THE LONG SILENCE: rilke and creative hiatus

Writing about deep hidden creativity yesterday brought to mind the life and work of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, a poet I often find challenging and sometimes find miraculous. I had vaguely remembered that ten years or so of silence passed between the beginnings of one of his poem cycles and its completion. I didn't remember that the poems were the Duino Elegies or that the decade it took to write them—most of it spent not writing them—was that from 1912 to 1922, but those are indeed the facts.

I don't bring up Rilke to compare my process or practice in any way to his immeasurably greater one. My point, in fact, is the opposite. This brilliant and accomplished writer, living in an extraordinarily beautiful place (the Duino Elegies are named after Duino Castle, pictured above right) as the guest of a titled family, had to try for ten years to finish a series of only ten poems. Admittedly, Rilke's silent decade happened to include World War I, which happened to involve Rilke's native Germany. And equally importantly, Rilke was too soulful and too shrewd to turn out mediocre poems while his Muse, well, a-muse-d herself elsewhere. But still, what can us mere mortals expect of ourselves if greats like Rilke have to wait a decade for their real work to emerge?

The poem below is not one of the Elegies, but it seems apposite to this post in some way. Absence and presence, life and lack, sight and insight are its themes, and as a bonus it has what may be one of the greatest last lines in all of poetry. The poem is called Archaic Torso of Apollo, or just Archaic Torso. Rilke wrote in German; this is one of Stephen Mitchell's always deft translations, which also include excellent versions of classic spiritual texts such as the Tao Te Ching, Gilgamesh, Bhagavad Gita, and the Book of Job, among others. You can find out more about Mitchell's work on his excellent website, though if you like me are creatively quiet at the moment his aray of wonderful books may be just a tad depressing for a moment.


Archaic TorsoRainer Maria Rilke

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.