this image of the landscape in ‘Der Turm’. Despite the
marginality of a subjective perspective in the Venice poems, vision is used
here too to dynamize space by constructing tensions within Venice itself –
between the visible Venice of the present and the invisible Venice of the
past, and between the abstract, personified Venice and the concrete
buildings and spaces of the city.
Beyond Rilke’s own concern with learning more productive ways of
seeing, vision has a clear aesthetic function in these poems: by creating
dynamic relationships, whether between a subject and a landscape or
between different elements within a landscape, vision makes it possible to
284 Helen Bridge
convey space as a temporal process. All three poems create a relationship
between space and time, both referentially in their treatment of their
respective subject matter, and aesthetically in their poetic form. In ‘Der
Turm’ and ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ the relationship is one of tension: the
poems embody both temporal processes and spatial relations, but
appreciating both dimensions requires a shift of focus on the part of the
reader. ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’, by contrast, constructs the relationship as
one of unity: here the space of Venice has an integral temporal dimension,
and an abstract idea of Venice which exists only temporally, since it
belongs to the past, is given spatial form.
NOTES
1. Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome, Briefwechsel, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer(Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 1989), p. 94. The same idea is expressed inthe monograph on Rodin, where Rilke talks of the aesthetic object being ‘getrenntvom Zufall und von der Zeit’ and ‘eingeschaltet […] in die stille Dauer des Raumesund in seine großen Gesetze’. Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabein vier Banden, ed. Manfred Engel, Ulrich Fulleborn, Horst Nalewski and AugustStahl (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 1996) [henceforth abbreviated asKA], IV: Schriften, ed. Horst Nalewski, pp. 410–411.
2. KA, I: Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fulleborn, pp. 907–908.
3. Cf. KA, I, p. 906.4. See, for example, Rilke’s comments on the independence of Rodin’s sculptures
from the ‘Stoff’ which formed their initial inspiration. KA, IV, pp. 430–431.5. KA, I, p. 908.6. It is generally accepted that Rilke’s engagement with the work of visual artists had
the function primarily of helping him to work out new directions for his ownpoetry. See, for example, Herman Meyer, ‘Rilkes Cezanne-Erlebnis’, in ZarteEmpirie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1963), pp. 244–286; Michaela Kopp, Rilke und Rodin:Auf der Suche nach der wahren Art des Schreibens (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin,Berne, New York, Paris and Vienna: Lang, 1999).
7. Paul de Man sees the significance of the Neue Gedichte in the structural principle ofchiasmic reversal. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,Rilke, and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 20–56. David Wellbery proposes a generative model for understanding Rilke’s poetics,arguing in his analysis of ‘Die Gazelle’ that the poem does not refer in any way to areal gazelle, but is rather constituted by a ‘Figurationsprozeß’ which creates aninterplay of various levels of meaning, thus constructing ‘hermeneutische Raume,durch die die Gazelle lauft’. ‘Zur Poetik der Figuration beim mittleren Rilke: ‘‘DieGazelle’’’, in Zu Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. Egon Schwarz (Stuttgart: Klett, 1983), pp.125–132.
8. Hartmut Engelhardt, Der Versuch, wirklich zu sein: Zu Rilkes sachlichem Sagen(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 36.
285Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
9. In his letter to Lou Andreas-Salome of 8 August 1903 Rilke laments his inability toreconcile life and art in the way he had observed Rodin doing, and expresses hisdesire to model his approach to his work on Rodin’s, asking ‘wo ist das Handwerkmeiner Kunst, ihre tiefste und geringste Stelle, an der ich beginnen durfte tuchtig zusein?’. On 10 August Andreas-Salome responds by pointing out the differencesbetween a sculpture’s work and a poet’s. Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome, Briefwechsel, pp. 90–101.
10. KA, IV, pp. 630–631.11. For example, Patricia Pollock Brodsky, Russia in the Works of Rainer Maria
Rilke (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), pp. 192–197; HelmutNaumann, Rußland in Rilkes Werk (Rheinfelden and Berlin: Schauble, 1993), pp.162–166.
12. See, for example, Karlheinz Stierle, ‘Rilkes Pariser Bilder’, in Romanistik als ver-gleichende Literaturwissenschaft: Festschrift fur Jurgen von Stackelberg, ed. Wil-helm Graeber, Dieter Steland and Wilfried Floeck (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin,Berne, New York, Paris and Vienna: Lang, 1996), pp. 387–411.
13. Richard Jayne, The Symbolism of Space and Motion in the Works of Rainer MariaRilke (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum, 1972), pp. 65–91. The older study by BedaAllemann is concerned with the Neue Gedichte only in so far as they anticipate theconcept of ‘Figur’ in the late work, but here too poems which represent objects –e.g. ‘Der Ball’ – are prominent. Zeit und Figur beim spaten Rilke: Ein Beitrag zurPoetik des modernen Gedichtes (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962).
14. KA, IV, pp. 417–418.15. Manfred Engel, ‘Rilke als Autor der literarischen Moderne’, in Rilke-Handbuch:
Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Manfred Engel, with Dorothea Lauterbach (Stuttgartand Weimar: Metzler, 2004), pp. 507–528 (p. 523).
16. Martin Sutton, for example, pursues the question of whether the model for Rilke’s‘Romische Fontane’ was the same fountain as that which inspired C. F. Meyer’s‘Der romische Brunnen’, in ‘C. F. Meyer and R. M. Rilke: Which Roman Foun-tain?’, German Life and Letters 40 (1986–1987), 135–141.
17. Jacob Steiner is not alone in pointing out that ‘Der Panther’ was originally inspirednot by the sight of a panther in the Jardin des Plantes, but by a statuette of a tiger inRodin’s atelier. ‘Kunst und Literatur: Zu Rilkes Kathedralengedichten’, in Wissenaus Erfahrungen: Werkbegriff und Interpretation heute. Festschrift fur HermanMeyer zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Alexander von Bormann, with Karl Robert Man-delkow and Anthonius H. Touber (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1976), pp. 621–635 (pp.621–622).
18. Ray Ockenden reads the indications of place as suggestive of museum exhibits, in‘Rilkes Neue Gedichte: Perspektive und Finalitat’, in Rilke und die Moderne, ed.Adrian Stevens and Fred Wagner (Munich: Iudicium, 2000), pp. 89–108 (pp. 90–92).
19. Judith Ryan, ‘The Intertextual Maze: Rilke’s ‘‘Der Turm’’ and his Relation toAestheticism’, Comparative Literature Studies 30 (1993), 69–82 (69).
20. Allemann, Zeit und Figur beim spaten Rilke, p. 18.21. Manfred Koch, ‘Mnemotechnik des Schonen’: Studien zur poetischen Erinnerung in
Romantik und Symbolismus (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1988), p. 205.22. KA, IV, pp. 629–630.
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23. The long tradition of cultural representations of Venice is well known. At the endof the nineteenth century the city became a symbol of the seductions of decay forwriters such as Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler and Thomas Mann. See Bernhard Blume,‘Rilkes ‘‘Spatherbst in Venedig’’’, Wirkendes Wort 10 (1960), 345–354 (346–347).Bruges was famously presented as a symbol of death in Georges Rodenbach’s 1892novel Bruges-la-morte.
24. Bernhard Blume, ‘Die Stadt als seelische Landschaft’, in Existenz und Dichtung:Essays und Aufsatze, selected by Egon Schwart (Frankfurt amMain: Insel, 1980), pp.43–86 (p. 57). See also Michael Pleister, Das Bild der Großstadt in den DichtungenRobert Walsers, Rainer Maria Rilkes, Stefan Georges und Hugo von Hofmannsthals(Hamburg: Buske, 1990), 2nd, reworked and expanded edn, p. 116.
25. I follow Ryan in assuming the ‘du’ is a transposed first person, that is, that thepoem is a speaker’s address to himself.
26. Engel, ‘Rilke als Autor der literarischen Moderne’, pp. 523–524.27. H. Uyttersprot, ‘R. M. Rilke: Der Turm’, Neophilologus 39 (1955), 262–275.28. Heidi Heimann, ‘ ‘‘O wenn er steigt, behangen wie ein Stier’’: Rilkes Gedicht ‘‘Der
Turm’’ ’, Publications of the English Goethe Society n. s. 32 (1961–62), 46–73. Seealso the response by Herbert W. Belmore: Herbert W. Belmore and Heidi Hei-mann, ‘ ‘‘Behangen wie ein Stier’’: Entgegnung und Berichtigung’, Publications ofthe English Goethe Society n. s. 33 (1962–1963), 1–9.
29. Franz Schuppen, ‘Lebensbilder aus dem flachen Land: Die westflamische StadtVeurne (Furnes) als poetisches Motiv bei Rainer Maria Rilke’, in ‘Stets wird dieWahrheit hadern mit dem Schonen’: Festschrift fur Manfred Windfuhr zum 60.Geburtstag, ed. Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, Winfried Hartkopf, Ariane Neuhaus-Koch and Hildegard Stauch (Cologne and Vienna: Bohlau, 1990), pp. 335–355(pp. 342–349).
30. Ryan, ‘The Intertextual Maze’. A revised version of the article is published in Rilke,Modernism and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),pp. 65–72.
31. For further analyses, see Brigitte L. Bradley, R. M. Rilke, Neue Gedichte: Ihrzyklisches Gefuge (Berne and Munich: Francke, 1967), pp. 135–137; WolfgangMuller, Rainer Maria Rilkes ‘Neue Gedichte’: Vielfaltigkeit eines Gedichttypus(Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1971), pp. 147–150.
32. Ryan, ‘The Intertextual Maze’, p. 77.33. Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition, p. 70. Alternatively – and perhaps
more plausibly – the line may refer to the resemblance in shape between the bellhanging in the tower and a bull’s genitalia.
34. This transition from a deliberate and intentional form of vision, informed by theintellect, to a much more successful kind of perception based on passive receptivityanticipates an idea which Rilke was to formulate explicitly in the context of hisaesthetic reflections prompted by the encounter with Cezanne’s paintings in au-tumn 1907. There he uses the image of a dog’s intentionless gaze as a metaphor forthe objective, unprejudiced way of looking at things, and the absence of consciousreflection, which he sees at the heart of Cezanne’s aesthetic. KA, IV, pp. 614, 627–628. See also Annette Gerok-Reiter, ‘Perspektivitat bei Rilke und Cezanne:Zur Raumerfahrung des spaten Rilke’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 67 (1993), 484–520 (516–517).
287Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
35. According to Theodore Ziolkowski, the ascent of the tower is ‘a gyrelike ascent ofconsciousness from an ominous darkness to blinding illumination’ and ‘achievedconsciousness enables the poet to structure the reality surrounding him in the formof art’. The View from the Tower: Origins of an Antimodernist Image (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 111.
36. Allemann (Zeit und Figur beim spaten Rilke, pp. 34–35) uses this poem to dem-onstrate the identity, at this stage of Rilke’s career, of the ‘Figur’ as a poeticformation in which this higher form of time is realized and the ‘Figur’ in the senseof ‘statue’. In fact, the idea of a ‘full’ time in which all temporal dimensions arepresent simultaneously is associated not just with aesthetic objects, but also withmore diffuse spaces in the Neue Gedichte.
37. Paul de Man shows how the figure of reversal in ‘Quai du Rosaire’ – by whichBruges, conventionally an emblem of transience and mutability, becomes, in itsreflective surfaces, the space in which a lost reality is recovered – produces a newtotality which is itself temporal in nature (the sound of the carillon, which markstime). De Man, Allegories of Reading, pp. 40–43.
38. Koch identifies this ‘Grundfigur’ in ‘Der Ball’ and ‘Falken-Beize’, but does notmention ‘Der Turm’.
39. Koch, ‘Mnemotechnik des Schonen’, p. 218.40. Hellmuth Himmel, ‘Rilke und das Transitorische’, Sprachkunst 6 (1975), 301–313
(311–312).41. Schuppen (‘Lebensbilder aus dem flachen Land’, p. 348) wrongly understands the
reference to Patenier in terms of the ‘unperspektivisches Nebeneinander’ of medi-eval painting. Heimann (‘ ‘‘O wenn er steigt…’’ ’, pp. 55–56), emphasizes instead theraised vantage points and convincing impression of depth which are typical ofPatenier’s work. Even if his paintings are not constructed strictly according toperspectival rules, they share the illusion of depth and the unitary viewpoint whichare defining characteristics of Renaissance perspective according to Erwin Panof-sky in ‘Die Perspektive als ‘‘symbolische Form’’’, in Aufsatze zu Grundfragen derKunstwissenschaft, collected by and ed. Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen (Berlin:Hessling, 1964), pp. 99–167 (pp. 99–101).
42. The most obvious examples of this are ‘Archaischer Torso Apollos’, ‘DieFensterrose’ and ‘Schwarze Katze’. When Rilke uses the process of viewing apainting to structure a poem in the second volume of Neue Gedichte, his techniquehas much in common with that of modern painters, such as Monet and Cezanne,who rejected Renaissance perspective, instead emphasizing the two-dimensionalityof the picture surface. See Helen Bridge, ‘Rilke and the Modern Portrait’, ModernLanguage Review 99 (2004), 681–695.
43. In a letter to Gisela von der Heydt on 24 March 1908, Rilke emphasizes the need toapproach Venice as a whole, saying that the Baedeker guide is of no use in a city, ‘inder alles sehenswert ist oder nichts’. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an Karl und Elis-abeth von der Heydt 1905–1922, ed. Ingeborg Schnack and Renate Scharffenberg(Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1986), pp. 144–145.
44. PaulRequadt, ‘Rilkes Venedigdichtung’, inRilke in neuer Sicht, ed.KateHamburger(Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne and Mainz: Kohlhammer, 1971), pp. 38–62 (p. 38).
45. ‘San Marco’ takes an individual building as the starting-point for reflections on thehistory of Venice more generally.
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46. The four poems in the ‘Fahrten’ section of Advent, for example, take up traditionalVenetian motifs – gondola rides, palaces, morbidity – in order to create a fairlysuperficial impression of atmosphere. Rainer Maria Rilke, Samtliche Werke, ed. theRilke Archive, with Ruth Sieber-Rilke, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1955;repr. 1987), I, pp. 116–118.
47. This was Rilke’s third stay in Venice. He had visited previously in March 1897 andin August 1904. See Ingeborg Schnack, Rainer Maria Rilke: Chronik seines Lebensund seines Werkes 1875–1926, 2nd, rev. edn, (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1990), pp.56–57, 171, 292–294; Bernard Dieterle, ‘Italien’, in Rilke-Handbuch, ed. ManfredEngel, pp. 88–98 (pp. 94–96); John Sandford, Landscape and Landscape Imagery inR. M. Rilke (Leeds: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1980), pp. 30–35; Joachim W.Storck, ‘Rilkes fruhestes Venedig-Erlebnis’, Blatter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 16/17(1989–1990), 19–32; Richard Exner, ‘ ‘‘Dieser Streifen Zwischen-Welt’’ und derWille zur Kunst’, Blatter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 16/17 (1989–1990), 57–68.
48. See Schnack, Rainer Maria Rilke, p. 293. Rilke was to pursue more detailed studiesof Venetian history in 1912. See his letter of 1 March 1912 to Lou Andreas-Salome.Briefwechsel, pp. 264–267.
49. K. Deleu, ‘R. M. Rilke: Venezianischer Morgen’, Handelingen 12 (1958), 43–52(44).
50. Panofsky, ‘Die Perspektive als ‘‘symbolische form’’ ’, p. 99.51. Deleu (‘R. M. Rilke: ‘‘Venezianischer Morgen’’ ’, p. 45) discusses this aspect of the
poem in detail.52. Ibid., 52.53. Manfred Koch (‘Mnemotechnik des Schonen’, pp. 236–237) reads this development
as a metaphor for a human subject’s daily emergence from sleep.54. See for example, KA, I, p. 985; Wolfgang G. Muller, ‘Neue Gedichte/Der Neuen
Gedichte anderer Teil’, in Rilke-Handbuch, pp. 296–318 (p. 313). John Sandfordsees the contrast in gendered terms, describing the summer Venice of ‘Veneziani-scher Morgen’ as ‘the female city, glittering and beautiful, a permanent embodi-ment of fickle transience’, while ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ portrays the ‘hard, active,male Venice’. Sandford, Landscape and Landscape Imagery in R. M. Rilke, pp. 32–33.
55. Volker Klotz shows how the optical impression of a sonnet is not supported by thesound structure of the poem, in ‘Roter Faden im Gedicht?’, Sprache im technischenZeitalter 33 (1995), 200–234 (222–224).
56. See Rilke’s comments on his discovery of Venice’s gardens in his letter to Giselavon der Heydt (24 March 1908), Briefe an Karl und Elisabeth von der Heydt, p. 149.
57. See, for example, Bernhard Blume, ‘Rilkes ‘‘Spatherbst in Venedig’’ ’, WirkendesWort 10 (1960), 345–354; Ernst Rose, ‘Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘‘Spatherbst inVenedig’’: An Interpretation’, The Germanic Review 16 (1941), 68–71; EgonSchwarz, ‘Zu Rilkes neuem Gedicht ‘‘Spatherbst in Venedig’’ ’, Wirkendes Wort 16(1966), 273–275. August Stahl argues that the poem is inspired by two paintings byTintoretto which Rilke had seen in the Hof-Museum in Vienna. ‘Zu einigen, auchfruheren Bildgedichten Rilkes’, Modern Austrian Literature 15 (1982), 317–335(320–321).
58. KA, III: Prosa und Dramen, ed. August Stahl, pp. 624–625.59. Blume, ‘Rilkes ‘‘Spatherbst in Venedig’’ ’, 349.
289Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte
60. Schwarz, ‘Zu Rilkes neuem Gedicht’, 275.61. Blume, ‘Rilkes ‘‘Spatherbst in Venedig’’ ’, 353–354.62. Kate Hamburger identifies a ‘Verraumlichung der Zeit’ in Rilke’s work. ‘Die Ka-
tegorie des Raums in Rilkes Lyrik’, Blatter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 15 (1988), 35–42(35). Winfried Eckel sees ‘Rettung’ as the central idea in Rilke’s aesthetics at thetime of Neue Gedichte, and defines this process as, amongst other things, a trans-formation of time into space. Wendung: Zum Prozeß der poetischen Reflexion imWerk Rilkes (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1994), p. 104. L. McGlashaneven goes so far as to deny that there is any progression in time in the NeueGedichte, arguing that Rilke’s main interest is in spatial relationships. ‘Rilke’s NeueGedichte’, German Life and Letters 12 (1958–1959), 81–101 (95).
63. Michael Kahl has shown how Rilke strives to use language in such a way as toachieve the ‘Synthese von Raum und Zeit’ which he perceives in Rodin’s work.Lebensphilosophie und Asthetik: Zu Rilkes Werk 1902–1910 (Freiburg im Breisgau:Rombach, 1999), pp. 59, 65–76. Martina Lauster has examined Rilke’s use of thesonnet form to create such a synthesis, in ‘Stone Imagery and the Sonnet Form:Petrarch, Michelangelo, Baudelaire, Rilke’, Comparative Literature 45 (1993), 146–174.
Helen Bridge. Born 1972. D.Phil (Oxon.). Lecturer in German at the University ofExeter. Recent publications: Women’s Writing and Historiography in the GDR (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2002); ‘Rilke and the Modern Portrait’, Modern LanguageReview 99 (2004), 681–695.
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