120
PARTISAN REVIEW
limpidity, and fluency, and yet at the same time be capable of such sudden
complexities of syntax and imagery as occur in T. S. Eliot's
Ash
Wednesday.
The
Duino Elegies
prel!ent the most complete statement of Rilke's
vision of life. What he envisaged, what obsessed him, was a certain state
of being which was sometimes enjoyed, Rilke supposed, by the child, the
animal, the hero, the "great lovers", and those who had died in childhood.
It was a state of being which involved immense difficulties. It was almost
impossible of attainment. Most human beings avoided and attempted to
escape from every intimation of it. In these Elegies, Rilke pleads and
argues, in terms of symbols established in his previous writing, for a
recognition and absorption in that state of being, which may be charac·
terized crudely as one of utter
acceptance,
acceptance of pain, destiny, the
here and now, the transiency of things, and death:
We've never, no, not for a single day
pure space before us, such as that which flowers
endlessly open into: always world,
and never nowhere without no: that pure,
unsuperintended element one breathes,
endlessly knows, and never craves. A child
sometimes gets quietly lost liMre,
to
be always
jogged back again. Or sometimes dies and
is
it.
What Rilke here has in mind may very well be that Unity of Being which
concerned Yeats, and also, though without the sexual emphasis, the unity
of being which prepossessed D. H. Lawrence so much.
This is a vision of life limited, as poetry, by being conceived in terms
of a particular kind of abstraction to which lyric poets and especially the
romantic tradition are always bound. The abstraction consists of conceiv·
ing of the individual as an individual only, a man confronted with life all
by himself. The very greatest poetry, by comparison, grasps the indi·
vidual in a multitude of relationships, as a prince of Denmark, a citizen
of Florence, a member of the house of Atreus, and a human being in a
definite time and place. Rilke for the most part saw the ego as confronted
with a constellation of immortal essences. This did not prevent him from
writing perfect lyric poetry, hut the dramatic and narrative scope of the
very greatest writing was out of the question, given his perspective,
in
which, for example, the lover is fulfilled when the loved one has been
renounced, for, as Rilke wrote, to love is to be alone. A symbol of this
limitation is perhaps to be seen in the fact that the World War shocked and
paralyzed Rilke, so that he was unable to write. Wars involve the fate of
societies, and are dominant subjects in Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy,
whether or not they wrote during a war. The comparison can he stated
