Chekhov's Mistress
Rilke Week at Chekhov’s Mistress
It’s time – we’re posting about Rainer Maria Rilke this week. I let this go for quite a while since I originally posted my “On Deck” invitations to post (what with babies coming, you know), but let’s see if anyone wants to talk about this man and his poetry. I don’t suppose Rilke is too controversial – either you love him or don’t know him. My entry into Rilke’s work was through Stephen Mitchell’s translation in Ahead of All Parting. The idea for doing some posting about Rilke came from an invitation to read M. Allen Cunningham’s Lost Son, which uses Rilke’s quietly odd life as its subject. That’s always a daunting task, using an historical figure in a novel, but using a great writer is even harder, raising the standards by which the novelist must meet. Cunningham seems up to it (I haven’t finished the book yet), so I invited him to post here too.
Let’s start with Jonah, who posted the following in the comments:
My favorite Rilke poem is The Panther. My professional background is engineering…Reading those poems made poetry tangible and interesting me. I always like Rilke’s deep observation and concrete language.
THE PANTHER
His vision from the passing of the bars
is grown so weary that it holds nor more.
To him it seems there are a thousand bars
and behind a thousand bars no world.
The padding gait of flexibly strong strides,
that in the very smallest circle turns,
is like a dance of strength around a center
in which stupefied a great will stands.
Only sometimes the curtain of the pupil
soundlessly parts –. Then an image enters,
goes through the tensioned stillness of the limbs –
and in the heart ceases to be.
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