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Sonette an Orpheus; Sonnets to Orpheus (1922)
The Sonnets were written over a few days in an intense burst of inspiration as Rilke was also finishing the Duino Elegies. The Elegies urge us and themselves towards praise and affirmation of life, and then the Sonnets take up this call. They declare that ‘singing is being’ (Sonnet I, 3), that poetry and praise of life is life itself, and they are bursting with the sensuous imagery of breathing, moving, taste, sound, light, colour and texture. In the Sonnets death and silence are also part of the texture of life, and life is lived and celebrated in the full acceptance of death.
The cycle of 55 sonnets is oriented towards death through its dedicatee and its addressee. Rilke wrote the Sonnets, as he declares at the beginning, ‘as a grave monument’ for Vera Ouckama Knoop, a young girl Rilke knew who was a talented dancer but who died of leukemia as a teenager. The figure of the young dancer, dancing and living fully within her art whilst simultaneously on the verge of death, appears in a number of the poems. The Sonnets are ‘little songs’ (sonetti in Italian) sung to Orpheus, the legendary musician and poet in ancient Greek religion and myth whose divine music charmed all living things and moved inanimate objects. Overcome with grief at the death of his wife, Eurydice, Orpheus played such beautiful mournful music on his lyre that the gods of the underworld allowed him to retrieve her from there on the condition that he walk in front of her on their journey back to the earth and not look back. In his fear of losing her again he did look back and so lost Eurydice forever. In Ovid’s version of the story Orpheus was torn apart by the Maenads, female devotees of Dionysus, during a drunken orgy when they were enraged because he had spurned the love of women since losing his wife and had taken only young men as lovers. His head and lyre floated down the river of Hebrus, his head still singing. His head was buried at Lesbos and his lyre was placed among the stars in the sky.
Rilke uses the Orphic legend to explore the nature of poetry in relation to our lives. In Orpheus separation, loss and death are a vital part of music and singing and Orphic music is in all forms of life, connecting us to, and reconciling us with, silence, emptiness and non-being. Sonnet II, 13 asks us to ‘Be ever dead in Eurydice’ and ‘be a ringing glass shattered in air’s oscillation’, to let our music and poetry ring out with our fragile mortality. In contrast to the Neue Gedichte; New Poems, which prioritise seeing and observation, the Sonnets celebrate and appeal to the sense of hearing, entreating us to hear Orpheus’s vibrations within nature, moving between and relating dissonances in harmonies. The organic imagery is also accompanied by imagery of artistry in the Sonnets, suggesting that Orpheus is myth, fiction, construct, existing only in our own articulations when we can create a language that praises life and death as one. We become Orpheus’s mouthpiece when we find our own voice that transforms language and meaning and accesses the ‘double-realm’ in which antitheses can coexist. In this sense the Sonnets do not celebrate the Romantic idea of inspiration but usher in the modernist mode of conscious creation.
As sonnets the poems also formally stretch their boundaries. Rilke adhered to the fourteen-line sonnet form, but he varied line length, rhyme schemes and rhythms, exceeding the lines with enjambment and using ellipses and pauses to interrupt rhythm and signal transitions.
https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/rilke/sonette/chap001.html
Commentary
The first poem of the cycle sends us soaring straight away in exclamation and celebration. The hymnic ‘O’ suggests reverence for a god as well as a language that reaches into the inexpressible. In the German the o-sound reverberates in the word ‘Ohr’ (‘ear’), awakening our ears to the cult of Orpheus as music, sound and song. Orpheus’s singing erects a ‘high tree in the ear’, a tree of ‘reine Übersteigung’ (‘sheer metamorphosis/transformation/ exceeding’), and this suggests both organic transformation and growth as well as the transformation of meanings, metamorphosis through metaphors and the exceeding of prior meanings in the creation of a new language. Orpheus’s powerful creative utterance brings into being a new tree of life. His creative word and breath fills creation with a new oxygen, a new language, a new way of hearing and living within sound, music and poetry. The image of the tree physically stretching the ear by its ‘sheer exceeding’, its excessive size, also suggests it is stretching our ability to hear and understand, to go beyond the normal distinctions between inherited categories and concepts such as inner and outer, singing and silence, and hear a different music in which death is in harmony with life. As in the myth, the beasts of the forest are tamed by Orpheus’s song. As they approach, hushed and listening, we too, as readers, start to tune out the noise in our heads and tune in to Orpheus. The image of the makeshift hut or shelter with trembling posts suggests an instrument receiving the vibrations of Orpheus’s divine music, but the shelter is also a metaphorical dwelling, a space erected ‘out of darkest desires’, where we learn to occupy again the internal space from which we find ourselves exiled in the rushing modern world. In this space we can fall silent and listen with a clairaudient ear to the music beyond our immediate senses. The poem addresses Orpheus for the first time directly in the last line at the point where the god creates temples in the animals’ – and in the reader’s – inner ear, inviting us to commune directly with Orpheus and become the house of the divine. The sonnet is itself like a tree, a hut or a temple, a structure with branches, pillars and posts that can transmit a divine music to our inner ear. The sonnet’s traditionally strict formal structure is used to ‘play’ this music as Orpheus makes the sonnet move, vibrate and resonate. Enjambment threatens to burst the poem’s line and stanza boundaries, the regular iambic rhythm is often varied and the traditional rhyme scheme is disrupted. In addition, rather than the sonnet’s controlled, linear and logical development, words and sounds develop and echo back and forth across the poem musically. There is a visual and auditory tremor in the penultimate line when the posts of the hut shake, marked by the dash at the end of the line. Here the rigidity of the sonnet form is set in motion and vibration. The sonnets to Orpheus are ‘little songs’ to the god who made inanimate objects move, and this first sonnet is full of the dynamic energy of song, transforming what is set and frozen, and animating it with new life.
Further Reading
Timothy J. Casey, A Reader’s Guide to Rilke’s “Sonnets to Orpheus” (Galway, Dublin: Arlen House, 2001)
Charlie Louth, ‘Rilke’s Sonette an Orpheus: The Tombeau, Dance, and the Adonic’, Modern Language Review 110:3 (2015), 724-38
S. S. Prawer, German Lyric Poetry: A Critical Analysis of Selected Poems from Klopstock to Rilke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), pp. 223-28 [on Sonnet I, 13]
Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge, Luke Fischer (eds.), Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019)
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