472 - The Ways of Praise

The Ways of Praise

By W. Dow Edgerton

"Must we not learn to speak of the interior landscape of heart? Must we not learn to see with our eyes in discipline and penetration and more: to see through love's eyes? Must we not learn the discipline of listening and the astonishment of silence? Must we not learn by heart the source and reason and language of praise? And finally, must we not learn how it is a human life could unfold with word at its center, a painful pearl of treasure, growing? Here is another traveller with stories to tell. "

ARE over words is one of the ways of love. Chief among the actual paths love must take from one person to another is the path of words. Words as a substitute for love we know well enough; words as a substitute for much else-for justice, for peace, for bread, for faith-this we know well. But language as a discipline of love, not for language itself, but for the hearer, the intended, this is not so well known.

There are many languages, however, which the preacher of the gospel must speak. There is the language of events, of world, of politics and economics, of theology, the language of law and justice, of reason. Sometimes it is the language of philosophy, sometimes science, sometimes business, sometimes art. All of these are vital, and all of them belong rightfully to the proclamation of the gospel. To these must be added, however, the vital languages of the individual life, of experience and feeling, the personal languages of hope and pain, relationship. These are languages founded in the tangible facts of day and year, filled with objects and places and times, ordinary enough in themselves, which nonetheless summon more than the bare names would seem to hold. These are languages which may well be the most compelling, for they are the ones which speak to us most intimately of ourselves and our world.

I

Where can we turn for help in learning the languages of experience? A source in one part of the spectrum could be the German poet, Rainer Maria Rilke, the translation of whose work in the last few years would

W. Dow Edgerton is Assistant Professor of Ministry and Dean of Student Life at Chicago Theological Seminary. He teaches in the areas of worship, preaching, and the practice of ministry. Educated at Johns Hopkins University and Chicago Theological Seminary, Edgerton came to seminary teaching after seven years of parish ministry in Wisconsin.

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suggest a power to speak which is unusually troublesome.¹ Rilke died in 1926, celebrated as one of the greatest of German poets. His ability to weave image, rhythm, sound, and meaning into a whole cloth which was more than the count of its threads explains the greatness in part. As much of it may lie, however, with his approach to poetry itself. Poetry, for Rilke, was more than the writing of poems. The essential work at the heart of human purpose had everything to do with the speaking, and ultimately the singing praise, which Rilke believed poetry to be. Poetry lived at the core of what it meant to be human. Or perhaps it should be said even more strongly, as Rilke himself did. Poetry sings as the heart of life; poetry sings as life itself.

The unfolding of the task through the years and volumes of poems traces a journey, at the same time personal and poetic. The route has identifiable way-stations which mark a progress. They are more properly seen as concerns than as ideas. A direction of concern can yield ideas and propositions which seem completely at odds with each other, giving and taking back, claiming and disclaiming. The concern, however, holds them together; the direction of the gaze, the field of vision, can contain direct contradiction, because it determines not so much what is seen, but where one looks.

What are the fields of vision through which the poet moves? Inwardness, seeing, hearing, heart-work, praise, song-human work foundational to human life. This work, indeed, is foundation and fulfillment both-what we build with and what we build toward. Vocation is an appropriate Word, for vocation represents both the core and the reach of a life: who we are and who we arc meant to be. Rilke was less concerned with poems than with poetry, and a poem, we could argue, mattered less in itself and more as an occasion of poetry's eruption. This characteristic, and its progress through the years and work, is much of what recommends him to those of us who labor between words and the Word. From Rilke we can learn about what it means to have a vocation of proclamation.

¹The following volumes represent a bibliography of recent translations and works cited:

Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. and ed. by Robert Bly. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. 224 pages.

An Unofficial Rilke, trans. and ed. by Michael Hamburger. Redding Ridge, Conn.: Black Swan Books, 1981. 115 pages.

The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rilke, by J. F. Hendry. Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 1983. 179 pages.

The Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. and ed. by Stephen Mitchell, introduction by Robert Hass. New York: Random House, 1982. 356 pages.

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, by Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans. by Stephen Mitchell, introduction by William H. Gass. New York: Vintage, 1985 (originally published by Random House, 1983). 277 pages.

The Astonishment of Origins: French Sequences by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by A. Poulin, Jr. Port Townsend, Wash.: Graywolf Press, 1982. 129 pages.

The Migration of Powers: French Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by A. Poulin, Jr. Port Townsend, Wash.: Graywolf Press, 1984. 175 pages.

New Poems [1907], trans. by Edward Snow. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984. 197 pages.

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From the poems we can learn about words themselves. For a religious tradition which points so emphatically toward Word, it is surprising how little attention we give to words: attention to how they sound, how they flow, how they combine or refuse to, how they connect with one another, the beat of them, the melody of them. These, too, shape meaning as surely, although less obviously, as the definitions in a dictionary. There is no avoiding of the "poetic" realities of our language-as if by refusing to pay attention to them our words became more sincere, less calculated. Those realities will be present and speaking with or without our permission; the question is whether or not we will attend to them and what they say.

From the translators we have much to learn as well! There is no more basic work in ministry than the finding of words to say best what is asking to be said. The gospel is always coming to speech afresh, or at least asking to come to speech afresh-asking to be translated afresh into words which speak to the new time. Every translation changes the original, particularly when it is the translation of poetry. In some ways, a translation is a new work, a re-imagining in a new language. If you have some German or French, there is nothing more natural than to read back and forth between the original and the translation to test it against your own sense. You find that it sends you searching through your own language, listening, weighing, balancing sound and meaning, rhyme, beat. If we follow carefully the work these individuals have done, they will teach us much about the work of translation we have to do.

The purpose here is not to offer an analysis of Rilke's life and poetry, but a more modest purpose of pointing. The pointing is twofold. First, it is to bring to the attention of those called to preach a source of help in understanding both the vocation and the task. Second, it is to call attention to recent translations which make that help even more accessible. The hope is that a reader would go and read some Rilke and profit from it.

II

In the early work, we meet the Rilke who is a poet of inwardness, solitude, and the hungering human spirit. A Book for the Hours of Prayer, written between 1899 and 1903, is well-named. The landscape is an interior landscape, even when it is the real landscape of the world. The horizon, mountains, streams, birds, buildings-the realities of the surrounding world-are grasped as signs of the heart's own life. Quoting here from Robert Bly's translation, the poems alternately soar in air and bore into bedrock.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don't know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song ...²

² Bly, Selected Poems, p. 13.

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Because One wanted so much to have you,
I know that we can all want you.
Even when we throw all depths away from us:
suppose a mountain has gold
and no one is allowed to mine it anymore;
the water will bring it to light, the water
which reaches into the silence of stone,
it does the wanting.

Even when we do not use our will:

God is growing³

Rilke knew that a poet of the inner life must befriend darkness and depth as well as light. Simple opposition of dark and light, the one evil and the other good, has no place. In these poems, we find the images of darkness have grown far beyond the usual association with evil or death, and taken on a kind of birth-potency.

You darkness, that I come from,
I love you more than all the fires
that fence in the world,
for the fire makes
a circle of light for everyone,
and then no one outside learns of you.

But the darkness pulls in everything:
shapes and fires, animals and myself,
how easily it gathers them!--
powers and people--

and it is possible a great energy
is moving near me.

I have faith in nights. ⁴

Darkness and light are experienced as mutually necessary, and both of them are full of danger and blessing alike. In the same way, the dreadful aspect of God-seen sometimes as the Enemy, sometimes as a stone, sometimes as the irresistible silence-is held in tension with God who is the ground of all praise, blessing, and delight.

The man who is not rich now as summer goes
will wait and wait and never be himself.

That man who cannot quietly close his eyes,
certain that there is vision after vision
inside, simply waiting until nighttime
to rise all around him in the darkness --
it's all over for him, he's like an old man.

Nothing else will come; no more days will open,
and everything that does happen will cheat him.
Even you, my God. And you are like a stone
that draws him daily deeper into the depths. ⁵

³Ibid., P. 29.

⁴Ibid., p. 21.

⁵Ibid., p. 53.

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And yet Rilke writes,

A hundred thousand harps take you
like wings and sweep you up out of silence.
And your primitive wind is blowing
the fragrance of your marvelous power
to every being and to every creature in need . ⁶

III

The poems of A Book for the Hours of Prayer, written while the poet was in his middle twenties, drew their subject matter chiefly from Rilke's own inner life. The language was often in the first person, and the concern subjective. Moving to Paris in 1902 at the age of twenty-six, however, brought the already achieved technical skill and sensitivity for the heart's interior landscape into confrontation with the immense life of the beautiful and grotesque City of Light.

So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in. I have been out. I saw...

In this way begins The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a novel in the form of a journal kept by a young Danish poet. Translator Stephen Mitchell has brought a vivid and contemporary English to Rilke's prose. To have Mitchell's translation of Selected Poems as well, many of them from this same period, offers a splendid opportunity to read back and forth between the language of prose and poetry without the inevitable jar of shifting translators. Writing of the poet's work, "Brigge" says a word which we preachers may find strikes our own calling:

Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines.

He then begins to enumerate what one must have seen and understood in order to write a single poem, a catalogue of world and life and mystery and death, all alive within memory. Continuing, he says:

And yet it is not enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them. ⁷

The poems of the first years in Paris, The Book of Pictures, are often titled after the human pain of the city: "The Blindman's Song," "The Idiot's Song," "The Dwarf's Song." The lives of the people and the life of the poet are lived on the margins with no home. The arrival of each

⁶ Ibid., p. 43.

⁷ Mitchell, Notebooks, pp. 20-21.

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evening enacts the contradiction, a land falling into the distance, another rising over the earth to

leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star ⁸

A sense of vast loss and waste haunts both the poems and prose, the tragedy of lives, especially the lives of women, gone without account, gone without words-and gone with them what they had to teach us of what is most difficult: love. With every death a world dies, so that the tragedy of the individual life becomes our entry into the pain of the world. What is surprising, however, is the affirmation, call it faith or hope, which remains. In a poem entitled "Lament," Rilke writes:

Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.
A clock has stopped striking in the house
across the road....
When did it start? ...
I would like to step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know which one it is--
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city. . . . ⁹

The sky is not heaven, the earth is not hell. The sky is full of false hope, dead stars-but there remains a true star, ancient and true which is not a deception. And to fall means to be held up by great hands:

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up,
as if orchards were dying high in space.

Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no."

And tonight the heavy earth is falling
away from all the other stars in the loneliness.

We're all failing. This hand here is failing.
And look at the other one.... It's in them all.

And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, hold up all this falling. ¹⁰

⁸ Mitchell, Selected Poems, p. 13.

⁹ Ibid., p. 9.

¹⁰ Bly, p. 89.

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IV

As the years in Paris continued, and as Rilke's contact with some of the great artists of the age became more intimate, the concern of the writing changed. Admiration for both the work and the method of the sculptor Rodin, in particular, shaped the new direction. Rilke wanted to make poems as solid as sculpture, as real and tangible as Things. Work itself became less a matter of subjectivity and inspiration, more a matter of observation and daily labor. Published in 1907, New Poems saw this program first carried into print. To the translations of Bly and Mitchell, each of whom presents only a small sample, must be added the excellent new volume offered by Edward Snow who is translating New Poems in its entirety. Rhyme and rhythm are notoriously difficult to recreate in translation; nevertheless, Snow frequently succeeds, if not in recreation, then in giving music in response to music. Some lines from the poem "The Cathedral":

There was birth in these foundations,
and strength and fervor in this towering,
and love was everywhere like wine and bread,
and the portals filled with love's lament ¹¹

Or these from "The Olive Grove," in which Jesus prays in Gethsemane:

I find no longer You. Not inside me.
Not in the others. Not in this stone.
I find You no longer. I am alone. ¹²

Consider the power of observation and the evocation of the movements of a woman going blind as she follows an adjourned tea party strolling through her house:

She walked behind the others,

restrained, like one who in a moment
will have to sing before a crowd;
on her bright, rejoicing eyes
light from outside rested, as on a pool.

She followed slowly and she needed time
as if something still were not surmounted;
and yet: as if, after a crossing-over,
she would no longer walk, but fly. ¹³

The detail of light resting on the woman's eyes, not penetrating, but reflecting as from the surface of a pool is remarkable in what. it evokes--of her blindness, of her spirit, of the eyes themselves, of loss and rejoicing, of past and future, and more. Yet all this opens up through the small detail of observation. Rilke has seen her eyes.

This fine attention to physical objects is characteristic of New Poems;

¹¹ Snow, New Poems, p. 53.

¹² Ibid., p. 39.

¹³ Ibid., p. 105.

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and not only an attention to the objects themselves, but to the placement of the objects within the poem to their maximum effect. Just as the reflecting eyes give the strange and marvelous lift to the lines which follow them, so in the poem "The Last Evening" the ominous object upon which our gaze rests at the end embodies all the pain and tension of the poem. A man and woman share a final evening as his military unit begins to leave for war. He sits playing at the harpsichord; she stands, listening both to the sound of the music and of the rumbling war-train. Here is Mitchell's translation:

She stood, as though distracted, near the window
and felt the violent drum-beats of her heart.

His playing stopped. From outside, a fresh wind blew.
And strangely alien on the mirror-table
stood the black shako with its ivory skull. ¹⁴

In the final words of the poem we come to the center, both of the scene and the poem itself. The hat and its fearsome insignia become the point of view. From here the reader sees; but how ironic to see through the emblem's empty eyes! Having once read through to the end, every return to the poem is under the power of the final image; the final image orders all that precedes it and draws all the lines toward itself.

This phenomenon may be what Edward Snow means when he says, "This interanimation of object and consciousness is, finally, the great theme of the New Poems . . . ." ¹⁵ The conclusion of "Portrait of My Father as a Young Man" could serve as well as any to depict this interanimation, actually through two objects seen together. The poem gazes at a daguerreotype portrait, interpreting the meaning of its various parts, then breaks off suddenly to conclude,

You swiftly fading photograph
in my more slowly fading hands. ¹⁶

In the last lines, the picture becomes a picture-within-a-picture, and framed yet once more by the hands, themselves a detail of a life and full of meaning!

V

If there is something to be learned by interpreters of the gospel from the poems of these years, it has to do with seeing and speaking. All testimony, one could argue, is a translation of what is seen into what is heard. What we see, however, is virtually lost to us until its transformation into words. In some sense, until we have said, we don't know what we have seen.

The poet helps us to see, because the poet helps us to say. In the transformation of experience into language, the actual words are

¹⁴ Mitchell, Selected Poems, p. 37.

¹⁵Snow, p. xi.

¹⁶ Snow, p. 121.

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anything but neutral. There is saying, and then there is saying well; and how well the saying is done makes an essential difference in how well we see. The concentration of the words concentrates our gaze; the scale and scope of the words extends the sweep of our horizon. In one sense, language which is stronger and more evocative, language which holds together wider webs of meaning, is a truer language. It is truer, perhaps we could say more faithful, to the experience and reality to which it bears witness. It is truer to the connectedness, the "interpenetrations," the overtones of meaning. A failed language falsifies by the flattening of depth and dimension, the muffling of echoes, the severing of relationships. Rather than concentrating, it isolates; rather than broadening, it diffuses. To repeat: the poet helps us to see because the poet helps us to say. But how does the poet actually help us to say?

The poet helps us to say, because the poet helps us to see! There is a kind of language which is about nothing but itself, which is rooted nowhere but within itself. What such a language does is direct our attention to its own working. Language which is called "poetic, in the worst sense" is of this sort. Preaching of the "stained-glass" style is, too. There is another sort of language, however. There is language which means to point beyond itself, to testify to what has been seen. Risking the obvious: unless one has seen, there is nothing to say. In order to speak, therefore, we must learn to look. To follow Rilke, our eyes teach our mouths-or even more radically, what we see does the teaching. Seeing is a work as much as words are. Through the poet's words is offered the fruit of such work, and with it, instruction in looking. To help us to speak, the poet helps us to look, and this looking is a search with both eyes and words.

It is not simply preaching in the usual sense which calls for such help. All of ministry is implicated; all of the words and acts, the gestures and silences are a saying founded upon seeing. How could we say in the middle of a life-an individual's, a community's, a world's-if we did not see? But seeing is a hard discipline, difficult work.

In how many kitchens have I sat, in how many hospital rooms, in how many sanctuaries? What has been shouting out in everything but words from the faces and gestures, the clothes, the toys and tokens, the bodies of the people? What might ministry have been if I had seen what was there to be seen, if I had attended through words and overheard, as it were, what my eyes were telling? With this work we all need help.

VI

Following the publication of a second and enlarged edition of New Poems, Rilke did not publish another major collection until 1923, an interval of fifteen years. The issues and problems were many: personal, political, artistic, spiritual. The translations cited here all include biographical introductions which interpret the crossed currents of the poet's world. J.F. Hendry has written a full length study of Rilke's life, The Sacred Threshold: A Life of Rilke, which should be of help to those

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who want to inquire more deeply into the poet himself. The final chapter, "Affirmations," provides an interpretation of the movement through the years based upon Rilke's own letters to a translator. ¹⁷ Although no major collections were published in these middle years, a great deal was written, primarily in German, but also in French. Mitchell and Bly include selections from this long period in their collections. Michael Hamburger has a selection entirely from this period, entitled An Unofficial Rilke: Poems 1912-1926, and an excellent introductory essay to put the work in perspective. ¹⁸

Important among the entwined threads was a dissatisfaction, both personal and artistic, with the way in which the program of "seeing" had been carried out. There was a growing judgment within Rilke that he had looked but not loved, and by not loving he had not really known what he had seen. Hamburger's translation of "Turning Point" tells the story:

When he, a waiting one, sat in strange towns; the hotel's
distracted, preoccupied bedroom
morose about him, and in the avoided mirror
that room once more
and later, from the tormenting bedstead
once more:
then in the air it pronounced,
beyond his grasping pronounced
on his heart that was still to be felt,
through his painfully buried body,
on his heart nonetheless to be felt,
something pronounced then, and judged:
that it was lacking in love...

For looking, you see, has a limit....

Work of seeing is done,
now practice heart-work. ¹⁹

How clearly the experience of inner judgment is displayed. A word is pronounced without a word. From where does such a word come? It can't be said. The judgment is in the very air, in the body. It is from without and from within; the judgment calls attention only to what it judges, so there can be no dissembling or evasion of the truth itself. To see, to know is not enough. There must be love.

Is this a most basic point? Of course. Is this a most difficult point? That too. For us, the first and last words are the same: love. All the intervening words are only explanation. Seeing could well stand for all of our knowledge and its purpose. In ministry, a learned profession, what is the purpose of knowledge? What is the relationship which is formed through knowledge? What is the relationship to the world, to nature, to persons which occurs through our knowing? Is it a relationship of

¹⁷ J.F. Hendry, Sacred Threshold, pp. 151-173.

¹⁸ Hamburger, An Unofficial Rilke, pp. 9-27.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 49.

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distance, objectifying person and thing? Is it a relationship of domination, possession, manipulation, control? Or is it a relationship of mutuality? Is it knowledge for the sake of the other, which intends the freedom of the other? Is it knowledge for the sake of love? The shift toward heart-work is an out-working through poetry of the most basic and most difficult problem of ministry.

The change in the poems from merely seeing to loving sometimes carries within it a despair of words spoken by us, and a turn toward listening, not speech, as the need of the time. Hamburger includes a poem which begins, "When will, when will, when will, they let it suffice...?"

Do not, do not, do not books for ever
hammer at people like perpetual bells?
When, between two books, silent sky appears: be glad ...,
or a patch of plain earth in the evening.

Then the poem grows into a cry to listen, beyond human shouting, to the stars shining in the sky:

Oh, if they spoke to us, the remotest, ancient, most ancient
forbears!
And we: listeners at last. The first human listeners. ²⁰

The ear often overtakes the eye in these years, as if the poet were learning new speech by listening, not speaking. Themes which finally come to full fruit in the towering labor of the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus, both published in 1923, are taking shape during these long and difficult middle years, and sometimes can be seen in early growth. Listening, astonishment, song, praise-these are the fruit ripening.

You language where languages
end. You time
that stands perpendicular on the course of transient
hearts...
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. Innermost of us
that, rising above us, seeks the way out--
holy departure:
when what is inward surrounds us
as the most mastered distance, as
the other side of the air:
pure,
immense,
beyond habitation ²¹

In the French poems written in the few years prior to Rilke's death in 1926, the themes growing in the middle years and finally coming of age in the great works can be seen in more modest and perhaps more accessible dress. There are four volumes now published, offering many

²⁰ Ibid., p. 8 1.

²¹ Ibid., p. 69.

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poems in English for the first time. The volumes are The Migration of Power, The Roses and the Windows, Orchards, and The Astonishment of Origins; the translator is A. Poulin, Jr. Some examples from the collection illustrate:

Let that too-near tomorrow I ignore
be hidden from me by your hand;
that will be a different day; its dawn
will blind me with its sudden roar. ²²

From a poem entitled "Gong":

We must close our eyes, renounce our mouths,
remain mute, blind and dazzled:
with space utterly shaken, what touches us
wants no more from our being that attention. ²³

This from a poem in response to ancient Greek statues of "The Victories":

Surely, in our most secret leaps, we are their sons,
their late-coming brothers in our broken flight,
but just by raising their seafaring statues
gilded by a lovely sun, the iridescence of the sea,

(these ex-votos left by navigators
on the sill of temples no devotee cares about),
just by raising them above our heads
we are a heart taller and a sister greater. ²⁴

After so many years, and so much hard-won ground in one language, to begin writing poems in another, even a well-accustomed one is remarkable. When the languages are as different as German and French, it is more remarkable yet-almost like starting out again. In some ways, perhaps that is what Rilke had in mind. We become captive to our own way of speaking, after all. We become captive to what we have said and how we have said it. The captivity, ironically, is greatest to what we have said best! We cling to our own best words, mimic them, and fear to leave them behind. Who knows, after all, if we shall say so well again? To leave an accustomed speaking behind is to leave yourself behind. What faith does it require to trust that your life lies ahead, in the unknown future, and not behind in the well-known past?

The path to new language is through listening and love. The years of slow transformation tell the story of that path's unfolding.

VII

We turn, finally, to the translations of the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Although the Elegies had been conceived some ten years earlier, only partial progress had been made. The first two of the ten poems had been written, and the opening lines of the last. No way was

²² Poulin, The Astonishment of Origins, P. 21.

²³ Ibid., p. 23.

²⁴Poulin, The Migration of Powers, p. 107.

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found, in those intervening years, to move from the first cry to the final affirmation. If we put the two side by side, the reason may be apparent. Here are Mitchell's translations:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'
hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed
in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to
endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

-First Elegy

Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
a broken string.

-Tenth Elegy

Perhaps we could say that the distance between those two passages is ten years; perhaps we could say the difference is a changed heart. In 1922, however, in the space of less than a month, Rilke completed, in a driven torrent of work, all of the "Elegies" and the fifty-nine "Sonnets." Robert Hass, in his introduction to Mitchell's translation, writes of the task which the poems embodied. Rilke had long been the priest of the solitary, and it was to solitude that he had returned again and again.

There are pleasures, forms of nourishment perhaps, that most people know and that he did not. What he knew about was the place that the need for that nourishment came from. And he knew how immensely difficult it is for us to inhabit that place, to be anything other than strangers to our own existence. To learn not to be a stranger is the burden of the Duino Elegies. ²⁵

The prayer which begins the Tenth Elegy (and what is it but a prayer, no matter where it is addressed?) asks much. Remembering the words in Malte describing what one must see and experience in order to write but a single poem, and then to come in the end to this! To ask for the power to say, "Yes!", the power to praise, and having seen all, still to praise.

To praise is the whole thing.

-Sonnet VII

That is Bly's rendering. Mitchell offers, "Praising is what matters," for the German, "Ruhmen, dasists!" You might try your own hand. A reading which makes for stronger English might be, "Praise, yes!" With every choice something is gained and something lost. However one might have a particular line, the pulse of praise remains, and in these poems the work of praise is supremely a work of words. From Mitchell's translation of the Ninth Elegy:

For when the traveler returns from the mountain-slopes into
the valley,

²⁵ Robert Hass in Mitchell, Selected Poems, p. xxxiv.

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he brings, not a handful of earth, unsayable to others, but
instead
some word he has gained, some pure word, the yellow and blue gentian.
Perhaps we are here in order to say: house,
bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window--
at most: column, tower... But to say them, you must
understand....

Here is the time for the sayable, here is its homeland.
Speak and bear witness. ²⁶

I find myself returning to these lines repeatedly. Perhaps it is the relatedness they evoke, as if to say, language is relationship: relationship with humankind, relationship with the things of the world, relationship with our own purpose. Eye, ear, touch, smell, taste, event-offered as a bouquet gathered and held by the hand of words. Life, human life, is a speaking of the world.

Speaking, however, is now transformed into song, and song is life itself. That is the burden of the Sonnets, and perhaps the final and most urgent burden of what Rilke has to say. Orpheus sings and the animals gather around, stilled, to hear:

...Bellow, roar, shriek
seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been
just a makeshift hut to receive the music,

a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing,
with an entryway that shuddered in the wind--
you built a temple deep inside their hearing. ²⁷

"Gesang ist dasein," says the Third Sonnet. "Song is existence," is the older rendering by Leishman. "To write poetry is to be alive," is Bly's; Mitchell has, "Song is reality." The pain of translation is nowhere more evident than in this small phrase, for its meaning, force, music, and sound are all tied together in the original tongue. Say the German aloud to hear the rhythm, the balance, and the euphony, then try for a phrase in English which can match it. Since every translation is loss already, there's nothing to lose by offering still another possibility. Perhaps "Song is life," catches some of it; perhaps we should read, "To sing is to live." Or perhaps we should just listen to the parent tongue and not try to recreate in our own. We could simply listen, and repeat the not so foreign words to ourselves for a long time, and see what difference it makes, having heard them, to how we sing and speak and live.

VIII

There is a temptation to make poems more than poems, poets more than poets. Because a poem sets so much ringing in you-so much memory, so much anticipation, so much fear and hope, so much language itself ringing, the occasion of it all, be it person or verse, is enshrined as if the force and effect were foreseen and intended. Because

²⁶ Mitchell, Selected Poems, pp. 200-201

²⁷ Ibid.,p.227.

486 - The Ways of Praise

there remains a mystery in why lines speak to us as they do, the mystery is transferred to the lines themselves. Better to understand them, not as wonders in themselves, but as yet another occasion of whatever mystery and wonder it is which lies at the foundation of human understanding and communication.

Why turn to a poet? Among the best reasons is not to learn religion or philosophy or the "truth," as if poetry were a shell of code to be cracked and some kernel recovered.

Rilke is not a "Christian" poet and doesn't intend to be. There is no desire to serve as an apologist, and often he has an active antagonism toward the church and its beliefs. He is a poet, not a theologian; his loyalty is to human experience, to the surrounding realities of the world, to the apprehension of meaning, to words. It is useful to remember from time to time that our own accountability is not to a system of thought, not to a code of definitions, but to experience as well. Theology which draws its life from the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection draws its life from event and experience rather than a derivation from principle. It is not for theology to say what experience must be in order to be "Christian." Theology's task is to interpret experience, to question it, and search for its meaning in light of the experience of the church through history. When a poet opens to us the life of the world, when a poet opens to us the books of the heart, what is offered to us is the opportunity to understand and believe the gospel afresh in dialogue with the human experience of the world God so loves.

Rilke's work was a pilgrimage. That is a word and a reality we claim often to express our individual lives and the church's shared life. It is a word which applies equally to pulpit and pew. The work of proclamation is at the heart of this pilgrimage for all of us. Rilke's journey passes through terrain proper to our own journeys, although we may pass in different directions and along different routes. Must we not learn to speak of the interior landscape of heart? Must we not learn to see with our eyes in discipline and penetration and more: to see through love's eyes? Must we not learn the discipline of listening and the astonishment of silence? Must we not learn by heart the source and reason and language of praise? And finally, must we not learn how it is a human life could unfold with word at its center, a painful pearl of treasure, growing? Here is another traveler with stories to tell.

The best thing to do with a poet and traveler such as Rilke is simply to listen. Maybe that itself is enough. Maybe it is enough to listen and follow where the words lead, to listen to the words themselves and listen to what they set ringing. Who knows what will come of it?

This much is clear. If words matter for the proclamation of the gospel, if the language of the individual life is one of the languages which open for us most powerfully, and if to preach is a life's calling which lands us irresolvably between words and the Word, then the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke have help to give.