The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Rainer Maria Rilke · a sequence of fifty-five sonnets in two parts · Insel-Verlag, Leipzig, 1923 · scored on Rilke’s German, read from knowledge, with the desk’s own English renderings; no text in hand, and German quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Lyric sequence of praise and lament; hymn, address and the thing-poem turned toward the heard and the invisible
Mythos
Orpheus as the principle of song, torn by the Maenads and so present in stones, trees and us; a dead girl in Eurydice’s place; the rose in place of the memorial stone; the unicorn that is because it is loved
Phase
Two bursts of a few days at Muzot in February 1922, in the same weeks the Duino Elegies were finished; in the sequence, from the tree rising in the ear to the poet’s farewell in the last tercet
Presentation
Poem; fifty-five sonnets of fourteen lines, 770 lines in all, in two parts of twenty-six and twenty-nine, under the dedication to Wera Ouckama Knoop, with Rilke’s own short notes at the end
Register
From exclamation and the high address to a god to the plain naming of a fruit, a horse, a dog and a machine
Scale
One realm of the living and the dead; trees, fruit, flowers and animals; a child’s spring song, Spanish dancers, gardens never seen, and the machine
Governing Proposition
Fifty-five sonnets, written in two bursts of a few days in February 1922 as a grave-monument for a young dancer, make Orpheus not a story but a principle: wherever there is singing, he is there. The wager of the sequence is that the dead are kept by transformation and not by monuments, that existence is answered by praise and not by possession, and that the closed form of the sonnet can carry a doctrine of flux.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung! / O Orpheus singt! O hoher Baum im Ohr!”
“A tree rose there. O pure transcendence! / O Orpheus sings! O tall tree in the ear!” The sequence opens on an event, not on a lament. A tree rises, and the rising is at once a transcendence and a song; the second line names the singer and puts the tree inside the hearer. The second line runs from “Baum” to “Ohr” and closes on the ear, so that the sound arrives where the poem says it arrives.
The second sonnet gives the other presence of the book: “fast ein Mädchen”, “almost a girl”, who sleeps the world inside the ear. Behind her stands the dead girl of the dedication, in the place where Eurydice stood in the old story. Eurydice is never the subject of the sequence. In her place is a young dancer, the daughter of acquaintances, whose death was the occasion of the book.
The sequence was published by the Insel-Verlag in Leipzig in 1923 under the dedication “Geschrieben als ein Grab-Mal für Wera Ouckama Knoop”, “written as a grave-monument for Wera Ouckama Knoop”, with Rilke’s own short notes at the end. It is in two parts, twenty-six sonnets in the first and twenty-nine in the second: fifty-five sonnets of fourteen lines, 770 lines in all. The fourteen lines and the division into quatrains and tercets are kept in every poem; the metre runs from short trochaic lines to long dactylic ones, and the rhyme is kept but often impure. The unit is the sequence as published, scored on the German.
Movement II
The third sonnet asks what song is, and answers that a god can make it: “Ein Gott vermags”, “A god can do it”. True singing, it says, is a breath about nothing. Then the credo the whole book enacts: “Gesang ist Dasein”, “Song is existence”. It is a credo and not a demonstration, and the sequence does not test it; it sings as though it were true, and lets the singing stand as the evidence.
The fifth sonnet turns the occasion against its own monument. “Errichtet keinen Denkstein”, “Raise no memorial stone”: only the rose, which blooms each year and passes. And then the principle that makes Orpheus more than a figure of story: “Ein für alle Male / ists Orpheus, wenn es singt”
“Once and for all, / it is Orpheus when there is singing.” The sonnet itself works like the rose it names. Its fourteen lines open and close, and the turn between octave and sestet is the turn from mourning to praise.
The ninth gives the realm in which this holds, the “Doppelbereich”, the double realm, where the dead are not elsewhere but part of the one world the living inhabit. Around these sonnets the book gathers particular things: the fruit of I.13, a white horse, a dog, a fountain mouth. Some are compelled by the theme, and some are drawn to it: the fruit sonnet is among those the arc could lose. The first part is a garland as much as a chain, and its order is one of return.
Movement III
The first part ends on the sequence’s load-bearing myth. Orpheus is torn by the Maenads, and the dismemberment is not the end of the song but the reason it is everywhere: scattered, the god is in the stones and the trees and in us. “O du verlorener Gott! Du unendliche Spur!”
“O you lost god! You endless trace!” What was a singer has become a condition of the world, and the loss is the means of the presence.
This is myth built, not borrowed. Rilke does not retell the story of Orpheus. He takes the god’s death and makes it the ground of a doctrine: that song is not owned by a singer, and that whatever is sung becomes a mouth for the god. The rose in place of the stone in I.5 and the scattered god of I.26 are the same thought at the two ends of the first part.
The dread is real. The Maenads’ violence is not softened, and the sonnet’s elevation is the elevation of dread before a god destroyed. Not every sonnet carries the myth with this weight; some carry it as address, an “O” and a name. But the end of Part I is where the sequence makes Orpheus a structure, and everything after it can be read as the hearing of his trace.
Movement IV
The second part opens on breath. The first sonnet of Part II names breath an “unsichtbares Gedicht”, an “invisible poem”. The turn from the seen thing to the heard and the invisible, which the first part began, here reaches the body itself.
Then the unicorn: “O dieses ist das Tier, das es nicht giebt”
“O this is the creature that does not exist.” It is made real by being loved; because it was loved, it was. The sonnet is among the highest in the book, and it asks the sequence’s deepest open question, what being-from-being-loved says about the reality of anything. The poem does not answer; it makes the creature and lets it stand.
Against these the tenth sonnet sets the machine: “Alles Erworbne bedroht die Maschine”
“Everything acquired the machine threatens.” The machine is admitted, and admitted as threat: what is held fast is what it endangers. With the machine sonnets the sequence has aged into prophecy rather than period, though they are drawn to the theme more than compelled by it. In the middle of the second part several sonnets could change places without loss: the height thins, and the turn is sometimes made because a sonnet turns.
Movement V
Late in the second part the doctrine is spoken as command. “Wolle die Wandlung”, “Will transformation” (II.12): what is held fast is what hardens, and only what changes is kept. And in the next sonnet the sequence’s plainest counsel: “Sei allem Abschied voran”, “Be ahead of all parting” (II.13). To live well is to have taken leave already, to be in front of every loss and not behind it. These are imperatives, and they are stated more than shown in lives; but as an account of grief they hold without the metaphysics around them.
The book closes with the poet’s farewell, and its last tercet is the passage most quoted from it: “Zu der stillen Erde sag: Ich rinne. / Zu dem raschen Wasser sprich: Ich bin.”
“To the still earth say: I flow. / To the rushing water speak: I am.” Each element is answered by its opposite. To what stays, one speaks as what passes; to what passes, as what is. “Ich rinne” and “Ich bin” rhyme in sense and not in sound, and close the sequence on the two states it has praised.
The sequence was written at the Château de Muzot in the Valais in February 1922, in two bursts of a few days each: the first part early in the month, the second after the Duino Elegies were finished in the same weeks. It came as dictation, as Rilke described it, and the speed shows in a few near-miss rhymes and in exclamation used as filler. It shows also in the unity of the whole, one law kept across fifty-five poems written in so few days. The grave-monument raises no stone. It ends by telling the reader to speak to the earth and the water as a thing that flows and is.
Act III · The Twelve
The frame sonnets are required, and the book could not lose them: I.1, the tree rising in the ear; I.3, what song is; I.5, no monument but the rose; I.26, the god torn and scattered; II.29, the close. The order is not arbitrary: Orpheus enters in the first line and the poet’s farewell speaks in the last. Between the frame, the subtractive test bites more often than it does in the Duino Elegies. The fruit sonnet of I.13 and the two machine sonnets are drawn to the theme rather than compelled by it, and several sonnets in the middle of Part II could change places or go without the arc breaking, because the arc is one of recurrence and not of progress. Much of the interior is a garland, not a chain.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds without Rilke’s metaphysics. Existence is answered by praise, not by possession. The dead belong to the one realm we live in, the “Doppelbereich” (“double realm”, I.9). What is held fast is what hardens: “Wolle die Wandlung” (“Will transformation”, II.12). To live well is to be ahead of every leave-taking: “Sei allem Abschied voran” (“Be ahead of all parting”, II.13). The sequence names what modernity costs this stance, “Alles Erworbne bedroht die Maschine” (“Everything acquired the machine threatens”, II.10). Held below the top because it is stated in imperatives more than shown in lives: no human condition is dramatised, and “Gesang ist Dasein” (“Song is existence”, I.3) is a credo the poems enact rather than a truth they test.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation is the sequence’s native register, and it rises often. The first lines are among the great openings in German verse: “Da stieg ein Baum. O reine Übersteigung! / O Orpheus singt! O hoher Baum im Ohr!” (I.1). Then I.3, where true singing is a breath about nothing; the dread of the god torn by the Maenads in I.26; the breath as “unsichtbares Gedicht” (“invisible poem”, II.1); the unicorn of II.4, made real by being loved; and the close of II.29. Held at 9.0 and not higher because in some of the lesser sonnets the height is sustained by exclamation, and because the frequency thins in the middle of Part II.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The myth is built, not retold. Rilke makes Orpheus a principle: “Ein für alle Male / ists Orpheus, wenn es singt” (“Once and for all, / it is Orpheus when there is singing”, I.5). The load-bearing move comes at the end of Part I, where the god’s dismemberment by the Maenads is the reason his song is now everywhere, in stones and trees and in us: “O du verlorener Gott! Du unendliche Spur!” (“O you lost god! You endless trace!”, I.26). Eurydice is never the subject; in her place stands the dead girl, “fast ein Mädchen” (“almost a girl”, I.2), who sleeps the world inside the ear. The myth stays particular: a dancer, a white horse, a dog, a fountain mouth. Held a step from the top because some sonnets carry the myth as address rather than as structure.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The inheritance is the sonnet from Petrarch to Baudelaire, and Rilke’s own Neue Gedichte, the thing-poem fixed on a seen object. The swerve is double. The form is kept and strained: fourteen lines every time, but metres from three stresses to six, rhyme loosened, and the volta turned into the figure of transformation itself, so that the sonnet becomes a vessel for change instead of a frame for a conceit. And the stance turns from the seen thing to the heard and the invisible: from the object observed to the tree in the ear. The stake was real: a sonnet sequence in 1922, the year of The Waste Land, was a wager on a form the age was leaving. Held below the top because the larger break of the same weeks was the Duino Elegies, and this book is their lighter twin.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and the knowledge goes. The sonnet is the most closed of lyric forms, and Rilke fills it with a content whose whole claim is that nothing should be held closed. The fourteen lines are a figure of the rose of I.5, which blooms each year and passes, and of song, which exists only while it is sung. The turn between octave and sestet carries, again and again, the turn from lament to praise. The sequence form bears weight too: a single elegy would have made the dead girl its subject; fifty-five sonnets let her become one presence among horse, fruit, fountain and machine, which is what the book says the dead become. Held off the top because in the lesser sonnets the form is a container, and the turn is made because sonnets turn.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Evidence rather than promise: a century of reading has not closed it. It has been translated into English more often than almost any modern lyric sequence, by Leishman, Herter Norton, Mitchell, Snow and Paterson among others, and each translation finds a different book, which is evidence of what the German holds open. It has been read with the Elegies as a poetics of being, and theologians and poets read it otherwise. The open questions are real. Is Orpheus a god, or a function of language? Is praise consent to death, or defiance of it? What does the unicorn, which is because it is loved, say about the reality of anything? Held below 9.0 because much of the commentary reaches it through the Elegies, and its own questions are fewer.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is German lyric poetry of the twentieth century, and with it the modern European sonnet. The force is high: the sequence showed that the sonnet could carry a modernist metaphysics without irony, and that a strict form could hold a poetics of flux. With the Elegies it completes Rilke’s turn from the seen thing to the inner world. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is wide in readership and translation and narrower in redirecting practice. German poetry after 1945 turned away from the Orphic and the hymnic, and the sequence’s heirs in form are fewer than its admirers. In English its reach runs through translation, and is real: it changed what a sonnet sequence in translation could be asked to do. Force near 9.0 and reach nearer 8.0 meet at 8.5.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Survival is demonstrated over about a century. The text survives whole, as Rilke published it in 1923, with no question of recension or loss, and the form is entirely legible. Its presence has been continuous: never out of print, read in German schools and universities, translated many times into English alone and into most literary languages, and quoted far outside poetry, the last tercet of II.29 above all. Nothing in it is fixed to its moment except the machine sonnets, and those have aged into prophecy rather than period. Held where it stands because a century is not millennia, and because its presence, though wide, is a step below the widest of the century.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Rilke’s German, and the command of the line is at its height. The sound bears load: in I.1 the line runs from “Baum” to “Ohr” and ends on the organ the poem is about. The last tercet of II.29 sets “Ich rinne” against “Ich bin” (“I flow”, “I am”), two short clauses that rhyme in sense and not in sound and close the book on the two states it has praised. The compounds and the nominalised verbs make the sonnet do work English has no equipment for, and the range of metre across fifty-five poems, each kept to fourteen lines, is itself a feat. Charged: speed shows in a few sonnets, in near-miss rhymes without purpose and in exclamation used as filler. The music of the German is partly beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
Score: 9.3 / 10
One law governs: what is, is transformed by being praised, sung or tasted, and what is held fast is lost. Take the most distant pairs, the dismembered god of I.26 and the fruit sonnet of I.13, or the machine of II.10 and the unicorn of II.4: they obey the same law. The range is wide, from Spanish dancers, a Russian horse and gardens never seen to a child’s spring song and the dead girl’s dance, and the law holds across it. What costs the axis is a pull between two centres that the book never fully settles: the Orphic sequence, impersonal and cosmic, and the tombstone for a dead girl, personal and occasional. The dedication says the second; most of the poems are the first.
Score: 8.7 / 10
A lyric sequence of 770 lines holds more than its size. The natural order, in trees, fruit, flowers and animals; the dead and their realm; the sacred, in a god who is not a creed; technology and the machine; childhood; dance, breath and the body; and art itself as an order of being. These are integrated under one law, not listed. What holds the axis lowest is what lies outside it: society; the family, except as absence; labour, except as the machine’s threat; history, except as a backdrop of change. The short form is not charged beyond what it encompasses, and what it encompasses is wide for a lyric and narrow for a book.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, The Imperishable at 9.1, and The Sublime and The Archetypal Deep at 9.0. Command of the German line, with sound that closes on the organ the poem is about and a last tercet that rhymes in sense; a century of unbroken presence in German and in translation; and an Orpheus built into a principle, the god torn so that his song is everywhere.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: nature, the dead, the sacred, the machine, childhood, dance and the body are held under one law, but society, labour, the family and history lie outside the sequence or appear only as absence. Below the rest, The Inevitable at 8.3: the frame sonnets are required, but the fruit and machine sonnets are drawn to the theme, and the middle of the second part could change its order without loss.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.3, The Living Form at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.7, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 9.0, The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Swerve at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.5 clear the bar of 8.5, the last exactly at it. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Every summit condition is met; the work is held below the summit by its aggregate alone.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus, scored as the sequence as published by the Insel-Verlag in Leipzig in 1923: two parts, twenty-six and twenty-nine sonnets, fifty-five in all, under the dedication to Wera Ouckama Knoop, with Rilke’s own notes at the end. The sequence was written at the Château de Muzot in the Valais in February 1922, in the same weeks the Duino Elegies were finished; the Elegies are context only, and nothing here is scored on them. The text survives whole as Rilke published it and is not in doubt. No text was in hand and nothing was measured on one; the line count follows from fifty-five sonnets of fourteen lines. Every axis is judged on Rilke’s German, which is quoted only where its words are certain; sonnets are cited by part and number. Translation · every English rendering on this page is the desk’s own, plain and close, and none is taken from a published translation. Edward Snow’s version (2004), which stays close to the German line by line, was used for sense, and Stephen Mitchell’s (1985) for the sequence in English; Leishman, Herter Norton and Paterson are among the other translators. Nothing is charged to any translation or credited to it. The sound and metre of the German are partly beyond this reading, and are neither credited nor charged. Matters that could not be verified, among them the exact days of composition, a sonnet of the first part said to have been replaced before publication, and which sonnets are addressed to the dead girl directly, are not given.