William Fitzgerald, Articulating The Unarticulated. Form, Death and Other in Keats and Rilke.

Articulating the Unarticulated: Form, Death and Other in Keats and Rilke Author(s): William Fitzgerald Source: MLN,
Vol. 100, No. 5, Comparative Literature (Dec., 1985), pp. 949-967 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905439 . Accessed: 09/03/2014 10:24
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Articulating theUnarticulated: Form,Death and Otherin Keats and Rilke

William Fitzgerald
. . . we shallenjoy ourselves hereafter by havingwhatwe call happiness on earthrepeatedin a finer tone,and so repeated." Keats, Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November, 1817. like the moon,lifeundoubtedly has a side thatis continually turnedawayfrom
us . . .
Rilke, Letter to Countess Sizzo von Dreikonigstag, 1923. Keats's "To Autumn" and Rilke'sSonnets toOrpheus share a concern with mortality as also with the world of nature and things.This conjunctionis not fortuitousfor, as Blanchot has observed, "the effortto elevate death to itself. .. implies an immense responsibility withregard to things."' The two poems that I willbe considering show that Blanchot's statementis reversible and that the effort to allow thingsto speak for themselvesimpliesa recognition of our own mortality, or rather,a realization of that mortality. I have chosen two poems that address the non-human world, both of which invoke from it an agency that is not committedto the temporality of the human speaker who invokes it. They pose the questionof whethersuch an agency mightarise throughinvocation in the speaker himself,2 but conclude that thisagency can only be realized forus through our own mortality ratherthan againstit. My epigraphs contrastthe very different conceptions of the "other"
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world of death held by these two poets: Keats's speculation that the "here after" involves a modified repetitionof our earthlyexistenceimpliesa temporalcontinuity betweenthe twoworlds,while Rilke'sstatement thatlife has a side thatis continually turned away I hope to show how fromus relates them in a spatial contiguity.3 thisdifference is reflectedin the formand movementof these two poems which confronta common problematic. As we mightexpect, Rilke puts his cards on the table fromthe forhis sonnetbegins by addressingthe fountainas a speaker: start,
o Brunnen-Mund du gebender, du Mund der unersch6pflich Eines,Reinesspricht. o fountain-mouth, you giver, youmouth
an Orpheus, (Sonette 2.15)
That inexhaustibly speaksone, pure thing. The fountain-mouth is invoked as a possible form of speech, a speech that is indivisible,pure and inexhaustiblebecause it is inarticulatein the original sense of that word ("not connected by joints"); it is the seamless flow of waterthatcannot be divided. To articulate,the dictionarytells us, is "to divide (vocal sound) into as distinct and significant parts."4Articulation impliestemporality, in the word unerschipflich, Rilkehas indicated,I think, whichmeans first of all "inexhaustible"but also, in the contextof water,"not to be drawn off (or ladled out)." The word schipfen means "scoop" or "ladle", and so signifies the divisionof a fluid shapelessnessinto distinctparts (this implicationof the word is brought out clearly at the end of the poem). Rilke invokes the inexhaustible,unarticulated speech of the fountainat the beginning of a poem cast in a form that is supremelyarticulatedand closed, the sonnet. Furthermore,he foregrounds here, and throughout the poem, the articulation of formin an enjambementthatproduces a change of perspective:the du of invocationbecomes the third person derof description.There is a contradictionbetween the invoked speech of the fountainand that of the invokinghuman speaker.5 Keats's famous invocationof Autumn caststhisseason of infinite extensionsand of the elided turningpoint in a similarrelationto its human speaker by mirroringAutumn's agency in the syntax itself.
Season of mistsand mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturingsun;
MLN Conspiring with himhowto load and bless Withfruit thevinesthatroundthethatch-eves run: To bendwith applesthemossedcottage-trees And fillall fruit with ripeness to thecore; To swellthegourdand plumpthehazel shells Witha sweetkernel; to setbuddingmore, And still more,laterflowers forthebees, Untilthey think warmdayswillnevercease, For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.6
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The stanza is a continuous suspension. First of all, as in Rilke's sonnet,the invocationnever expresses a demand on itsobject. The conspiracy of Autumn withthe maturingsun is mirroredby Keats's own invocation of Autumn, which becomes a con-spiracy (breathingtogether)that never issues in a singleplot. The present participle,"conspiring",that suspends the invocationis itselfsuspended over a series of infinitives in whichthe activity of Autumn becomes almost intransitive as it is displaced from one object to another. Where Rilke thematizesthe relationbetween his own activity and that of the fountain by invoking it as a speaker with capacities beyond his own, Keats establishesthis relation through an identification of Autumn's perpetual loading and swellingof the formsof nature with his own stretching of linguisticarticulation. Like the "clammycells" of the bees, the sentence structure is "o'erbrimm'd" by Keats's suspensions. Enjambement confuses rather than accents articulation,extending a continuous agency and eliding the turningpoints: ... to setbuddingmore, And still more,laterflowers forthebees. The double comparative,"more, later", erases the goal of activity in a displacement (from quantityto time) that is characteristic of this poem. This identification withAutumn's agency,the attemptto inhabit the articulateformsof human speech as it inhabitsnature,7is more optimistic and, for the moment,more deluded than Rilke's clearheaded situatingof one speaker in relation to the other. Rilke makes no attemptto enter the interiority of the fountain'spure and indivisiblespeech. Keats surrounds himselfwiththe miststhat dissolve contours and edges like the extended fruitfulness of Autumnitself.8 But he is not unaware of the instability of his position; the conjunctionof the mist'sinteriority withthe warmthof the sun
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is a relationshipthreatened by time, a bosom friendshipthat will burn itselfout as soon as the sun burns offthe mists.As the poem (and the day) progresses,the landscape becomes widerand clearer, stanza the and the figuresin it more exposed.9 Already in the first as it is loading, budding and swelling of Autumn's fruitfulness, carried by Keats's linguisticsuspensions, reaches the limitsof its elasticity.The self-consciousnessof the subject whose articulate temporalityprevents him from being continuallyinternal to an is materializedin the bees, who provide extended activity infinitely on an external perspective Autumn's budding and swellingat the end of the stanza. This perspectivecoincides with the resolution of the suspended conspiracy ("Conspiring . . . to .. . Until.. ."), although the temporal limitis smudged by the speculation of the bees that "warm days will never cease." The stanza is here constiof nature in the honeytuted as a product, as is the fruitfulness combs of the bees. There is a tension at the end of this firststanza between the infinitiveand extended fruitfulnessinvoked from the natural world and the articulationof human temporalitythat defines a completedstageof thisforcethatis now separated fromitsproduct. Of course, Keats cannot any more than Rilke ignore the factthat the agency he invokes is incompatible with his own articulated But instead of settingup a contradiction, speech and temporality. he has allowed the relationshipto develop its own inner tension. The meeting of an articulatinghuman speaker with the unarticulated naturalforcehe invoked takes place, in Keats's poem, within a succession of end-stopped stanzas of identical length. These diof Autumn into three stages in the course of vide the fruitfulness of all the locus of whichit is exhausted as its sphere becomes first itsproduct or "store"and then,when the store has been gathered, the husk that it has shucked. As each stanza is left behind as a of Autumn, originally completed unit the infinitivefruitfulness hidden in a conspiracy withouta plot, is drawn into a temporal thatmoves toward Winter.But Keats maintainsa conarticulation stanttensionbetween thismovementand Autumn's extendingelisions of the turning point, which counterpointthe end-stopped progressionof the stanzas.10 The formal articulationof Rilke's sonnet emphasizes not the between them: units of its structurebut the transitions distinct
0 Brunnen-Mund, du gebender, du Mund,
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der unerschdpflichEines, Reines, spricht,du, vor des Wassers flieBendem Gesicht, marmorne Maske. Und im Hintergrund der Aquadukte Herkunft.Weither an Grabern vorbei, vom Hang des Apennins tragen sie dir dein Sagen zu, das dann am schwarzen Altern deines Kinns voriiberfallt in das Gefass davor. Dies ist das schlafend hingelegteOhr, das Marmor-Ohr in das du immer sprichst. Ein Ohr der Erde. Nur mit sich allein redet sie also. Schiebt ein Krug sich ein, so scheintes ihr, dass du sie unterbrichst.11 0 fountain-mouth, you givingone, you mouth that inexhaustibly speaks one pure thing. Before the water's fluid face, you marble mask, and in the background now the aqueducts arrive. From far away past graves and down the sloping Apennines theybring you your speech, that then at the black aging of your chin falls away into the waitingvessel. This is the ear laid sleeping down before you, the marble ear in which you always speak. An ear of the earth. Only withitself it speaks then. Should ajug barge in the earth thinksthat you're interrupting it. The ubiquitous enjambements seem to figure the falling of the fountain's water itself as Keats's end-stopped stanzas figure perhaps the storehouses of Autumn. These enjambements divide the continuous speech of the fountain's mouth and resituate it within the articulated transference that brings the water, its "speech", from the Apennines in its background to the ear before it; intransitive speaking becomes transitive communication. As the octave falls over into the sestet with the enjambement of voruiberfallt ("falls away") the fountain is revealed as the focal point of an articulated
action.
But if both poets recognize that they cannot totally sustain the initial identification with the unarticulated non-human world into
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which their invocation would project them, they neverthelessrecover a tangentialor marginal relation to that world which gives their endings a distinctiveopenness. Keats consoles a spent Autumn confrontinga depleted landscape at the beginning of the finalstanza withthe words Whereare thesongsof Spring? Aye,whereare they? Thinknotof them, thouhas thy musictooIt is a new kind of suspension that he findsin the sparse music of thisfinalstanza, but one that is born out of a precise balancing of the human and the non-human in theirmutual consolation.As we mightexpect, Rilke's turn is more acrobatic.'2The whole action of the poem is overturnedby the revelationthat the transference of water conveyed by the fountainis in fact the earth's conversation withitself: Nur mitsichallein redetsie also. itself/ (Onlywith it speaksthen). Here is a new kind of pure, inexhaustiblespeaking but, as we shall see, access to it demands a considerable sacrificeon the part of the human speaker, a sacrificethat Rilke makes with greatjoy. The finalactions of sacrificeand consolation on the part of Rilke and Keats respectively reflectthe differences we have already seen in the relationbetween human and non-human: Rilke begins by setting up a contradiction between the fountain and himself as speakers whereas Keats allows a tension to develop. Before consideringin more detail the differencebetween these two recoveriesof openness in the context of the articulateI will compare the movementof these two poems towards the final action. Symptomaticof the difference between Rilke's exuberant fallingand Keats's slow protractionsare the moments of loss, of transition frominside to outside. In Rilke the .gatheredenergyof the octave is poised for a moment on the "black aging" of the fountain's chin and then gushes over into the container that awaits it: tragen sie dirdein Sagen zu, das dann am schwarzen Altern deinesKinns in das Gefassdavor. voruberfallt (Theybring youyourspeech, that at theblackagingofyour then/ chin/ fallsintothewaiting vessel)
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Keats's whole middle stanza is poised before the coup de grace, which comes not as a sudden release of concentratedenergy,but as a protractedseeping: Who hathnotseen theeoftamidthystore? Sometimes whoever seeksabroadmayfind Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hairsoft-lifted bythewinnowing wind: Or on a half-reaped furrow soundasleep, hook Drowsedwith thefumeof poppies,whilethy and all itstwined Sparesthenextswathe flowers; And sometimes likea gleanerthoudostkeep Steadytheladen head acrossa brook; look Or bya cyder-press with patient Thou watchest thelastoozings, hoursbyhours. The oozings at the cider-press recall the brimmingover of the honeycombs at the end of the firststanza. Counterpointingthe progressivemovement of Autumn through the stages of Keats's stanzas is a sequence of analogies in which the same process is "repeated in a finer tone." Clearly the almost identical structure and generous scope of Keats's stanzas make thisbalancing a more feasible procedure for him than for Rilke, who inhabitsthe more dynamicstructure of the sonnet.But thisformaldifference reflects substantially different attitudesto change and loss: the "aging" of the fountain'schin is overlaid by the crossingof the water so that a sudden and dizzy fall from one world to another is substituted forthe undergoingof temporalchange. Rilke'sturningpointsusually involve a switchin perspective,so that time does not have to be survivedas it is in Keat's ode, where each stanza protractsand translates the same impulse into a later stage of Autumn'sprogress towardsWinter. The common problematicof these two poems is the reconciliation of an inexhaustible and unarticulatedactivity invoked from transthe non-humanworld withthe turningpointsthatarticulate, form and eventuallyexhaust human activity. It is apparent that Keats triesto elide these turningpoints,to preservein theirdespite and interiority, while all he can of Autumn's extended fruitfulness of the landstillaccounting for its exhaustion and transformation scapes in which it is active. This is in starkcontrastto Rilke's repeated accentuationof the turningpoint as reversalor leap. Take the first"articulation" of the fountain's inexhaustibly singular speaking:
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WM.FITZGERALD Gesicht fliessendem du, vordes Wassers Maske... marmorne mask) fluidfaceyou/marble (Beforethewater's
by the articulateinvoker,of the founrepresentation, It is the first divisionof tain's speech as a focussingof its background, the first the "one, pure thing" and it coincides, of course, with an articulation of the poem's own form.'3 The enjambement is foregrounded by the suspended du, and the crossingfromone line to the next gathersthe water'scontourlessfluid face into the chiseled outlines of the fountain's marble mask. But there is no crossing the turningpoint of its confronts over where Keats's Autumn first which coincides with the end of the first extended fruitfulness, stanza. The words "Until they thinkwarm days will never cease" both imply a limit and look beyond it; the containing cells brim over. Rilke's sudden switch from inside to outside is avoided in this moment of unstable poise. At the beginning of the second stanza we do indeed find that the Autumn which has swelled nature to its limithas been separated from what is now its "store" and has emerged as an allegorical figurein a landscape. This materializationcorresponds to Rilke's articulationof the fountain's speech in the fall from"fluid face" to "marble mask." But in Keats elided, for the question "Who the transitionhas been brilliantly hath not seen thee oft amid thystore?" both introduces Autumn under a new and later aspect as the harvesterand resolves the suspension of the traditionalrequest for appearance thathas been held over from the invocation of the firststanza.14The question both poses and dismissesthe call forAutumn to appear ("Whohath
not seen thee . . . ?"), so that there is a continuity between the first
two stanzas as well as an articulated break between Autumn as force and harvesterof its product. fructifying Keats balances the progressive with the repetitiverelationship of Autumn's betweenthe stanzasby a displacementor transference protractedactivityfrom one mode to another. The fruitfulness that began to lose any sense of contours as it swelled and loaded nature becomes the drowsiness of the harvesteramid his store, postponingthe coup de gracethat will consummate his action. The of Autumn is no longer that of the swellinggourd or interiority plumping hazel shell, but rather of the surrounded harvester "drowsed by the fume of poppies." Keats preserves in the finite invoked from process of harvestingwhat he can of the infinitives
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in the firststanza. Similarlywith his own Autumn's fruitfulness extensionsand suspensions of relationto Autumn: the syntactical a linguisticembrace ever widening to comprehend the protracted of Autumn are no longer appropriate to an Autumn fruitfulness stanIn place of the first thathas become an ubiquitous individual. za's repeated "with",indicatinga protean and cumulativefruitfulness that eludes the speaker's grasp, the second stanza presentsa wealth of alternatives("Sometimes . . . Or . . . Sometimes . . . Or .. .") between which the speaker need make no choice. The same suspension has been displaced onto another mode. Like linguistic Autumn the harvester,the speaker hesitates before this wealth, then comes down gently on the final tableau of the harvester watchingthe cider-press.It is as though the tension between the equally weighted alternativesis itselfthe squeezing of the ciderpress, the pressure of time that finallyovercomes hesitation.In factthere is a progressionthroughthe stanza of images leading to the cider-presswithan increasingimpressionof weight:"hair softlifted", "Drowsed", "laden head", "cyder-press". As in the first stanza the temporal pull of the stanza's articulation is played against the suspension of a sense of goal. Rilke's enjambement from "fluid face" to "marble mask" exaggerated the transition from the unarticulated to the articulate. Keats's use of enjambement could not be more different: likea gleanerthoudostkeep And sometimes laden head acrossa brook. Steadythy of transportation The formalcrossingis mimeticof the harvester's fromone of fruitfulness his burden and of Autumn's transference stage to another,just as Rilke's enjambement imitatesthe falling But of the fountainthatconvertspure speech into communication. for Rilke the momentof articulationis more like a reversalthan a crossing: the fluid face becomes its opposite, withoutany mediation, it is turned inside out so that we are switchedsuddenly to a new perspective.'5 This is prepared by the inverted structureof the utterance ("du, vor . . .") which makes articulationa punctual event.Keats's crossingpivotson the word "keep", whichundergoes a shiftin meaning from one line to the next. In connectionwith appropriate to its the earlier word "gleaner", "keep" has a finality position in the line: the last remnants of corn are gathered and stored away, kept. But in the next line it becomes clear that the object of "keep" is not to be supplied from"gleaner" and thatwith
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"head" as object it is to be understood in a dynamic,as well as static, sense ("Keep/Steady").'6The two senses (roughly"preserve" and "maintain")are closelyrelated so thatthe word is trulycarried over the line breakjust as the gleaner carrieshis laden head across the river in a way that combines stillnessand movement. It is a typically Keatsian (or Autumnal) extension, an elision of the turningpoint in which the dual aspect of keeping reconcilescontinuation with containment. Rilke's enjambement deliberately avoids such reconciliation,for he wants to present articulationas the pivotalpointof two sides thatare turnedaway fromeach other. In Keats's enjambementthe energyreleased by the new meaning that accrues to "keep" in the dactylicrhythm withwhich the new line begins ("Steady thyLaden . . .") is typicalof his abilityin this poem to transfer energyacross the articulating that turning-points draw Autumn towardsWinter,to reinvestthisenergyin each new stage of Autumn. This persistenceof Autumn'sfruitfulness in parallel withthe temporalprocess of itsexhaustionfindsitsequivalent in Rilke's reinterpretation of the fountain'sspeech. Consider the access of energyin the crossingbetween the first two quartets: du, vordes Wassers fliessendem Gesicht marmorne Maske.Und im Hintergrund der Aquadukte Herkunft. an Weither Grabern vomHang des Apennins vorbei, tragen sie dirdein Sagen zu ... The focus produced by the marble mask fades with the loosely connected referenceto its background ("Und imHintergrund . . .") withwhich the line trails away. But this is preparatoryto a repetitionof the process that we observed in the previous enjambement: the unfocussedbackground to the marble mask becomes the purposefullystridingarrival (Herkunft) of the aqueducts. In this case the change of perspectiveis effectedby reinterpreting background (Hintergrund) as origin (Herkunft). The space between the stanzas is where the fountain'sbackground is claimed by the otherness of the aqueducts' arrival,and it is in thisothernessthatthe speech of the fountainacquires a new energy ("tragen sie dir dein Sagen zu"). Like the fountain'sspeech, Autumn also loses its self-identity at articulating moments,but in quite a different fashion. At the end of the first stanza where Autumn moves towards its forwardlimit in the brimmingcells of the bees it is extended backwardsinto the
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previous season, for it is Summerthat has "o'erbrimm'd [the] clammycells". At the beginningof the thirdstanza, where the last oozings of fruitfulness have been squeezed from the landscape, thereis a further backward extensionwhen there is mourningfor the songs of Spring. At each of these points the articulationthat marksa limitto the forwardextension of some aspect of Autumn is counterbalancedby a dissolvingof the boundaries between Autumnand the previous season. The shortness of breathwhichmakes the speaker articulate Autumn in stages, drawing a new breath beforeeach stage,becomes a deeper breathingeach timehe inhales. In Rilke's turning-points the self findsits complement in the other, in Keats's the boundary between self and other is elided.But in both cases it is the turning-point, where the human speaker recognizes the inescapable temporalitythat separates his articulate being from the unarticulated other, it is this very turningpoint thatis the locus of a true meetingwiththe other. At the crossingfromoctave to sestetin Rilke's sonnet there is a crossingof perspectives.The speech of the fountain,as spoken by the articulatingpoet, has become a focussingof its background, for the water that has flowed past graves and down the slope of the Apennines is gathered at the black aging of the fountain's chin. The rhymeApennins/Kinns reduces the vast slope of the mountain to the human slope of the chin, and this is accompanied by the re-presentation of death as mortality ("black aging") rather than the sleeping earth of the graves. The water that falls away from the fountain'saging mouth is the passing away thatis articulation, the individual's inevitableloss. But this fallingis at the same time the moment when the indivisibleand inexhaustiblespeech of the earth to itselfbecomes perceptible,a speech that is only apparent in its interruptions.Rilke's crossing of perspectivescompensates the loss of pure speech fromthe fountain'spoint of view withthe appearance of the earth's pure speech. But compensation is perhaps the wrong word since it implies that somethinghas survived to be compensated. As the end of Rilke's sonnet will make quite clear, the emergence of the earth's pure speech depends on the speaking subject's willingself-sacrifice. The identification withor possession of the inexhaustibleinfinitivesposited by invocation of the non-human other gives way at the end of both of these poems to an interchangebetween the articulateand the non-articulate in which theyare related in their verydivergence. Keats's conspiracywith Autumn's extensionsbe-
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comes problematic in the last stanza where his survival in a depleted nature leaves him verylittleto conspire with. Whereare thesongsof Spring? Ayewhereare they? Thinknotof them, thouhas thy musictooWhilebarredcloudsbloomthesoft-dying day, And touchthestubble plainswith rosyhue, Then in a wailful choirthesmallgnatsmourn Amongtheriver sallows, bornealoft Or sinking as thelight windlivesor dies; And fullgrown lambsloud bleatfrom hilly bourne; Hedge-crickets sing;and nowwith treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in theskies. Keats has become a consoler, both of nature and of himself.The full-throated "songs of Spring" in which a radiating center filled the landscape are exchanged for the music of late Autumn: the scattered,isolated sounds that are brought togetherby the composition of the consoling and consoled poet.'7 The tension in this stanza between composing poet and decomposing nature is considerably greater than in the precarious conspiracy of the preceding two. In the open, exposed spaces of late Autumn individuals assert themselvesmore emphaticallythan in the cluttered profusionof earlier stages. But the syntactic structure("While ... Then . . . and now . . .") imposes a firmersense of directionthan the suspensions, protractions and alternatives of the previous stanzas. This sense of direction is gentlyresisted by the unconnected,scatteredsounds of late Autumn. In the finalline the gathering swallowsthatseem drawn togetherby the stanza's own gatheringto itsfinal"now" refuseto be drawn into a choir,and "twitter in the skies"; the rhythm's elision of the middle syllableof "gathering" is counterbalanced by the spacing of the same sounds in "twitter in", where the t loses its softeningaspirate.'8 Similarly the wonderfulline "And fullgrownlambs loud bleat fromhilly bourne" presentsindividualsassertingthemselvesin the stressedmonosyllables that resistthe metricalrhythm just as the qualification"fullgrown"resists the emotional connotationsof "lambs". It is precisely this tension that constitutes the consolation of this last stanza, where the indifferent sounds of an exhausted nature no longer swelledby a single forceare yetbroughtto interactin a composing consciousness,whose own intimations of mortality are in turn displaced onto a nature unencumbered by such consciousness.19
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TVhis mutuality is absent fromRilke's sestetwhere the articulated speech of the fountain and the unarticulatedconversationof the earth withitselfdo not interpenetrate, for the two realms or perspectivesare turned away from each other in their complementarity. The enjambed word vorfiberfallt relates octave and sestetin a linear temporality; it is a message delivered. But the first element of the word, which semanticallyconveys the linear relationship (vor-)is repeated in the last word of the line, davor,and its sound is takenup by Ohrand Marmor-Ohr so thatitbecomes a murmuring that conveys the earth's continual conversation with itself.The transitivity implied by the semanticsand positioningof vorfiberfdllt fades as its firstsyllableis dispersed as sound through the sestet; articulationbecomes a continuous murmuring.The earth's conversationwithitselfthat links the graves on the Apennines to the marble ear "laid sleeping down" (schlafend hingelegtes) is the continuityof the side of lifethatis turned away fromus. In the turningpoint where the perspective of the fountain,from whose aging chin the water falls away, is relinquished that other side is revealed.20
It is not only the perspectiveof the fountainthatis relinquished at the end of Rilke's sonnet, but also that of the speaker who has articulatedits speech. The last word of the sonnet thatclinchesits highly articulated form undermines the closure that has been achieved,forthatlast word is "interrupts" (unterbrichst). What Rilke has done is to cast his own activity in the imageryof the world he has invoked, so that in the last lines of the sonnet it is he who is addressed fromthe perspectiveof the earth:2' Schiebt ein Krugsichein so scheint es ihrdass du sie unterbrichst. (Shouldajug bargein /theearththinks thatyou'reinterrupting it.) The meddling jug is the poet who seeks to contain or draw off in the articulateshape of his poem what is inexhaustible (schbpfen) (unerschdpflich) and indivisible, and in the last lines of the poem the reversalof the I-you relationshipmarks the emergence of a new authorityfrom the abdication of the articulatingpoet. It is only throughthisabdicationthatthe earthcomes to speak, foritsspeech is the obverse of human speech and can be heard only in the turning-point of the poet's abdication. Rilke'sfinalreversalis but the epitome of the relationof obverse to reverse in which self and other have been cast throughoutthis
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poem. The other comes to speak when the poet convictshimself of being a meddling jug, which allows the earth to address him. Thus the poet manages to slough offthe confinesof his own perspective by presenting his activityin terms of the non-human world, which balances his previous casting of the fountain as a speaker. Keats finds in the natural world of late Autumn reflections of his own compositional activity, but it is an activity shared between self and other. The "barred clouds" are the bar lines of a score in which the "soft-dying" cadence of the day is notated,and the "wailfulchoir" of the gnats rises and fallslike notes on a page of music. But this notation becomes musicin the human ear that hears it. Keats himselfbecomes for the landscape what the Autumn with which he conspired, as burgeoning force or harvester,had been in the previous two stanzas. The movementof the poem has been both progressiveand repetitive:on one level it has been the articulation of the fruitfulness of Autumn that marks the stages of its exhaustion,but on another it has been an analogical sequence that finds new versions of an extended infinitivity at each stage. This double structureis responsible for the elided turning-points and dissolving contours that accompany the self-contained stanzaic progression. In the final stanza Autumn has burnt through the landscape as the invokingpoet has emerged fromthe conspiracy that suspended and diffusedhuman temporality in the profusion of the natural world: protractedfruitfulness and ubiquitous harvestergive way to the listeningpoet, finallyconfined to the here and now of Winters'threshold in an exhausted landscape. But if the interiority of Autumn to landscape or of the poet to his conspiracyhas been played out it has also been recovered in another sense. By displacing the mode in which loss appears from the oozing of cider apples thatends the harvester's workin the second stanza to the lack of the songs of Spring at the beginning of the third,Keats discovers the sober inferiority of the human ear that draws the scatteredand attenuatedsounds of Autumnaround him by hearing them as music. The landscape as musical score is one that confrontsthe speaker/composeras a field in which he must exercise his own will, rather than the locus of a fruitfulness with which he may conspire. But the landscape is not a passive bearer of the imprintof the speaker's will,for it gentlyinsistson its own and otherness,and in doing so unloads the burden of materiality mortal consciousness from the speaker.22In this interchangebe-
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tween human and non-human as theydiverge, ratherthan in the precarious suspensions of the original conspiracy,human articulation is extended by the inarticulate. For both Keats and Rilke the world of thingscomes to speak to By invokingthatworldas one whose us throughour own mortality. othernessis cast in termsof itsrelationto the articulatetemporality of the human speaker theysituatethe meetingof human and other in the area where the poem subverts its own articulation. We in whichwe are confined, cannot bypass the articulatetemporality nor can we simplyproject ourselves into the world of the inarticfor all human action is articulatedtowards ulate by identification, its conclusion. But if we can neither suspend our movement towhat lies beyond nor experience wards that conclusion indefinitely thatconclusion,we may neverthelesssubject it to the pull of what lies beyond. Winternever appears in Keats's ode, but itsimminence is felt in the tension between composition and decomposition in the last stanza, which is the finesttone of his conspiracywith nature.23In Rilke's final tercetthe figureof the meddlingjug both the poem's consciousness of its own action and subjects crystallizes thataction to another consciousness. I began by quoting two statementsabout death and its relation to life. Keats's speculation about the "here after"comes early in a career of which "To Autumn" was the culminationand there is, of course, no mentionof the "here after"in the ode. However, the notionthatthe other world is connected to thisone as a repetition expresses that "keeping" of the original in a finertone perfectly vision of fruitfulnessacross the articulating boundaries of Au"finertone" that the tension tumn's stages and the progressively between articulate and inarticulate produces. Keats's reconciliationsare trulyAutumnal: the final,and least deluded, affirmation power between selfand other and of the refining of the continuity made of time.WithRilke we entera new Spring,a new intoxication possible by renunciation,an elan of release from the burden of survivalthat is borne by Keats. Life has a side that is continually turned away from us, a side thatjoyfullycompletes us when we renounce our "wooing" and "mourning".24There is something Nietzschean about the final reversal of Rilke's sonnet, where the realm of Orpheus, of the earth's conversation with itself,is affirmedby thejoyful renunciationof the meddling self.The realm of Orpheus comes into itsown much as does the realm of Dionysus "For itis onlyin particularexamples ofTragedy: in Nietzsche'sBirth
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of such annihilation[viz. of the individual] that we see clearlythe eternal phenomenon of Dionysian art . . . the eternal life beyond all phenomena, and despite all annihilation."25 Rilke's cycleof sonnets is inspired by an early death, thatof the twenty year old dancer Wera Knoop, and it is thisprematuredeath that allows the song of Orpheus, of the totality of life and death, to arise in the poet who remembersher. The dancer who made a bed in the poet's ear, as Rilke puts it in the second poem of the cycle,"slept the world" (Sie schlief die Welt).Loss of the individual becomes the gain of an impersonal whole: "Once and for all it's Orpheus when it sings." (Einfiiralle Male istsOrpheus wennessingt). It is the death of Wera that prompts the conception of change as a movement from obverse to reverse that we found in the enjambed reversalsof the fountainsonnet: Und fastein Madchenwarsund ginghervor aus diesemeinigen Gluckvon Sang und Leier und glanzte klardurchihreFruhlingsschleier und machte sichein Bettin meinem Ohr. (1.2) (Almost a girlit was and issuedforth from thisconcordant joy of songand lyre, and clearly shining through her springtime veils she made herself a bed insidemyear.)26 She was almost a girl and then madeherself a bed in the poet's ear, she "arose and slept" (sie erstand und schlief). There is no room for Autumn in this world where Spring is preserved by premature death and the individual will is sacrificedratherthan refined.It is a strangeironythatthe last major workof the forty-seven year old Rilkeshould be a celebrationof Spring,whereas the last greatwork of Keats, who was to die so prematurelyat twenty-six, is this ode to Autumn, "close bosom friendof the maturingsun."
UCal San Diego
NOTES 1 M. Blanchot,L'espace littegraire, (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), p. 155. 2 "It is only as a product of poetic intervention that an object can occupy the place of addressee. In this sense things evoked are objects transformedinto internalforces."Jonathan Culler, "Apostrophe,"Diacritics 7 (1977), p. 66. 3 Keats's sonnet "Why did I laugh tonight?", writtenearlier in the same year as "To Autumn", ends
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Verse, fame and beauty are intense indeed, But Death's intenser-Death is Life's high meed. As in the letterto Bailey, Keats here sees death as continuous withlife,whose concerns it refinesor intensifies. In a letterexplaining his DuineseElegiesRilke repeated his descriptionof death as the side of life that is turned away from us: "Der Tod ist die uns abgekehret,von uns unbeschienene Seitedes Lebens." (Letter to Witold von Hulewicz, 13 November 1925). 4 The Shorter Oxford EnglishDictionary, (Oxford, 1973) ad loc. 5 Rilke actuallyspeaks of the relation between human articulation and the formlessness of water in a poem writtena year after the Sonnetsto Orpheuswere completed: des Wassers Heiterkeitund Herkunft in mich nehmend durch die handgelenke (Quoted by Hermann Morchen, Rilkes "Sonette an Orpheus"[Stuttgart:Kohlhammer, 1955] 314. 6 On Keats's "To Autumn" see GeoffreyHartman, "Poem and Ideology," in Literary Theory and Structure: Essaysin Honor of W. K. Wimsatt, ed. F. Brady,J. Palmer and M. Price (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973) 305-31; Virgil Nemoianou, "The Dialectics of Movement in Keats's 'To Autumn' " PMLA 93,2 (1978) 205-14; James Lott, "Keats's 'Autumn': The Poetic Consciousness and Awareness of Process," SIR 9, No. 2 (1970) 71-81; Paul Fry,The Poet'sCalling in theEnglishOde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980) 258-75. 7 As Nemoianou notes, the firststanza is dominated by tactile imagery,which suggestsan attemptto empathize withnature. In a footnote(p. 213, n. 31) he cites some interesting examples of Keats's empathy with objects and animals. Keats spoke, for instance, of the billiard ball's "sense of delight from its own roundness, smoothnessand volubility and the rapidityof its motion." 8 Fry (p. 266) quotes an interestingpun, perhaps unintentional,from one of Keats's letters:"We are in a mist... We feel 'the burden of the mystery' " (Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 3 May 1818). Earlier in that letterKeats declares that "An extensiveknowledge is needful to thinkingpeople-it takes away the heat and fever; and helps, by widening speculation to ease the Burden of the Mystery." Certainlyin this poem the burden of the fruitfulness Keats can scarcelycomprehend at first is eased as Autumn's fruitis harvested,and the wideningspaces of the second and third stanzas purge the breathlessness(a mild "heat and fever") of the firststanza. Fry (p. 272) sees this poem as Keats's attemptto compose withoutfever,a desire he expressed in a letterwrittenon the same day he described his Sunday walk to Reynolds. 9 For the progressiveextension of space over the three stanzas (as well as other patterns),see Nemoianou, pp. 206-7. 10 The rhyme-scheme contributesto the elision of the end-stopped stanzas. The first and thirdlines of the second stanza carryover the rhymeof the sixthand eighth lines of the firststanza (core, more; store, floor). There is a partially visual and partiallyaural reminiscence of the rhyme of the second stanza's couplet (brook, look) in the second and fourthlines of the third(too, hue). 11 On this poem see M6rchen's useful commentary.Paul de Man's chapter on Rilke in his Allegories ofReading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979) has some veryinteresting ideas that are relevantto this poem, though he does not actuallyreferto it. 12 The accelerated effectof Rilke's use of the sonnet formin thiscycleis a vehicle of what Rilke calls, in one of these sonnets,the Schwung derFigur; it can be felt, in all its euphoric vitality, at the turning-point (Wendende Punkt,2.12). For the
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13
14
15
16
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18
19
20
significance of Figurin Rilke'slate poetry,see Beda Alleman,ZeitundFigurbeim Spdten Rilke(Pftillingen: Neske, 1971) and RichardJayne,The Symbolism ofSpace and Motionin theWorks ofRainerMaria Rilke(Frankfurt:Athenaum, 1972). The discrepancybetween the fountain'sunarticulatedtemporality and the articulatedhuman perception of it is described in some lines of Rilke quoted by M6rchen: Sie [sc. Brunnen] Klingen uns beinah wie Zeit. Aber sie halten viel eher Schritt mit der wandelnden Ewigkeit. "Nothing remains of the culticdistance between votaryand personifiedpower ... the momentof hailing or petitioning is replaced by a presumptivequestion ("Who hath not seen thee") suggesting availabilityrather than remoteness," (Hartman, 323). De Man remarks that "the determining figure of Rilke's poetry is that of "chiasmus" which he refers to as "the crossing that reverses the attributes of word and things"(38). By addressing the fountainas a speaker, Rilke sets up the reversalsby which this poem moves. There are some interestingobservations on this enjambement in John Hollander's Visionand Resonance: Iwo Senses of Poetic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 144-5. Hollander notes the shiftfromprimaryto auxiliaryin the verb "keep". I stressthe word "composition"not onlybecause it is the perfectexpressionfor Keats's "putting together" of the sounds that make up Autumn's music, but because it is the word he himselfused about thispoem in his letterto Reynolds (21 September 1819). The famous passage is worthquoting entire: "How beautiful the season is now-How fine the air. A temperate sharpness about it. Really, withoutjoking-Dian skies-I never lik'd stubble fields so much as now-Aye betterthan the chillygreen of the Spring. Somehow a stubbleplain looks warm-in the same way that some pictures look warm-this struckme so much in mySunday'swalk thatI composed upon it."The reference to pictures supplements the musical term as though Keats were reaching toward other artistic mediums to express his insight. Michael Cooke has some fine lines on "gathering" in his Romantic Will (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976) 173: "Gathering indicates an action, but it also describes a state and nothingin the contextof the poem forbidsus to take both values, of action and state,to maximum extent... If both action and state are kept in mind, the concluding line of "To Autumn" presentssomethinglike an active tableau, process withoutchange, life going on (and never off, into Winter)." Early in his career (in "I stood tip-toe. . .") Keats imagined an "interchangeof favors"within nature,whichnow occurs between man and nature. In the earlier poem this interchangeis compared to that between "good men": The ripples seem rightglad to reach those cresses And cool themselvesamong the emerald tresses. The while theycool themselves,theyfreshnessgive And moisture,that the bowerygreen may live: So keeping up an interchangeof favors, Like good men in the truthof theirbehaviors. (81-6). In the second poem of the firstpart of this cycle, where Rilke introduces its human dedicatee (Wera Knoop), the girl who died so early is described as making a bed in the poet's ear, so that everything is her sleep. Her transience, once accepted, provides access to a new totality.
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TorsoApolls",the opening 21 An interestingparallel is afforded by "Archaischer The bulk of the sonnet describes the poem of the second part of Neue Gedichte. torso from the perspectiveof a generalized "we", but in the last two lines the observerssuddenly become a "du" for the statue that now sees them: denn da ist keine Stelle die dich nichtsieht. Du musst dein Leben andern. 22 The many references to death in the final stanza ("soft-dying", "wailful", "mourn", "live or die") hover between the consciousness of the mortalspeaker and the unconscious, cyclicalworld of nature. commentary provide an interesting 23 Some lines in the introductionto Endymion on this last stanza: season, bare and hoary, Oh, may no wintry half finished,but let Autumn bold, See it [sc. Endymion] With universal tinge of sober gold, Be all about me when I make an end. (54-7) 24 The renunciation or transformation of these activities is one of the major themesof the cycle: Gesang wie du ihn lehrstist nichtBegehr, Nicht Werbung um ein immer noch Erreichtes... (1.3.) and Nur im Raum der Ruhmung darf die Klage gehn ... (1.8.) trans. Walter and The Case of Wagner, 25 FriedrichNietzsche, The Birthof Tragedy Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 104. trans. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: to Orpheus, 26 Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets Norton, 1924), 19.

William Fitzgerald, Articulating The Unarticulated. Form, Death and Other in Keats and Rilke.

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William Fitzgerald, Articulating The Unarticulated. Form, Death and Other in Keats and Rilke.

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Articulating the Unarticulated: Form, Death and Other in Keats and Rilke Author(s): William Fitzgerald Source: MLN,

Articulating theUnarticulated: Form,Death and Otherin Keats and Rilke

an Orpheus, (Sonette 2.15)

0 Brunnen-Mund, du gebender, du Mund,

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