ART, T RA 0 I T ION, AND T RUT H
27
Feeling the impact of Rodin and Cezanne-he wrote on both–
Rilke thought at times that it was the poet's task
just to say: house,
bridge, well, gate, jug, fruit tree, window-
at most: column, tower-but to
say
it, understand,
oh, to say it as the things themselves never
thought of existing intensely.
Seeing how a painter can take a jug or an apple and restore to it
the intensity which it had lost in ordinary adult perception; seeing
how a sculptor can take the apparently unmysterious shape of a hu–
man body and show us passion, longing, despair, grace, agony, and
beauty, Rilke thought that the poet might take the everyday words
and restore their poetry to them.
One can re-experience this thought and understand it; but if
we examine it instead of abandoning ourselves to the rhythms of
Rilke's ninth elegy, we find that this aestheticism borders on the ab–
surd: "Are we perhaps
here
just to say: house"? Rilke himself might
have admitted that we are here for no purpose at all, but can give
our life a purpose; and "just to say : house" is an absurd purpose.
The poet is not condemned merely to revitalize words; and any
mystery that one can ultimately find in the words, "house, bridge,
well" is a paltry and bloodless thing compared to Rodin's
Tete
de
La douleur
or
La Martyre-the
mute hopelessness that the sculptor
has forced to utter not merely a blessing (like Balaam who had in–
tended to pronounce a curse) but the comfort of complete achieve–
ment.
The great poet revitalizes words only incidentally. To brook
comparison with Rodin he must achieve with words what Rodin
does in bronze or marble. He does not imitate reality but realizes
that our everyday world is not so much a brute reality as a human
creation no longer recognized as such; an artifact that has fallen into
the hands of uncomprehending apes; something that is all skin and
void of blood because the mass of men have lost the perception of
those more poetic, more creative, more childlike men who originally
fashioned words and values as a mirror of the mysteries they felt.
But the poet does not restore the life that was there in the begin–
ning, in childhood or in the childhood of the race: he creates new
