RE: Aspects on Rilke's poem Orpheus Eurydice Hermes

Baader, Cecilia (cbaader@casecorp.com)
Thu, 02 Dec 1999 23:02:04 -0600
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> On Wednesday, December 01, 1999 10:40 AM  The Laughing Man
[the_laughing_man@hotmail.com] wrote:
> ASPECTS ON A RILKE POEM

> ...But I'm slow, my thoughts wander astray and I've more than once wished
I had 
> that Twilight Zone gift of getting the rest of the world to Stop when I
tell 
> it to, enabling me to catch up with it...

Might I say, TLM, that it is posts like yours that make me glad that I am a
member of this list.  Thanks so much for responding. I'd hate to have missed
it, just because of the late date.    

> ORPHEUS THE BLIND POET
> 
> But something happened. The more I looked into the matter, the more I 
> thought about it, the more the circumstantial evidence gathered around me.

> Orpheus the poet, the twister of words and sound: what did he know about 
> love? Isn't there an end to the use of his lyre? How many times can he 
> perform the same trick of playing to his audience, knowing they can't 
> resist? When does he start to listen as well?

Yes, I can see what you're saying, and I don't know that I'd thought of it
from that angle. I'm afraid that the importance of Orpheus's art was always
secondary to the degree of his love for Eurydice for me. (I'm hopelessly
romantic when it comes to certain things.  It's my dirty little secret.)  So
I've never considered that Orpheus's art could be such a powerful motivator.


> 
> Suddenly this poem, for me, is a tale of Eurydice's liberation from a
man's 
> objectifying worship of her. Her cause was just even in my previous
reading, 
> of course, but then it bore with it more of that sadness over love lost.
Now 
> the only love lost was a false one...
> 
That's a very good point, but I think that you have to take that thought a
little further, and understand that Rilke would have felt that their
relationship limited them both.  Orpheus's poetry became more beautiful when
faced with the loss of Eurydice, and Eurydice was now freed to explore the
fullness of her death.  To further illustrate my point, I want to toss out a
few lines from another poem of Rilke's, "Requiem for a Friend."  "Requiem"
was written following the death of Paula Moderson-Becker, a great painter
who married a man who led her to give up her art and have children.  She
died in childbirth, and Rilke blamed her earthly relationship for the
destruction of her art:
	I have my dead, and I have let them go,
	and was amazed to see them so contented,
	so soon at home in being dead, so cheerful,
	so unlike their reputation. Only you 
	return; brush past me, loiter, try to knock
	against something, so that the sound reveals
	your presence.  Oh don't take from me what I 
	am slowly learning. I'm sure you have gone astray 
	if you are moved to homesickness for anything
	in this dimension. We transform these Things;
	they aren't real, they are only the reflections 
	upon the polished surface of our being.  (1-12)
  
You have gone astray if you are homesick for anything back here, kid.
Nothing here is real - only our own beings are real.  So Eurydice, escaping
the objectifying love of Orpheus, is saved.  And losing Eurydice lets
Orpheus explore his art to the fullest.  The depth of his lament is so
terrifyingly beautiful that they kill him just to stop it. 

Coincidentally, I've been working on a paper on elegy, which supports your
viewpoint of Orpheus the "selfish bastard." (Quotes are mine.)  According to
Melissa Zeiger in her _Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the
Changing Shapes of Elegy_,  the death of Eurydice is "...the victory of
Orpheus's art over death in the recovery of his dead spouse, Eurydice; the
implicit sacrificial second loss of Eurydice; Eurydice's part in creating
the greatness of Orpheus's poetry..." (8). She goes even further to suggest
that "Tellingly, Eurydice's return to the underworld is no sad accident
here; it is an active, ruthless condemnation performed in the guise of an
anxious backward glance" (3).

Yikes, Melissa.  Not quite the same reading as what I'd give to Rilke's
poem, but she does bring up something that is meaningful:  the loss of
Eurydice improves upon Orpheus's previously perfect poetry.  It becomes so
alarmingly beautiful that the maenads, in the midst of a Bacchic orgy,
murder Orpheus to escape him, thus sending him back to Hades to be with his
beloved.  The victory of Poetry over Death.

An idea that Rilke, I think, would have liked.
 
> 
> DISAGREEING WITH CECILIA
> 

That line is perhaps my favorite part of your post.  Many disagree with me;
none, however, have made it a heading in an essay.  

> I don't like what you're telling me here, Cecilia.... What does it mean,
then,  to be complete? To be - in another way of putting it - oneself?

Exactly.  Togetherness is limiting, in Rilke's view.  Only in aloneness can
a person achieve that fullness of self.  Not a popular viewpoint, by any
means, but one that he practiced faithfully.

> Back to the Rilke poem. I do not want to read it the way Cecilia does. The

> completeness of self excluding others is not the completeness of self that

> make us human. That is not to be oneself. To find a positive definition 
> perhaps takes a life-time. So be it. /TLM
> 

That's the beauty of this poem.  You don't have to read it the way that I
do...  most would probably see it simply as a sad tale of love lost, as a
matter of fact.  There's so many layers of meaning, and the more that I look
at it, the more my opinion changes.  So maybe you'll soon have a third and a
fourth and a five hundred thousandth reading by the time that we're through.
Amen, Alleluia.


Regards, 
Cecilia.

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