You my friend are lonely… a lament.
Reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Sonnets to Orpheus.
A Lament.
Today, I came across a strikingly beautiful poem that took me unawares. It was a downcast day outside; pacing around my living room, I began poring over my shelves, hoping to make a new discovery, and I noticed a book of poems my friend got me for my birthday, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), Selected Poems (New translations by Susan Ranson and Marielle Sutherland). I flipped through the pages at random and stopped at a text that tugged at me. I was immediately captivated by the delicate craftsmanship of the words that drew me into a mournful lament - a lament at the loss of fellowship, where words are used for ‘pointing fingers’ and splitting ‘fragments and parts’ against ‘the whole’. The poem, from The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XVI is a lament at having been made lonely by one’s hunger to disgorge words, ‘because…we make the world our own, with words / and our pointing fingers’. Earlier this week, I coincidentally wrote a poem about Orpheus, punished for the ‘sin of making certain’.
I have only just discovered Rilke’s poetry, but am already taken by his stinging lament at our loss of communion with the ineffable, our infinite capacity for dissension and self-isolation.
Listen now to the poem, XVI Sonnet to Orpheus:
Music: Michael Levy; “Yikhes (Tradition)”
YOU my friend are lonely, because…
we make the world our own, with words
and our pointing fingers, perhaps by the pieces
frailest and most dangerous to us.
Who can point fingers to a smell? -
Yet of the forces that we dread,
you feel so many…you know the dead,
you are afraid of the magic spell.
See, now together we must bear,
as if the whole, these fragments and parts.
To help you is hard. Above all, do not plant
me in your heart. I would grow too fast.
Yet, I will guide my own master’s hand and swear:
Here. This is Esau, here in his pelt.
(Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Part One, XVI)
Thought of the Day
The Sonnets to Orpheus, XVI is a lament at having been made lonely by one’s hunger to disgorge words, ‘because…we make the world our own’. The delicate craftsmanship of the words drew me into a mournful lament - a lament at the loss of fellowship, where words are used for ‘pointing fingers’ and splitting ‘fragments and parts’ against ‘the whole’. Rilke mourns our loss of communion with the ineffable, our infinite capacity for dissension, and our persistent descent into self-isolation.
