A Brief History of the Sonnet - Chapter 14 - Rilke in Germany

 There is no end to sonnets or those who write sonnets and sonnet sequences or are specialized in sonnets. But only some matter to me in sketching out its history. Rilke is one. I started in Italy and went over to England or the UK, then to France and am now in Germany.

A few among my readers may have heard of Rainer Maria Rilke's "Sonnets to Orpheus", the legendary Greek musician who is comparable to India's Tansen. They were written between 1875-1926.

Here is a sonnet from it, one of many that are worth reading, chosen for its simplicity and appeal: 

Just a moment ..., I savour this ... ah, but it’s flown already.
... Only a bit of music, stamping in time, humming-:
Girls, you grow warm, - girls, you silently mime, -
Dance the flavour of this fruit as we experience it!

Make of the orange a dance. Who can be oblivious
Of how it drowns in itself, of how it restrains
Its very essence of sweetness, holds it back? It
Has possessed you. You have deliciously converted it into you.

Dance the orange. The warmth of the landscape,
It draws you forth, so that your ripeness streams forth
Resplendent on the local breezes! A glow arising, revealed

Aroma after aroma! Evoke its affinity
With the pure, self-denying peel,
With the juice which joyously fills it!

Translated by Robert Temple.

I love this sonnet especially in translation as it breaks with rhyme and metre but  flows just to show we are in what I call Modernism now, as the translation is flexible but retains the unmistakable Rilkeness needed as well as the poetry of the original. 

What is the Rilkeness here? When young I read Rilke on Paul Cezanne. I do not know how many of you have read that book. In it, he says that what God is to the believer/disciple/devout the subjects of his still life studies were to Cezanne. The book is called "Letters on Cézanne" (“Only a saint could be as united with his God as Cézanne was with his work,” Rilke wrote.) This was in 1907.

"For a long time nothing, and then suddenly one has the right eyes."

This sonnet means a lot to me as in it I find Rilke's attempts to make an orange in words the same way Cezanne did it in paint. For a writer to grow he needs to read and listen, hear and speak and write, it is true; and for a painter to look, see and draw and sketch and paint, to know the beauty of colour. This is a "sonnet of colour". A single colour, orange, and of the fruit, as a single fruit as in Cezanne's still lives, but it becomes many, by making it a dance of vitality, the dance of (the) orange and talk of how it drowns in its own self, its essence of sweetness, its peel, its deliciousness aroma, purity, restraint, possession, ripeness,  glow, the juice that fills it, and its associations to a bit of music, stamping feet, a hum, a dance, a landscape, local breezes, bringing to us not only the orange and its colour but where it was born, grew, was plucked, and matured. The poem invokes the history of the orange, of oranges, all of it, in entirety. This is what Rilke learned from Cezanne and this evocation in what is in the translation in free verse, of the oranges of lands that to us Indians are alien and beautiful in Europe, like Tuscany with their orange groves, but sweet, nameless often, leaving one thirsty, thirsty for more of Cezanne, for Rilke, for those lands and women and those dances and music and finally for those oranges....themselves. 

Rilke's mastery is that he paints (an) orange in words and Cezanne's that he writes the fruit/the colour in paint.

Archibald Macleish said "A poem must not mean but be."  

" A poem should be palpable and mute   

As a globed fruit" he says in the same poem Ars Poetica. As an orange, we can say.

Perhaps he had read Orpheus sing through Rilke bringing Eurydice back to life for us again in his sonnets as an...orange, silently miming to us that a sonnet too must not mean, in the modern dispensation, but be.

(Disclaimer: he connections I make in this book between poems and work of art are my own as are the ones between poems and not necessarily factual, but intuitive and aesthetic. For instance, the sonnet may have preceded the book on Cezanne but does not annul, in any way, the way I feel about it)

https://sonnetstoorpheus.com/book1_15.html

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17168/ars-poetica

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/086547639X/?tag=braipick-20

http://sonnetsincolour.org/2017/11/on-rilkes-letters-on-cezanne/