Rainer Maria Rilke

One of Thomas Merton’s favourite poets was the Austrian poet Rilke – Rainer Maria Rilke. Merton gave a series of talks to the novice monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani speaking about how poetic experience is closely aligned to the religious experience. Both Rilke and Merton shared a longing to be alone and apart from the world and its busyness, alongside, somewhat paradoxically, an attraction to it that included for both much letter writing.

Both men write about trying to find the best place to be alone: Rilke in striving to find the best place where he could write and how this required solitude. He also needed help from patrons and friends to achieve this.

In a letter written in 1903 Rilke writes:

‘What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours – that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing.’

For Rilke creativity seemed to thrive on silence and time alone. Out of the contemplative silence poetry might emerge from a timeless reality. It’s been suggested that when we engage with a poem that arises from such contemplation then the reader, too, has access to this same reality and this can be spiritually transformative – evoking awareness in the reader. Poetry is then a contemplative art that has the capacity to create peace in the heart of the responsive individual, which is a precondition for peace in the world.

Rilke turned against organized religion in response to his times at the start of the twentieth century; also affected by his rather negative experiences of Catholicism as a child. Yet he saw himself as deeply religious, writing:

‘Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling (for all content is admitted from the start, where a man comes to terms with life), it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.’

A decade after Rilke had begun his initial work on the Duino Elegies when he perceived the whole outline of them, he set out again to try and achieve the right conditions to work further on them: ‘the heart-work for all the images imprisoned’ within him. Moments of brief inspiration were not enough; he had to find the right place, practice through letters, translations, and making notes from his reading, and he neded hope.  Finding a little ‘Chateau’ set in a garden in the region of Valais his supporters helped sort the place out, and found a discreet and suitable housekeeper who would know not to disturb Rilke while at work. Even then:

‘Concentration is terribly hard’ he complained, ‘even eating is a distraction, and the hours between meals seem too short for anything whole to be done … if only one could eat for half a year, then spend the other half meditating, so that there did not have to be this constant shift of focus …’

Unexpectedly the inspiration came, and the day after writing this letter Rilke composed over three days a cycle of Sonnets closely followed by more work on the Elegies. Rilke could then write in a letter:

‘Though I can scarcely hold the pen after days of overwhelming obedience in the spirit … I must give the news:

I am over the mountain!

At last! The Elegies are there … I never knew that such a storm of spirit and heart could break over one! And that it could be survived!