{"id":9140,"date":"2026-11-09T13:10:48","date_gmt":"2026-11-09T21:10:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/?p=9140"},"modified":"2026-11-09T22:21:47","modified_gmt":"2026-11-10T06:21:47","slug":"rilke-the-music-of-human-being-a-sonata-essay-by-bruce-donehower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/fr\/rilke-the-music-of-human-being-a-sonata-essay-by-bruce-donehower\/","title":{"rendered":"Rilke et la musique de l'\u00eatre humain : une sonate \/ Essai de Bruce Donehower"},"content":{"rendered":"<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><strong>&#8220;Eurydice in Realm of Night&#8221; \u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: right;\"><strong>Marion Donehower (Visual Arts Section)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Dear Friends,<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>This essay, originally in German, appeared in the Easter 2026 Rilke issue of STIL magazine. <a href=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/an-interview-with-christiane-haid-ariane-eichenberg-publisher-editor-of-stil-magazine\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">STIL is the quarterly publication of the Section for Literary Arts &amp; Humanities of the School for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum.<\/a> This essay should be read in tandem with viewing the video performances on poems from Sonnets to Orpheus, which you can find on his website in the section of the website called <a href=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/category\/rilke-project\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Rilke Project.<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>I am posting this translation as supplementary material for the October &#8211; November 2026 \u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/dying-becoming-orphic-wisdom-in-the-poetry-of-rilke-novalis\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ASA event: Dying &amp; Becoming: Orphic Wisdom in the Poetry of Rilke &amp; Novalis&#8221;\u00a0<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<h2><\/h2>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\"><strong>Rilke &amp; The Music of Human Being:<\/strong><\/h2>\n<h2><strong>A Sonata <\/strong><\/h2>\n<h2><strong>Essay by Bruce Donehower<\/strong><\/h2>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>&#8220;&#8230; silent death, who knows<br \/>\nwhat we are &#8230;&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Sonnets to Orpheus, Part II, Sonnet 24<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<h2><\/h2>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">A View from the West<\/h2>\n<p>For many North Americans, the voice of the early-twentieth-century poet Rainer Maria Rilke is the voice of <em>poetry<\/em> itself. I know how strange, or dissonant, this statement may sound to a German-speaking reader of Rilke. English-speaking readers of Rainer Maria Rilke \u2014 those of us who find our home on the North American continent \u2014 we <em>Norte Americanos<\/em> \u2014 have an uncanny relationship to Rilke: the poet-wanderer with no fixed abode &#8230; Rilke, the Orpheus of a lost era of civilization (Europe before the First World War) &#8230; Rilke, citizen of an empire (Austria-Hungary) that went under before the poet&#8217;s eyes in the apocalypse of modernity, the First World War &#8230; Rilke, who created a poetic language attuned to the dead, to those who perished in the First World War &#8230; Rilke, who declared himself a soul-citizen of a poetically imagined, mystically intuited spiritual homeland: Russia &#8230; another empire that went under in the First World War.<\/p>\n<p>Fresh translations of Rilke&#8217;s poems into English appear every year. To my knowledge there are more than twenty published translations of the <em>Duino Elegies<\/em>. Translating Rilke into English has become a kind of initiation rite for many poets, and &#8220;dozens of poets have blunted their skills against [Rilke&#8217;s] obdurate, complex, and compacted poems, poems displaying an orator&#8217;s theatrical power, while remaining as suited to a chamber and its music as a harpsichord made of plucked tough sounds, yet as rapid and light and fragile as fountain water.&#8221;<sup id=\"mb-ref-1\"><a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-note-1\">1<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>Rilke&#8217;s letters are as highly valued in North America as his poetry. Rightly so: for Rilke, letter writing was as much an art and an artistic vocation as his poetry. He devoted himself eagerly to his correspondence and achieved in it such a degree of intimacy and poetry that for some readers the letters matter almost more than the poems.<\/p>\n<p>Take, for example, <em>Letters to a Young Poet<\/em> \u2014 often a gift from friend to friend when the recipient needs care for the soul. Many North American poets whose essays on Rilke, or translations of his poems, I greatly value say that their encounter with <em>Letters to a Young Poet<\/em> was a moment of destiny in their youth. Stephen Mitchell \u2014 probably the most accomplished translator, and the poet who has done most in the last fifty years to anchor Rilke&#8217;s voice in the ears of North American readers \u2014 described his first encounter with the <em>Letters<\/em> this way, and it is fairly typical: &#8220;I remember first opening the small, light-green cover of the French translation, given to me in Paris by a girl I was in love with when I was nineteen: when both love and the German language were more alien to me than the moon. The book was a revelation. I had never heard a voice speaking out of such deep understanding, with such authority. I felt, as many readers have felt, that the letters were written for me.&#8221;<sup id=\"mb-ref-2\"><a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-note-2\">2<\/a><\/sup><\/p>\n<p>One might add: &#8220;written&#8221; not only for &#8220;me&#8221; personally, but for an inner and spiritual understanding of &#8220;who I am.&#8221; Orpheus famously drew the animals to his side. They came obediently, shoulder to shoulder, in cheerful company. But Rilke identified solitude as the music the human soul sings to Orpheus. Repeatedly in his letters Rilke describes the dark intervals of solitude between the resonant tones of the Orphic lyre. Every threshold we cross is a moment of awakening. We are &#8220;thrown&#8221; into overcoming our immaturity, to discover a greater openness to the mystery.<\/p>\n<p>Rilke&#8217;s muse, Lou Andreas-Salom\u00e9, was the first to speak of a healing power in connection with her lover Rainer Maria and his poems. In her memoir <em>Rainer Maria Rilke<\/em>, published in 1926 shortly after the poet&#8217;s death and still regarded as one of the best introductions to his work, Andreas-Salom\u00e9 spoke of &#8220;the poet in us, <em>the poet in everyone<\/em>,&#8221; and of how the poet walks the same path on which the psychologically ill patient wanders aimlessly. She wrote of how broken individuals are brought back to life by Rilke&#8217;s words. &#8220;Every illness is a musical problem \u2014 the cure <em>a musical resolution<\/em>,&#8221; wrote Novalis.<sup id=\"mb-ref-3\"><a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-note-3\">3<\/a><\/sup> Lou Andreas-Salom\u00e9 placed Rilke in the same Orphic tradition that characterized Novalis, in which song and incantation are the oldest remedies known to human culture.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>&#8220;After I had told him about a sufferer [XXX] who, in no way schooled to an understanding of art, had for the first time drawn hope from the Elegies \u2014 an experience of being recognized, of indescribable luminosity, a hopeful entering into order and calm \u2014 his reply came (from Ch\u00e2teau de Muzot, 1924, on the Tuesday after Easter):<\/p>\n<p>My dear, dear Lou,<\/p>\n<p>I cannot tell you what a great, mighty Easter you have prepared for me with your letter \u2014\u2014\u2014 Only later, when I tell you the story of my past (third) Muzot winter, will you see how wonderful it is that you should be able to tell me this about XXX just now: I read it again and again and draw from it an indescribable sense of being sheltered.&#8221;<sup id=\"mb-ref-4\"><a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-note-4\">4<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And yet how difficult, how bewildering, how seemingly impossible these threshold moments of transformation are, and these possible\/impossible moments of healing \u2014 these surprising revelations of &#8220;Yes!&#8221; We stammer like schoolchildren questioned rudely in a cold classroom on a cloudy morning, while a stern senior schoolmaster, well versed in the topics of the day, stands over us with his prophet&#8217;s beard demanding an immediate answer to an impossible question. &#8220;Blue?&#8221; or &#8220;Green?&#8221; Yet the <em>human<\/em> answer is really &#8220;return,&#8221; &#8220;spring,&#8221; &#8220;abundance,&#8221; &#8220;praise,&#8221; &#8220;song&#8221;!<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>\u201cSpring has returned. The earth<br \/>\nis like a child who knows some poetry;<br \/>\nquite a bit, really. Lots! Complainers, rejoice!<br \/>\nYou can keep your toys.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSpare the rod and spoil the child.\u201d<br \/>\nThose silver hairs in the old man\u2019s beard \u2013<br \/>\nLOL! Priceless!<br \/>\nNow, if the test throws up the question: Green or Blue?<br \/>\nShe can do it! She can!<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>O lucky earth, free at last!<br \/>\nHave fun with the kids.<br \/>\nWe\u2019ll smooch you up, you silly earth.<br \/>\nThe silliest wins.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>\u201cO what the Teacher doth teacheth!\u201d \u2013 the Many,<br \/>\nin tiny tedious roots and corpuscular stems . . .<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>She sings! She sings!\u201d<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Part 1, Sonnet 21 of Sonnets to Orpheus. (Translation by Bruce Donehower; see <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/rilke-part-1-sonnet-21-fruhling-is-weidergekommen\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Rilke Project<\/a>)<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Sensitive readers understand this intuitively, even if the poetic logic runs counter to the common sense of critical writers who always smile disapprovingly at silly fables. The spirit of poetry flutters and whirls against the hurricanes of history that throw it back. But intuitive readers \u2014 those who have found a poet-witness in their human soul \u2014 applaud threshold travelers like Rilke, because their intuition tells them that on this threshold, they have found a place they can call &#8220;home.&#8221; Poetry as transformation &#8230; song as existence &#8230; music that vanishes forever the moment it sounds &#8230;<\/p>\n<h2><\/h2>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Dark Intervals<\/h2>\n<p>In 2021 I wrote about Rilke for the Easter issue of <em>STIL<\/em>, which was devoted to the poet, and in that essay, I highlighted Rilke&#8217;s statement &#8220;Song is existence&#8221; (<em>Gesang ist Dasein<\/em>).<sup id=\"mb-ref-6\"><a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-note-6\">6<\/a><\/sup> I spoke about the role that patience and devotion play in an artist&#8217;s life, and about how Rilke, as an essential part of his mastery of the music of the word, had learned to dwell and wait in silence.<sup id=\"mb-ref-7\"><a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-note-7\">7<\/a><\/sup> I wrote about the pull of solitude and silence as a field of Orphic energy and affinity, to which readers respond when they meet Rilke&#8217;s letters and poems \u2014 even in foreign languages that break his verses apart. But I did not follow Orpheus&#8217;s song to its end. I did not speak about the poet and the dead.<\/p>\n<p>Rudolf Steiner called the year 1899 the beginning of a new era for humanity, which he named the &#8220;Age of Light.&#8221; But from 1899 there were only a few sunny years before a terrible darkness descended. The catastrophe of the First World War is, of course, further removed from the collective memory of readers in North America than from that of readers in Europe. As a result, literatures that deal with the crisis of civilization in the first two decades of the twentieth century are often read outside their historical context \u2014 and this holds for the reception of Rilke&#8217;s poems in North America as much as for other masters. I have already pointed out that the term &#8220;wisdom literature&#8221; is a disparaging criticism aimed at the marketing of Rilke translations in North America. That is understandable, but regrettable. When readers lose sight of a literature&#8217;s historical and cultural facticity \u2014 that is, when they lose sight of a text&#8217;s rootedness in the stubborn soils and sufferings of a particular social-historical time and place \u2014 when this is forgotten or overlooked, then the lemniscate of word and world that weaves understanding between text and reader becomes distorted and sometimes even breaks. This brokenness cannot pedure. Readers look for meaning elsewhere as best they can. So-called &#8220;wisdom literature&#8221; speaks to every reader everywhere about the general conditions of being human at any time.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>&#8220;There is, indeed, the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.&#8221;<sup id=\"mb-ref-8\"><a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-note-8\">8<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But as Rilke&#8217;s poems and letters show, speaking the unspeakable is best done with eyes wide open. In the famous letter to his Polish translator Witold Hulewicz, written in November 1925 after he had completed the inspired <em>Sonnets<\/em> and the monumental <em>Elegies<\/em>, Rilke explained how &#8220;life becomes possible again.&#8221; He described how he came to realize that life was possible again, after his novel <em>The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge<\/em> had almost broken him under the weight of irrefutable proof &#8220;that this life, suspended thus over the bottomless, is impossible.&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>&#8220;Affirmation of life and affirmation of death prove to be one in the Elegies. To grant the one without the other is, as is here experienced and celebrated, a limitation that in the end shuts out everything infinite. Death is the side of life turned away from us, unlit by us: we must try to achieve the greatest consciousness of our existence, which is at home in both unbounded realms, inexhaustibly nourished by both &#8230;&#8221;<sup id=\"mb-ref-9\"><a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-note-9\">9<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Nowadays &#8220;mysticism&#8221; and &#8220;poetry&#8221; stand rather awkwardly on our stage of current events, like stateless, homeless figures in a play by Samuel Beckett. Many find it still more comical, or ridiculous, to attempt to describe &#8220;the side of life unlit by us,&#8221; or to entertain the idea that the dead influence our life here.<\/p>\n<p>But if we follow Orpheus sincerely, this is the uncanny stranger we meet \u2014 the one we must learn to listen to, and of whom we must speak.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>&#8220;We must learn to die: That is all of life. To prepare gradually the masterpiece of a proud and supreme death, of a death where chance plays no part, of a well-made, beatific, and enthusiastic death of the kind the saints knew to shape. Of a long-ripened death that effaces its hateful name and is nothing but a gesture that returns those laws to the anonymous universe which have been recognized and rescued over the course of an intensely accomplished life. It is this idea of death which has developed inside of me since childhood from one painful experience to the next, and which compels me to humbly endure the small death, so that I may become worthy of the one which wants us to be great.&#8221;<sup id=\"mb-ref-10\"><a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-note-10\">10<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>What is this death &#8220;which wants us to be great&#8221;?<\/p>\n<h2><\/h2>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Tracks Along the Pacific Rim<\/h2>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>I chose the bed downstairs by the sea-window for a good death-bed<br \/>\nWhen we built the house &#8230;<sup id=\"mb-ref-11\"><a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-note-11\">11<\/a><\/sup><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_7129\" style=\"width: 910px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/the-bloody-sire-by-robinson-jeffers\/img_4320\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-7129\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7129\" class=\"wp-image-7129 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/IMG_4320.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"900\" height=\"675\" srcset=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/IMG_4320.jpeg 900w, https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/IMG_4320-480x360.jpeg 480w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 480px) 480px, (min-width: 481px) 900px, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-7129\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Marriage Bed &amp; Death Bed of North American Poet Robinson Jeffers<\/p><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>In the winter of 2024, while I was immersed in Rilke&#8217;s poems, letters and life, I made a poet&#8217;s pilgrimage to Hawk Tower near Big Sur, in Northern California. Hawk Tower is a stone building built entirely by a poet: a poet&#8217;s temple like Rilke&#8217;s Muzot, Jung&#8217;s tower at Bollingen or Yeats&#8217;s tower in Ireland. It was raised from granite stones, patiently and laboriously quarried one by one and hauled up from a beach at the edge of the Pacific Ocean by a single poet-craftsman, with the help of a horse and a block and tackle. The tower was built a hundred years ago by the North American poet Robinson Jeffers.<\/p>\n<p>Jeffers (1887\u20131962) was a contemporary of Rilke. Before the Second World War, Jeffers was the most famous poet on this continent \u2014 more famous than T. S. Eliot and, at that time, certainly more famous than Rilke. Jeffers and Rilke lived at the same time in the same world, yet worlds apart in their bioregional settings, their languages and the spirit of place that inspired their verse. Nonetheless, as modernists they share essential gestures born of the spirit of their age. They also share essential <em>questions<\/em>. Both were highly educated and well versed in the Western literary tradition, reaching back to classical Greece and on to Goethe and Emerson. Jeffers, who received much of his formal education in Europe, has been called the most learned poet America has ever produced. Both men, Rilke and Jeffers, treasured their spiritual solitude and freedom; both meditated on the question &#8220;What is this death which wants us to be great?&#8221;; both, at the beginning of the twentieth century, were strongly attuned to the &#8220;mind of Europe,&#8221; though in different ways. Rilke lived in the great cities of Europe and was housed and supported by cultivated, privileged aristocrats; Jeffers moved with pioneer horse and wagon to a frontier of wilderness (Big Sur). There he settled at the farthest edge of a continent on the Pacific Rim and, with great tenacity, built a stone house for his family and then a Celtic tower.<\/p>\n<p>Even so, Rilke and Jeffers, each in his own tower, wrote poems concerned with the Orphic question &#8220;What is an authentic life?&#8221; And conversely: &#8220;What is an authentic death?&#8221; It is a question that confronted many poets, intellectuals and spiritual seekers in that period of the early twentieth century, when so many restless dead took possession of &#8220;the mind of Europe.&#8221; When Rudolf Steiner began his teaching of anthroposophy in that era, he too took up, in a uniquely poetic way, this question of &#8220;authentic death&#8221; \u2014 particularly in connection with the Mystery of Christ and the passage of the human entelechy as it moves across the thresholds from death to birth, birth to death, death to birth.<\/p>\n<p>I went to Hawk Tower for known literary reasons, yes. But more importantly, I went there that winter for reasons that were <em>unknown<\/em> to me at the time \u2014 reasons that had to do with the poet and the dead.<sup id=\"mb-ref-12\"><a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-note-12\">12<\/a><\/sup> When I reached the tower Jeffers built, I found neither Jeffers nor his ghost. Standing alone in that poet&#8217;s temple, which Jeffers had so lovingly raised for his wife and muse Una, I heard the stones speak these words: &#8220;Today, now that the Mysteries are being renewed, our relationship to the dead has changed.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>At every stage of his poetic development, Rilke&#8217;s poems, stories and letters reflect the significance of our changed relationship to the dead. It is a theme that makes itself felt early, strives stubbornly and persistently toward the light, and comes to full flower in the <em>Sonnets<\/em> and <em>Elegies<\/em>, and elsewhere, in the last years of his life. I knew that \u2014 and yet I did <em>not<\/em> know it. I knew it as a reader of modernist poetry and as a professor of literature, but I did not know it with my poet&#8217;s heart. When I heard this Orphic theme among the stones of Hawk Tower, on that cold January day at the Pacific Rim, I felt greeted by Rilke in a surprisingly intimate way.<\/p>\n<p>Think for a moment of <em>The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge<\/em>. The idea of an authentic or an inauthentic death haunts the novel&#8217;s narrator; it becomes one of the main themes of Rilke&#8217;s writing \u2014 not death itself, but the fear of losing one&#8217;s humanity and one&#8217;s soul in the general anonymity of institutionalized, de-spiritualized, capitalist-technological attitudes toward dying and death. An authentic death, by contrast, is stubbornly independent. It does not happen as <em>la sc\u00e8ne \u00e0 faire<\/em> \u2014 the obligatory scene that closes the five-act melodrama or farce of a life. No, an authentic death finds its embodied moment in the flourishing struggle of an authentic life. And yes, while in the <em>Notebooks<\/em> authentic death stands in relation to authentic individuality (as opposed to the mass anonymity of the nightmarish modernist metropolis of Paris), Rilke&#8217;s Orphic persona in later poems and letters finds a poetic acceptance of death through transcending the transient roles of the self.<\/p>\n<p>Or take this example, which we find in the <em>New Poems<\/em>:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote\"><p>We know nothing of this going hence, which<br \/>\ndoes not share with us. We have no cause<br \/>\nto show admiration and love or hate<br \/>\nto death, whom a masked mouth<\/p>\n<p>of tragic lament strangely disfigures.<br \/>\nThe world is still full of roles we play.<br \/>\nAs long as we worry whether we might please,<br \/>\ndeath too plays, although he does not please.<\/p>\n<p>But when you went, there broke onto this stage<br \/>\na streak of reality through that crack<br \/>\nthrough which you went: green of real green,<br \/>\nreal sunshine, real forest.<\/p>\n<p>We go on playing. Reciting what was anxiously<br \/>\nand painfully learned, and now and then<br \/>\nraising gestures; but your existence, removed<br \/>\nfrom us, taken out of our play, can<\/p>\n<p>sometimes come over us, like a knowledge<br \/>\nof that reality, settling down on us,<br \/>\nso that for a while, carried away,<br \/>\nwe play life, not thinking of applause.<\/p>\n<p>(&#8220;Death Experience,&#8221; New Poems)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Here Rilke has death make its entrance like an actor. The theatrical motifs in this poem implicitly raise questions of authenticity and inauthenticity. The poem asks: &#8220;What is real when we simply accept our sense impressions, and what is real when we consciously bring our poetic intelligence to bear?&#8221; What drives us through a sham reality of constructed stage sets toward &#8220;real green, sunshine and forest&#8221;? We deconstruct the staged to find the true.<\/p>\n<p>Poets like Rilke and Jeffers, who came of age at the start of what Rudolf Steiner called the Age of Light, entered a dark night of chaos \u2014 a threshold experience that demanded a new language of the human soul. It was felt that this would be a new language, one that would build a bridge to the dead and make possible a new community for a new age. Rilke&#8217;s verses are an attempt to discover such a poetic language \u2014 and so is the language of anthroposophy, if we can hear it with a poet&#8217;s ears, perhaps.<\/p>\n<h2><\/h2>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Coda<\/h2>\n<p>I confess that I am one of those readers who find the <em>Sonnets to Orpheus<\/em> more compelling than the <em>Elegies<\/em>, if that counts for anything. But only when I read the <em>Sonnets<\/em> in German! A large part of my enthusiasm for and fascination with these sonnets comes from the whimsy, the rhyme and the liveliness with which Rilke uses the German language. These sonnets are profoundly serious, yet they can still wink, dance and be shy. Rilke called these masterpieces a stormy surprise. Unlike the long-awaited, long-suffered <em>Elegies<\/em>, the fifty-five sonnets were suddenly simply there \u2014 as if sent by invisible messengers from invisible realms. In an earlier poem, &#8220;Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes,&#8221; found in the <em>New Poems<\/em> (1907\/1908), Rilke told a story about Orpheus, but in the <em>Sonnets to Orpheus<\/em> Rilke himself became Orpheus. &#8220;Rilke&#8221; as a personality vanished \u2014 and yet, as must be just and mysterious when everything is poetry in the Orphic sense, Rilke remained fully present in a breathing, rhythmic stream of music and magical language \u2014 poem and poet set free &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_9136\" style=\"width: 910px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/rilke-part-2-sonnet-1-atmen\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"attachment noopener wp-att-9136\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-9136\" class=\"wp-image-9136 size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/971430D5-F3A7-4814-B5C3-2D1510B6875C_1_105_c.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"900\" height=\"671\" srcset=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/971430D5-F3A7-4814-B5C3-2D1510B6875C_1_105_c.jpeg 900w, https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/971430D5-F3A7-4814-B5C3-2D1510B6875C_1_105_c-480x358.jpeg 480w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 480px) 480px, (min-width: 481px) 900px, 100vw\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-9136\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Click the poem to hear a musical performance.<\/p><\/div>\n<h2><\/h2>\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Notes<\/h2>\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list essay-notes\">\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-1\"><\/span>William Gass, <em>Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problem of Translation<\/em>, Knopf, 1999. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-1\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-2\"><\/span>Stephen Mitchell, Foreword to <em>Letters to a Young Poet<\/em>, The Modern Library, 2001. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-2\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-3\"><\/span>Novalis, <em>Schriften<\/em> III, 310. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-3\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-4\"><\/span>Lou Andreas-Salom\u00e9, <em>Rainer Maria Rilke<\/em>, [publisher?], 1929, pp. 121\u2013122. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-4\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-5\"><\/span><em>Sonnets to Orpheus<\/em>, Part I, Sonnet 21. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-5\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-6\"><\/span><em>Sonnets to Orpheus<\/em>, Part I, Sonnet 3. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-6\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-7\"><\/span>Music comes out of silence, but musical expression rests on the passion of discipline and on the sensitive patience and perseverance of craft. By the moment Rilke attuned himself to Orpheus, the preceding ten years had disciplined his spirit for just such an attunement. The stations along Rilke&#8217;s way \u2014 his translations of Michelangelo&#8217;s sonnets and of Elizabeth Barrett Browning&#8217;s <em>Sonnets from the Portuguese<\/em>, his long engagement with Petrarch, Petrarch&#8217;s ascent of Mont Ventoux \u2014 all of this was present when, for example, the sonnets spoke. But it was the silence arising out of the fruitful darkness of isolation that held that voice and allowed it to come forth. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-7\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-8\"><\/span>Ludwig Wittgenstein, <em>Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus<\/em>, \u00a76.522. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-8\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-9\"><\/span>Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Witold von Hulewicz, November 13, 1925. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-9\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-10\"><\/span>Rainer Maria Rilke, letter to Mimi Romanelli, December 8, 1907 (original in French). German edition: <em>Briefe an eine venezianische Freundin<\/em>, trans. Margret Millischer, Leipziger Literaturverlag, 2011. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-10\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-11\"><\/span>From the poem &#8220;The Bed by the Window.&#8221; This is the deathbed that the North American poet Robinson Jeffers chose for himself. The large window beside the bed looks directly out onto the Pacific. Jeffers lay in this bed when he died. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-11\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-12\"><\/span>The phrase &#8220;The Poet and the Dead&#8221; comes from a chapter in a book by Albert Steffen, <em>Der Genius des Todes<\/em> (Dornach: Verlag f\u00fcr Sch\u00f6ne Wissenschaften, 1943). The sentence quoted about the Mysteries is from Steffen&#8217;s book, p. 29. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-12\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<li><span id=\"mb-note-13\"><\/span><em>Sonnets to Orpheus<\/em>, Part II, Sonnet 1. <a href=\"file:\/\/\/Users\/brucedonehower\/Library\/CloudStorage\/Dropbox\/2026%20Desktops\/11.%20November\/BD%20Rilke%20Essays%20for%20ASA\/HTML\/Rilke_Music_of_Being_Human_WordPress.html#mb-ref-13\" aria-label=\"Back to text\">\u21a9<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>This essay originally appeared in German in the Easter 2026 issue of STIL magazine.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/the-poet-the-painter-by-albert-steffen\/image-4-30-26-at-12-12-pm-2\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-9107\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-9107\" src=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Image-4-30-26-at-12.12-PM-2.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"724\" height=\"1016\" srcset=\"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Image-4-30-26-at-12.12-PM-2.jpg 724w, https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/06\/Image-4-30-26-at-12.12-PM-2-480x674.jpg 480w\" sizes=\"(min-width: 0px) and (max-width: 480px) 480px, (min-width: 481px) 724px, 100vw\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>11.9.2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Eurydice in Realm of Night&#8221; \u00a0 Marion Donehower (Visual Arts Section) Dear Friends, This essay, originally in German, appeared in the Easter 2026 Rilke issue of STIL magazine. STIL is the quarterly publication of the Section for Literary Arts &amp; Humanities of the School for Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum. This essay should be read [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4006,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14,53],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-essays","category-featured-topics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9140"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9158,"href":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9140\/revisions\/9158"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theliteraryarts.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}