The Angel in Valéry and Rilke

Ursula Franklin

Comparative Literature, Vol. 35, No. 3. (Summer, 1983), pp. 215-246.

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URSULA FRANKLIN

The Angel in
Val~ryand Rilke

I N T H I S century, when Deus Absconditus has become, gradually

and inexorably, Deus Absens, or even deus mortuzis, the concept of
the angel-that immortal messenger, soldier, and celebrant of the Hid-
den God, His manifestation to men-has become largely meaningless to
the educated West. Hence it is all the more remarkable that two of the
century's greatest poets, in two different national traditions, have found
the Angel not merely an attractive metaphor but a symbolic vehicle
which, secularized and transmuted, conveys their intellectual and artis-
tic essence. Angels permeate the entire textual cosmos of both ValCry
and Rilke in diverse forms and varying modes of poetic expression;
these symbolic figures, moreover, reach their most imposing propor-
tions in their creators' culminating works. For Rilke, as he frequently
stated, that culmination could never have come about without his en-
counter with Va1Cry.l In this study I shall trace some of the significant
configurations of the angel image in each of the poets, note how that
image conveys for each poet themes essential to his poetic vision, and
finally examine and comment on the fundamental differences between
the two poets in their understanding and use of the image-on the way
their angels reflect their basic, often diametrically opposed, attitudes as
poets.
ValCry's angels are scattered throughout the voluminous oeuvre, as
well as the volumes of Notes that fed it for half a century. The poet's
early angels recall the Symbolist atmosphere and the artistic cult that
produced, through many transformations, the hieratic angelic figures
of the early correspondence with Gide,2 and those of poems like "Le
1 See Renee Lang, "Ein fruchtbringendes MiBverstandnis : Rilke und ValCry,"
Symposiunz, 13 (1959), 51-62; and Monique St. HClier, A Rilke pour Noel (Bern,
1927), p. 21.
2 Andre! Gide-Paul Valhry Correspondance 1887-1942 (Paris, 1955), pp. 80,83.

215
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Jeune P~-Stre,"~ "Solitude" ( 0 , I, 1585), the early "Narcisse" (pp.

1551-61), and the liturgical angel of the unfinished "Messe angklique"
(pp. 1559-90), all written in the early 1890s. Soon, however, VaICry
analyzed this aesthetics and its products, as well as their Schopen-
hauerian underpinnings, with an objective lucidity that already an-
nounces his own ernancipati~n.~ This emancipation from the Symbolist
aesthetics, which the young poet already understood with the objective
clarity of a "regard d'Ange," was brought about, moreover, by an in-
tense sentimental crisis in 1892, which made him abandon the poetic
for the analytic mode ( 0 ,I, 19-20).
ValCry's predisposition toward the angel archetype is likewise re-
Aected in such rare childhood reminiscenses in the Notebooks5 as the
story of "ma petite maison" and the "histoire de ma chute'' which later
became the prose poem "Enfance aux Cygnes" ( 0 , I, 297). From the
outset, then, the angel figure is associated with the notion of the Fall,
while numerous Notebook passages sketch out the defensive mechanism
of a vulnerable, insular adolescent by means of an inner split in which
one half of the Self-the lucidly angelic-observes and analyzes the
suffering other-the human half, including both self and other(s) in its
objective intellectual analysis (cf. C, XVII, 224; XVIII, 784). This
inner strategy culminated then in the resolution of the crisis of 1892,
frequently recalled in the Notebooks (cf. C, XXII, 842-43; XXIII,
756-57). At this point, Valkry appropriated the Angel-Narcissus Ge-
stalt as his personal imago. Narcissus provided the model for the dk-
doublewent int&rieu~~ dividing the Self into actor and spectator,'-' while
3 Paul ValCry, Oeuwes, ed. Jean Hytier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1957-1960), I, 1578. All
quotations from ValCry's work will refer to this edition, unless otherwise indi-
cated, and be cited in the text as 0, followed by volume and page numbers.
4 See the interesting letter to a friend in which the nineteen-year-old poet ex-
plains: "Ce siecle qui meurt, a de mille facons CtudiC, dissCquC, exalt6 ou honni
cet Eternel FCminin . . . Enfin, prononcant le dCfinitif anathhme, vient Schopen-
hauer qui condamne radicalement la femelle, et de qui procede toute cette jeune
ECOLE dont je te parlais . .. Pour elle, la femme n'existe plus. Toute la tendresse,
tout 1'Cpanchement qu'elle occasionnait jadis--on le reporte vers de vagues formes
CATHOLIQUES. On ne craint pas de parler B je ne sais quel Dieu avec 1'Cquivo-
que parole et I'ardeur d'un amour de chair . . . Ce regain de ferveur religieuse,
dont les Verlaine, les Huysmans (en quelques pages curieuses) voire les MallarmC,
sont les magnifiques Aphtres, n'a pas d'autres racines, que le dCdain du Sexe b&te.
Quelle chose curieuse de voir produire en notre si&cle,des oeuvres d'une Cmotion
mystique aussi intense que 'Parsifal,' que certains pieces d' 'AMOUR' ou de
L'ALBUM D E VERS E T D E PROSE. (MallarmC)" (Bibliotheque litteraire
Jacques Doucet, Paul ValCry catalogue PrC-Teste, No. 113; in the Biblioth&que
Sainte Genevihve, Paris)
5 Paul Valery, Cahiers, facsimile ed. (Paris, 1957-61), XVIII, 218-19. All
quotations from ValCry's Cahiers will refer to this edition, hereafter cited in the
text as C, followed by volume and page numbers.
'-' ValCry, suffering from his love affair, for example, writes two series of letters,
love letters expressing what he suffers and which he does not send, while to Gide
 VALGRY A N D RILKE

the Angel-always linked by ValCry to Narcissus-furnished the ideal

image for intellectual lucidity, isolation, and superiority both over the
Self, with its vulnerability, and over others.
Armed with this new sense of angelic vision and will, the young law
student forsook poetry for mathematics and began to write for himself
-the Notebooks-rather than for a public. His major theme became
the exploration of the "RIoi angClique" that was to assume many masks
in a poetic universe to which he returned after the failure of the "Uni-
versal Arithmeti~."~
The poet's early crisis and its resolution through the analytic, "sci-
entific" exploration of the psyche are brilliantly reflected in the prose
text "La RCvClation anagogique" which maltes up the last of the His-
toires brisies ( 0 , 11, 466-67). The "Abstract Tale," originating from
a Notebook version of 1938, is dated MDCCCXCII in the text, a myth-
ologized and symbolic transformation of the 1892 experience and its
consequences. Here it is not the Self, or one half of it, but its two warring
factions that are figured as "two terrible angels," Nous and Eros,
against each of which the nzoi must defend itself equally. The "Anagogi-
cal Revelation" is a ValCryan version of Jacob's Struggle with the
Angel, which objectifies and symbolizes an inner victory of the Self
over it(s) self (ves) ; commemorating the battle and the victory of 1892,
its "revelation" is that of the "abstract," analytic and scientific method
-that of the Angel-by which those other powers, the evil angels Eros
and Nous, who fuse into one "Anti-ego" threatening the moi, that is
itself, can be o v e r c ~ m e . ~
This Cartesian dualism remained fundamental in ValCry, always
supporting a dichotomized vision of the Self, its angelic aspiration for
complete lucidity ever threatened by the incomprehensible forces on
which it depends, its human reality. Thus Teste, one of ValCry's most
purely intellectual heroes, in part inspired by Poe, though "dur comme
un ange," could never have subsisted "dans le rCel" according to his
creator ( 0 , 11, 13). The most famous fragment of the Teste cycle, "La
SoirCe avec Monsieur Teste" (at the theater) ( 0 , 11, 15-25), which
celebrates the hero's most eminently angelic trait, his lucid "regard,"
stands under the sign (epigraph) of Descartes. Teste, moreover, is the
he writes letters analyzilzg what he observes happening to his vulnerable self
(Gide-Vale'ry Correspondance, pp. 110, 122, 130, 160-61). Here Valhry already
links the myth of Narcissus to himself, "Narcisse" the vulnerable other half of
his M o i anghlique.
7 Nicole Celeyrette-Pietri, in her magistral work Valkry et le Moa' des Cahiers
d Poeuz~e (Paris, 1979), esp. pp. 9-75, has discussed extensively Valkry's "Fas-
cination Mathkmatique," the construction and the ultimate failure of the "Univer-
sal Arithmetic," and his preoccupation with an "alghbre du moi."
8 Celeyrette-Pietri, p. 170: "Le 'Conte abstrait' .. . raconte l'invention du
Systtme, entendu comme riduction P I'Absolu."
217
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

man of the Possible; he "Ctait le maitre de sa pensCe," and "s'il eiit

tournC contre le monde la puissance rCguli6re de son esprit, rien ne lui
eGt rCsistC" ( 0 , 11, 18, 19). But Teste does not need to exercise his
latent strength : "Mr. Teste est-il autre chose que le possible, I'incarna-
tion du possible en tant que-nous en usons et disposons? E t ce pos-
sible-li, est-ce pas-ce que I'on entend par intellectuel" (C, XI, 768) ?
Teste, a celebration of the angelic Moi Fur, a woi become a pure crystal
of lucidity, finally culminates in the "Homme de verre" ( 0 , 11, 44)) a
figure reflecting this inconceivable mental lucidity while, at the same
time, suggesting its fragility.
An angelic figure related to Teste is that of "Agathe" ( 0 , 11, 1388-
92), his nocturnal sister, who did not see the light of day until after the
poet's death.g I have discussed this text elsewhere at some length, and
suggested why ValCry might have chosen not to "finish" or publish
"Agathe."1° "Agathe" was to become a fragment of the night of the
hero in the Teste cycle, a mono-dialogue of a mind-Teste's-behold-
ing itself think during a fragment of a night, a theme later fully orches-
trated in "La Jeune Parque." W e will not follow Agathe through the
mental phases of her nocturnal voyage, but will meet her at its climax,
when her introspective mind has become a virtual system, independent
of any content, forming "un systBme nu1 ou indifdrent d ce qu'il vient
de produire ou approfondir, cluand 1' ombre imaginaire doucement c6de
a toute naissance, et c'est I'esprit" ( 0 , 11, 1392; my italics). Here
"Agathe" has reached the Absolute of the Angel, imaged in ValCry's
last poem, "L'Ange," in the Angel's spiritual diadem, "la couronne de
la connaissance unitive, . . . ou toutes les idCes vivaient Cgalement dis-
tantes entre elles et de lui-meme, et dans une telle perfection de leur
harnlonie et promptitude de leurs correspondances, qu'on ezit dit qu'il
eiit pu s'tvanouir, et le syst?~.tte,ttincelant comme un diadBme, de leur
ntcessitb simultante subsister par soi seul dans sa sublime pltnitzdde
( 0 , I, 2% ;my italics).
Another of ValCry's heroes of the intellect-"le personnage principal
de cette ComCdie Intellectuelle qui n'a jusqu'ici rencontrC son po6te"-
is his LConard de Vinci, who first appeared in an article in La Nouvelle
Reme in 1895, entitled "Introduction i la MCthode de LConard de
Vinci." This "commande" has become, like Teste, one of the poet's
most celebrated texts, republished in 1919, now preceded by "Note et
digression"; both were republished in 1933, along with a third essay,
"LConard et les philosophes," which had first appeared separately in
Commerce in 1920, all three texts now accompanied by retrospective
9 Paul Valkry, A g a t h (Paris, 1956).
10 See my "The White Night of Agathe: A Fragment by Paul ValCry," in
EFL, 12 (1975), 37-58.
 VALBRY A N D R I L K E

marginal notes written from 1929 to 1933. Here ValCry sketched no

historical Leonardo, but rather "ce qui m'apparaissait alors comme le
pouvoir de l'esprit" (0, I, 1155), that is the angelic Self wearing the
mask of the great Renaissance genius, whom he called "l'ange-Lio-
nardo." Teste's "que peut un homme?" is LConard's obsession also, and
his motto is Hostinato rigore, that of the historical figure. LConard is,
like Teste, a hero of the "regard," the "regard d'Ange." An entry of
the 1930s reads : "Roman Conte Description par l'ange-Lionardo.
L'ange-celui qui voit les divers ordres" (C, XVI, 841). But LConard
surpassed Teste in that he realized his potential in creativity and ex-
plored the mysteries of the body as well as those of the mind. LConard-
artist-scientist, homo faber par excellence-confronts the phenomenal
world and masters it: "I1 est le maitre des visages, des anatomies, des
machines. I1 sait de quoi se fait un sourire" (0,I, 1175). In a Notebook
entry of the 1920s entitled "Lionardo," ValCry notes that LConard
possesses, like no other artist, the precise sense of the forms of nature,
concluding, "I1 est l'ange de la morphologie" (C, XI, 199). But like
Teste, ValCry's Leonardo rejects the human individual(ity) in himself
that would make him a mere man among others ; for these ideal projec-
tions of the Self have no semblable, any more than do the angels, each
of whom is a species to himself, as ValCry had learned from Thomistic
angelology.ll LConard, like Teste, aspires to the angelic vision which
reduces the world to its object, without being itself object for another:
"C'est une maniPre de lumineux supplice que de sentir que l'on voit
tout, sans cesser de sentir que l'on est encore visible, et l'objet con-
cevable d'une attention CtrangPre ; et sans se trouver jamais le poste ni
le regard qui ne laissent rien derriire eux" (0,I, 1217).
When we turn to ValCry's lyric poetry of the period, we realize that
his farewell to poetry was, indeed, not absolute. Though many of the
pieces published in 1920 in Album de vers anciens were written before
the 1892 crisis, the recueil contains some important poems written later,
though all, of course, before "La Jeune Parque," whose composition
spans the years 1913-17.
One of the most significant poems of the "pCriode aigue," the Teste
11 In 1910 ValCry had regularly attended the courses of Father Hurteaux on
Saint Thomas Aquinas' Sz~mma(cf. 0 , I, 34), and the Thomistic angel-that pure
Intelligence, each one a species to himself-has left its mark on ValCry's. Ltonard-
ValCry's marvelous intellect immolates the individual that carries it-"se sent
conscience pure: il ne peut pas en exister deux. [Ill est le nzoi, le pronom uni-
versel, appellation de ceci qui n'a pas de rapport avec un visage" ( 0 , I, 1229)-
to become a unique and universal Self. In another essay Valtry notes that "ce que
j'avais dit des triangles, saint Thomas le professe des Anges, lesquels etant tout
immatCriels et des essences stparkes, chacun d'eux est necessairement seul de son
espece. I1 faudrait donc en toute rigueur ne jamais dire deux triangles, ni deux
anges, mais un triangle et un triangle, un ange et un ange" (0, 11, 955).
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

years,12 is "Profusion du soir" ( 0 , I, 86-89), begun around 1899 and

.
reworked many times. Its subtitle, "Poirme abandonn6 . . ," might well
allude to its creative history. W e recall that for ValCry no poem was
ever "finished,"13 and that he liked to compare poetic to musical com-
position, so that poets would produce, "A la mode des musiciens, une
diversit6 de variantes ou de solutions du mime sujet" ( 0 , I, 1501). I
have discussed in a previous study how this theory of composition is
linked to the "fragmentary" form of much of the poet's work,14 and it
pertains to our poem, which is made up of fragments: one opening
sonnet and eleven "sections" of varying length and rhyme schemes, all
of them variations on the abundance of a sunset reflected in the "regard"
of an Angel, "L'Ange frais de l'oeil nu."15 The poem is a hymn to the
eye, introducing an image which integrates the Angel's purity with that
of his vision : after the death of the sun, the "cool Angel of the naked
eye" announces the birth of a thought in the mind and a star in the sky :
L'Ange frais de l'ceil nu pressent dans sa pudeur,
Haute nativitC d'ktoile dlucidCe,
Un diamant agir qui berce la splendeur . ..
( O , I , 86)
The poetic fragments are musical variations on the reciprocal inter-
action of world and mind through the eye that is fecundated by the
phenomena of nature, out of which it creates the meaning it confers on
the world-"Une maternit6 muette de penskes" (p. 89). The creative
eye forms divinities out of the clouds of an evening sky, and a Swim-
ming Angel whose every stroke measures the celestial space :
E t sur les roches d'air du soir qui s'assombrit,

Telle divinitd s'accoude. Un ange nage.

I1 restaure l'espace ? chaque

i
tour de rein.

(P. 88)
The beautiful anagram marries the male and the female, intellect and
affect, the angel's union with the maternal Ur-element, in a vision that
is, of course, entirely of the beholder's creation: the transformation of
12 The poet reminisces : "Je regrette le temps oh je jouissais du souverain bien
(cette libertk de l'esprit). . . Je ne souhaitais que le pouvoir de faire, et non son
exercice dans le monde" (0, I, 1477).
13 In "Calepin d'un potte," ValCry explains that "une oeuvre n'est jamais ndces-
sairement finie, car celui qui I'a faite ne s'est jamais accompli" ( 0 , I, 1450-51).
14 See my The Rhetoric of Vale'ry's Prose Aubades (Toronto, 1979), pp. 7-9.
16 Charles Whiting, Valiry : Jeune Po2te (Paris, 1960), p. 123, calls "Profusion
du soir" Valdry's "premier grand poi.me de l'intellect"; and James Laxvler, The
Poet as Analyst (Berkeley, 1974), pp. 74-116, giving a detailed examination of the
poem's many unpublished drafts and variants as well as a thoroughly documented
and definitive exegesis, reminds us that it was important for Valdry to the very
end of his creative career, as it is alluded to by the protagonist of Mon Faust in
1940.
220
 VALBRY A N D RILKE

an evening cloud. The poem's persona is an eye-protagonist who has

shed the "person," so that it poetizes this process (so frequently de-
scribed in the Notebooks and in prose texts like "Monsieur Teste" and
"Note et digression"). The text continues :
Moi, qui jette ici-bas l'ombre d'un personnage,

Toutefois dCliC dans le plein souverain,

Je me sens qui me trempe, et pur qui me dCdaigne !

The shadow of the "personnage" is not merely "cast" but "thrown off,"
and this self-disdain has rendered the Moi bur.
The publication of "La Jeune Parque" in 1917 marked ValCry's
triumphant return to poetry, with a poem wliose subject is related to
"Agathe" and thus to Teste,16 as it constitutes another transformation
of the great subtext-"la Conscience de soi-mSme"-now musically
orchestrated into lyric fragments. And though the figure of the Angel
is not manifest in the poem's "surface" imagery, the Ange/Narcisse
configuration is an inherent part of its underlying "deep-structure" :
Harmonieuse MOI, differente d'un songe,
Femme flexible et ferme aux silences suivis
..
D'actes purs ! .
Dites ! . . . J'Ctais 1'6gale et 1'Cpouse du jour,
Seul support souriant que je formais d'amour
A la toute-puissante altitude adorCe. ..
( 0 , I, 99)
This harmonious Moi suggests the Angel, as do the "pure acts" and the
upward surge of love to the sun-"altitude adorCe"-"altitude dorte"-
whose support is the adoring mind, a mind that carries the meaning of
the universe, is its mirror and reflection: "Tout l'univers chancelle et
tremble sur ma tige, / La pensive couronne Cchappe 2 mes esprits" (p.
102). The Young Fate's death would rob the world of its meaning, and
her "crown of thought" recalls the Angel's "spiritual diadem." But at
the end of her nocturnal voyage, the Young Fate rejects the angelic
"puretC du Non-itre" for life.
ValCry has told us how, after the years of patient work on this major
poem, the "Charmes" burst forth almost spontaneously. Their opening
and closing poems, "Aurore" and "Palme," were originally one, their
kinship still recognizable in the fragments' common stanzaic form as
well as a certain parallelism of vocabulary.17 Dawn is preeminently the
16Val6ry explains: "Songez que Ie sujet veritable du poeme est la peinture
d'une suite de substitutions psychologiques, et en somme le changement d'une
conscience pendant la d u d e d'une nuit" ( 0 , I, 1613) ; and in a letter he writes :
"Le sujet vague de l'oeuvre est la Conscience de soi-mcme; la Consciousness de
Poe, si I'on veut" (Lettres ci quelqz~es-uns,Paris, 1952, p. 124).
17 See James R. Lawler's examination of this parallelism in Lecture de Vale'ry
(Paris, 1963), p. 31.
221
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

moment of the Moi pur, and "Aurore" constitutes its lyric celebration.
While it celebrates the poet's matutinal confidence and his virile taking
possession of the world, "Palme" ( 0 ,I, 153-56), again about the crea-
tive process, appears indeed like the first poem's feminine "other half,"
a poem about maternity. In the form of a parable, it tells about the
secret gestation and patient maturation, finally the miraculous birth of
the poem-the palm tree's "fruit mtr" (p. 155). The tree, we recall, is
one of the poet's richest symbols for the mind, its roots anchored deep
in the maternal earth, and its crown reaching toward the sun.18 Both
the symbol of the Palm and the form of the parable confer a biblicaI
quality on the poem, whose religious solemnity is enhanced by the
appearance of an Angel "of formidable grace" in the opening stanza. I t
is the Angel of the Annunciation who visits the poetic mind to bring
gifts of both earthly and spiritual food, and who "speaks to his vision" :
De sa grHce redoutable
Voilant B peine I'Cclat,
Un ange met sur ma table
Le pain tendre, le lait plat ;
I1 me fait de la paupitre
Le signe d'une pritre
Qui parle A ma vision :
-Calme, calme, reste calme !
Connais le poids d'une palme
Portant sa profusion!
(pp. 153-54)
This loveliest Angel of ValCry's lyric poetry is recalled in a Notebook
entry from his later years commenting on the "Leonardesque beauty"
and the "supreme poetry" of the Angel of the Annunciation :
Les Ecritures sont pleines de thsmes extraordinairement beaux. Plus riches que
les anciens-lesquels ont trop de mythes B monstres.
L'Annonciation est une rnerveille-Bien LConardesque-avec l'kmoi et le my-
sttre de la Fkcondation--en dessous.
Le point de tendresse critique situk entre l'acte (ici, mystique) et le germe dans
la chair de la vierge-C'est une idke extraordinaire, d'une "poCsiev suprtme-
L'Ange I'annonce bien simplement, et il a grandement raison. (C, XXVI, 282)
W e recall here that Rilke especially loved "Palme" and gave it one of
his most accomplished Uuutdichtungen.19
I n the best known of the Charwes, "Le CimetiPre marin," ValCry's
most dualistic poem in which the antithetical motifs of "connaitre" and
"ttre," timelessness and cyclical return, the universal and the personal,
are contrapuntally invoked, we recognize the angelic in the persona
whose hubris would project him beyond the human. And the poet's
18 See Pierre Laurette, Le Th ?me de l'arbre chez Valkry (Paris, 1967).
1 9 Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe (Wiesbaden, 1950), 11,391.
222
 VALBRY A N D RILKE

recollection about its creative process is itself the demonstration of

dualism, being one of the rare commentaries by a modern poet about
poetry that dissociates content and form.20 The form came first, and
then needed to be "filled" ; and the themes to fill that form were to be
from the poet's affective and from his intellectual life, to culminate in
the contrast of "la mort" and "la pensCe pure." The protagonist is, in
fact, again the Moi divided, intellect and affect, in a setting recalled by
ValCry's personal memories, sun and sea, celebrating the universal
archetypal elements of fire and water symbolic of "esprit" and "corps."
Though the definitive version contains no angel, except those sculptures
vainly decorating the graves, the Moi's "orgueil" and the hubris pro-
jecting it beyond human mutability are angelic traits par excellence;
and a "great angel" appeared, in fact, in one of the poem's drafts21
Pride and hubris were the fatal traits of the brightest of angels, the
fallen Lucifer and hero of "Ebauche d'un serpent" ( 0 , I, 138-46),
ValCry's poetic version of the third chapter of Genesis. W e have noted
that the motif of the Fall is intrinsically related to the ValCryan angel
from the outset, and to the "angelic self" whose construction is inspired
by an aspiration to a "higher" state. Among the numerous Notebook
passages on the Fall which have found their way into ValCry's published
work are two fragments from Tel Quel ( 0 , 11,696) which have a direct
bearing on the poem :
L'Ange ne diffPre du Demon que par une certaine rtflexion qui ne s'est point
encore pr6sentte 2 lui.
Chutes.
a ) I1 y a eu deux grandes et mysttrieuses chutes. Chute des Anges, chute de
l'homme : catastrophes IzomotJzhtiqt~es,dirait un gtomPtre.
Tout ce qu'IL fit devait donc tomber;
b ) Toute religion fondte sur I'idte d'une chate initiale se trouve en proie aux
douleurs de la discontinuitt.

20 In the 1930s, the poet explained both the genesis and the intent of his famous
poem in "Au Sujet du Cimetihre marin"-how it first imposed itself on the poetic
consciousness as a rhythm, then a metric and strophic figure that needed to be
"filled": "Quant au CimetiPre marin, cette intention ne fut d'abord qu'une figure
. .
rythmique vide, . I1 me proposa une certaine strophe de six vers et lJidCe d'une
composition fondte sur le nombre de ces strophes, et assurte par une diversitt de
tons et de fonctions & leur assigner. Entre les strophes, des contrastes ou des cor-
respondances devaient &tre instituts. Cette dernitre condition exigea bientBt que
le poPme possible fGt un monologue de 'moi,' dans lequel les thtmes les plus simples
et les plus constants de ma vie affective et intellectuelle, tels qu'ils s'ttaient imposts
& mon adolescence et associts & la mer et 2 la lumitre d'un certain lieu des bords
de la mtditerrante, fussent appelCs, tramts, opposes . . .
. .
"Tout ceci menait 2 la mort et touchait & la penshe pure . Je savais que je
m'orientais vers un monologue aussi personnel, mais aussi universe1 que je pour-
rais le construire . . . Un assez long travail s'ensuivit" (0,I. 1503-04).
21 See Lloyd J. Austin, "Paul Valtry compose Le Cimetihre mark" in Mercure
de France (janvier-avril 1953), p. 600.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

c ) Mais une CrCation est une premiPre rupture. A I'origine du monde, deux
actes, l'un du createur, I'autre de la crCature. L'un fonde la foi, et I'autre. ..
la
liberte.
With "homothetic," i.e., "similar in construction and position," ValCry
points to a parallelism, in fact, between not merely the Fall of the Angels
and the Fall of Man but between the Fall of Man and the Fall of God !
For God's Fall, as the Serpent will explain, is the very Creation itself,
the entire universe being the "flaw" in the pure Nothingness :
.
Soleil, soleil I . . Faute dclatante !
Toi qui masques la mort, Soleil, ..
Toi, le plus fier de mes complices,
E t de mes piPges le plus haut,
T u gardes les cceurs de connaitre
Que l'univers n'est qu'un dCfaut
Dans la puretC du Non-ttre !
( 0 , I, 138-39)
Teste, the angelic, the pure, "dur comme un ange," we recall, dis-
dained manifesting his essence, for the Fault and Fall of genius is to
make himself known. Teste had preferred himself : "Je me suis prCfCrC.
Ce qu'ils nomment un Gtre supCrieur est un Etre qui s'est trompk" (0,
11, 15), and from the "Are supkieur" to the "Highest" it is but a step.
"Chaque esprit qu'on trouve puissant, commence par la faute qui le fait
connaitre" (p. 16), and "le Tout-puissant'' is no exception :
Cieux, son erreur ! Temps, sa ruine !
Et l'abime animal, bCant ! . . .
Quelle chute dans l'origine
Etincelle au lieu de neant ! . ..
( 0 , I, 139)
Reflecting toward the end of his life on the work he has created and on
that which he left undone ValCry muses in 1944 :
Age, degradation.. . c'est que je me trouve par-ci par-15 en prCsence du seigneur
1'0-Mismo-Non de ce 'moi pur,' mon tternel agent-Mais d'un personnage Moi-
Auteur de telles oeuvres. ..
Je dCcouvre que j'ai fait-tout autres choses que celles que je pensais avoir
faites.
Je me dis, avec mon Serpent que l'&tre est un dCfaut dans la purete du Non-
etre (C, XXVIII, 89) .22

22 Valkry's fascination with the serpent-he chose a serpent entwined around

a key as his personal emblem-and especially the archetypal uroboros, the serpent
swallowing its tail (sketches of which abound in the Notebooks), lies beyond the
scope of this discussion. What concerns us here is the Serpent's angelic past that
has made him what he is in the Garden : the devil, who never forgets his former
proximity to the divine, whose ways he therefore knows better than any other
creature. The fact that Nietzsche's Zarathustra also privileged the snake among
creatures invites interesting reflections.
 VALBRY A N D RILKE

As ValPry's poetic career reaches its zenith with these major poems
of Charwtes, the angelic self is threatened by a great human love in the
encounter with "Beatrice" (Catherine Pozzi). And while the youthful
crisis of the 1890s had been exorcized by "Monsieur Teste," Beatrice
will "chastize" his creator for his idolatry-"0 Lionardo [Beatrice's
appelation for the poet] che tanto pensate ! Amour fut la recompense et
le chiitiment tout inattendus de cette quantite de pensCesn (C, VIII,
374). As regards Monsieur Teste, "Love and Mr Teste-I1 fait sa
theorie et puis-Jamais en paix!" (C, X, 538, 531) ! As the early crisis
was instrumental in the construction of the angelic self, so the mature
one marks its evolution as reflected in the mirror of the a?uvre ; many
years later, ValCry points to the importance of these experiences in
their effect on the Ego scriptor :
AoGt 40
.
Insomnie . . Je revis ma grande maladie mentale d'amour de 91-92--et quelques
annCes apres- ... La litttrature ou plutbt, tout ce qui est spirituel, fut toujours
mon anti-vie, mon anesthttique. Mais ces sensations cependant furent un puissant
excitant intellectuel-le ma1 exasperait le remkde-Eupalinos en 21, La Danse en
22, k i t en ttat de ravage. Et qui le devinerait?" (C, XXIII, 589-90)
Both Dialogues were written "sur ~ommancle,"~~ and we recall how
enthusiastic Rilke, who translated both, was about " E ~ p a l i n o s , " ~ ~
while the dance motif was to assume a growing significance in his own
poetry.25"Eupalinos ou l'architecte" (0, 11, 79-147) culminates in the
hero's great apostrophe to his body, the artist's prayer to his mortal
form :
"0 mon corps, qui me rappelez B tout moment ce temptrament de mes tendances,
cet Cquilibre de vos organes, ces justes proportions de vos parties . . . prenez garde
A mon ouvrage ; enseignez-moi sourdement les exigences de la nature, et me com-
munique~ce grand art dont vous Ctes dout . . . Donnez-moi de trouver dans votre
alliance le sentiment des choses vraies ; modCrez, renforcez, assurez mes pensCes
. . . Mais ce corps et cet esprit, . . . mais ce fini et cet infini que nous apportons,
chacun selon sa nature, il faut A present qu'ils s'unissent dans une construction
bien ordonnee." (0,II,99-100)
"Quelle pri6re sans exemple !" exclaims Socrates, who in the "immense
leisure" of immortality judges and condemns his mortal past and
dreams of another life. "Qu'est-ce donc que tu veux peindre sur le
nCant ?" Ph&dreasks, and Socrates, reformed, replies : "L'Anti-Socrate
23 About the "commande" of "Eupalinos" and the form it imposed, see Valery,
Lettres, p. 214; about "L'Ame et la danse," Lettres, pp. 190-91.
24 See Rilke's letter of 1921 to Gertrud Ouckama Knoop in Briefe, 11, 268:
". . . dieser grofle herrliche 'Eupalinos.' "
26I have discussed the treatment of that motif in Mallarm&, Val&ry, and
Rilke in "Mallarme's Living Metaphor: Valtry's Athikte and Rilke's 'Spanish
Dancer,'" in Pre-Text, Text, Context: Essays in Nineteenth-Century French
Literature (Columbus, Ohio, 1980)' pp. 217-27.
225
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

. . . Ce sera donc . . . le constructeur" (p. 142). T h e "anti-Socrate" re-

flects the anti-Teste, and their defeat is that of the Angel.
"L'Kme et la danse" (0,11, 14s-76), as its title suggests, celebrates
both body and soul, as Socrates, his physician, and Phkdre, at a banquet,
discourse on the most bodily of the arts. Both "esprit" and "corps," as
ValCry's LConardo had taught already, inspire every artist and creator.
And, inspired by his ECatrice, the poet celebrates the body and its arts
which enlighten the soul and mind." ValCry had, of course, already
before the "ECatrice" crisis become an "anti-Teste," namely, the crea-
tive poet whose conversion is reflected in the Dialogues ; many Kotebook
entries, like the follo~t-ing,mirror that change: "Vers ce temps-l& les
hommes commenckrent & comprendre que la vCritable connaissance est
crCation . . . que la crCation est vie, que le faire est le seul 'savoir' " (C,
V I I I , 879).
The beautiful conten~poraryprose poem sequence "A B CHZ7cele-
brates the marriage of "esprit" and "corps" in one of ValCry's most
accon~plishedprose aubades ;2R but the images of the "angel of light"
and his sleeping beloved, "femme endorinie," reveal again the funda-
mental polarity and insuperable duality within the Self: "Sur le seuil
de la premi6re heure et de tout ce qui est possible, je dors et je veille,
je suis jour et nuit . . . L'5me s'abreuve & la source du temps, boit un
peu de tCni.bres, un peu d'aurore, se sent fenlme endormie, ange fait de
lumiGre, se recueille, s'attriste, et s'enfuit sous forme d'oiseau jusqu'i
la cime & demi nue dont le roc perce, chair et or, le plein azur nocturne."
Finally, with the "Fragments du Narcisse" of 1926," ValCry returns
to the classic figure of the divided Self, always linked to and eventually
merging with that of the Angel. "L'Ange-(au bord) de la fontaine,"
title of the earliest draft of the poet's last work, the prose poem
"L'Ange." T h e "Fragments du Narcisse," which contains soine of
ValCry's most accoinplished lyrics, consists, we recall, of three num-
bered sections : the protagonist's aspiration to embrace and coinpre-
26 See Alexandre Lazaridhs, V a l t r y fioz~rune fiottiqz~edu Dialogz~e (Montreal,
1978), p. 176.
27 Published in Cotiztizerce : Calriers trimestriels, 5 (automne 1925), 4-14.
" I have discussed the sequence in "A ValCryan Trilogy: The Prose Poems
'A B C,' " CentR, 20 (1976), 244-56.
29 W e recall the early "Narcisse" sonnet of September 1890 ( 0 , I, 1554) which
predates the poem the young ValCry had submitted to the judgment of MallarmC,
the "Fragments du Narcisse" of the early 1920s which found definitive form in
the 1926 version of Charnzes, and finally the "Cantate du Narcisse" written in the
late 1930s "sur la demande de Mme Germaine Tailleferre pour servir de libretto
B une cantate qui a CtC composee par cette Cminente musicienne" ( 0 , I, 403). When
VaiCry gave a lecture "Sur les Narcisse" in 1941, he remarked that "ce theme de
Narcisse . . . est une sorte d'auto-biographie poCtique" ( 0 , 1, 1557), recalling the
famous tomb of Narcissa in the Botanical Garden of Montpellier which had in-
spired his early "Narcisse."
 VALBRY AND RILKE

hend his "inCpuisable Moi" ( 0 , I , 126), the rejection of human love,

finally the aspiring Self conquered by night and death. Longing for
transcendence and immortality, the Self is condemned to a temporal
existence-the motif of Time is modulated tl~roughoutthe poem through
the n~elocliesof sunset and nightfall over the forest and their reflection
in the fountain-of \~11ic11death is an inherent part. Nun~erousNote-
book passages, like this one from the mid-1920s) link the figure of
h'arcissus to death and mutability :
'Narcisse' N'est-ce point penser B la mort
que se regarder au miroir ?
N'y voit-on pas son perissable ?
L'immortel y voit son mortel.
(C, X, 848)
This will be the theme also of Valkry's last poem, as sketched already
in the 1921 Notebook: "Une sorte d'ange Ctait assis sur le bord d'une
fontaine. I1 s'y regardait et se voyait Izolnlne, et en larmes, et en proie a
une douleur [tristesse] infinie" (C, V I I I , 370).
Another angelic figure that had preoccupied ValCry for many years
is S C m i r a r n i ~ In
. ~ ~both the poem, "Air de SCmiramis" ( 0 , I , 91-94),
and "SCmiramis : mClodranle en trois actes et deux interludes" ( 0 , I,
182-96)) the queen's aspirations to meet her lover, the Sun, are ex-
pressed in verbs stressing vertical tension. I n the melodrama's third
act, SCmiramis, echoed by the chorus, sings her soaring aspiration:
"Altitude, mon Altitude, mon Ciel" (p. 191). Finally, mounting the
parapet, she rises toward the altar she has built to the Sun and pros-
trates herself upon it to be talten up-into the ultimate "puretC du Non-
Ctre"-and consumed by its fire: "Je prierai le Soleil, bientBt dans
toute sa force, qu'il me rCduise en vapeur et en cendres" ; her prayer is
heard: "Une colombe s'envole. L'Autel vide brille au soleil" (0, I,
196).
SCmiramis reaches and crosses over that "borne,') the extreme limit
from which there is no return. I t is precisely the cyclical returns of the
natural, temporal order that she conquers in her blazing ascension. For
her angelic orgzteil, like that of the Parque or MallarmC's HCrodiade,
rebels against the endless repetitions imposed by a body-Schopen-
hauer redivivus-and its appurtenance to Nature. T h e angelic ambition
projects the Self beyond the space-time limitations of human reality,
the particularization and individuation that ties the mind to a specific
human life with its history and personality, and condemns it to a Nietz-
30 H e r origins go back to an "abandoned, unfinished" poem of 1899 (cf. Whit-
ing, p. 147). She first appeared in 1920, under the title "Si.miramis (Fragment
~ ' Z L P Z trBs ancien po?nze), still lacking some of the stanzas that make up the last
piece of Album de zlers anciens.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

schean "ewige Wiederkunft." Zarathustra had sighed: "Ach, der

Mensch kehrt wieder ! Der kleine Mensch kehrt ewig wieder !"31 And
this human fate that Zarathustra accepts-"amor fatin-the Angel re-
jects. "La vie," says ValCry in a 1930 entry, "s'oppose & I'intelligence
..
par sa forme pCriodique . L'intelligence est du type: une fois pour
toutes," and " 'L'esprit' (le plus esprit de l'esprit) repugne & la rCpCti-
tion" (C, XIV, 574 ; and XXVI, 291) .32
A passage from Milange, a variation on the Fallen Angel, reads :
Un esprit allait voir cesser son ttat; il devait tomber de l'eternitt dans le
Temps, s'incarner :
"Tu vas viwe !"
C'itait tnourir pour lui. Quel eff roi ! Descendre dans le Temps !
(0, I, 299)
One year after the ~~ilodrautze "Skmiramis," in 1935, ValCry wrote a
series of free-verse "Paraboles" ( 0 ,I, 197-201)33to accompany twelve
watercolors by Lulu Albert-Lasard, who had been one of Rilke's close
friends and painted one of the well-known portraits of him. With the
epigraph of the last three lines of "Die Flamingos" from Neue Gedichte,
ValCry discreetly commemorates his friendship with the German poet,
while the subtitle of the Rilke poem, "Jardin des Plantes," at the same
time serves to set the stage for "Paraboles" : the Garden of Eden, where
the Angels were as pure as the Beasts-before the advent of Man :
Quand il n'y avait encore que 1'Ange et l'Animal dans ce Jardin, . ..
Et quand Dieu, et les Choses, et les Anges et les Animaux
E t la Lumitre qui est Archange
Etaient tout ce qui Ctait,
CE F U T L'BRE DE PURETB.
(0,I, 198)
But this purity of paradise is destroyed by man, homo duplex, who
appears under the sign of sorrow and pain heretofore unknown in the
Garden: "I1 n'Ctait ANGE ni BETE; / Je le connus par une souf-
france sans pareille" (p. 199). The culminating apostrophe to the
Angels then sums up some of the angelic traits we have traced in the
oeuvre :
ANGE, disait en moi Celui dont je possedais si bien la prCsence,
ANGES, leur disait-il,
Merveilles tternelles de l'amour et de la lumiere,
31 Friedrich Nietzsche, Wrrke in Zwei Banden (Munich, 1967), I, p. 699.
32 Ned Bastet has analyzed the opposition of "esprit" to the cyclical operation
of nature of which it partakes in connection with Valery's late angelic figure, his
Faust in "Faust et le cvcle" in Entretiens sur Paul Vale'ry
- (The
. H a -m e and Paris.
1968), pp. 115-28.
33 Part of the text appeared, with very slight modifications, in Melange under
the title "Psaume devant la bete" (0, I, 356-57).
 VALfIRY A N D R I L K E

Actes purs
0 seulement connaissables par le desir
Par l'espoir, par l'orgueil, par l'amour,
P a r tout ce qui est
Prtsence d'absence,
Toutefois Vous m'ttes mysteres qui brillez
U n peu au-dessus du plus haut degrt de moi-mime .. .
( 0 ,I, 200)
From the early 1920s on, from the time marked by "Eupalinos," the
gravitational force arresting the Angel's "transcendance en puretCVis
human love, and the harmonization of Eros and the Angelic, without
compromising either, constitutes the dramatic conflict of much of
ValCry's mature work. It is the theme of the drafts of the "L'Ange et
l'amour" fragments, significantly never con~pletedand still among the
unpublished documents of ValCry's dossier "Ange" ("Cahier Gladiator
1920-1925") at the Bibliothique Nationale, a dossier which also con-
tains the successive drafts of ValCry's last poem.34"L'Ange et l'amour"
projects the Angel's descent-Fall-(in) to human love, a theme taken
up again in the Faust fragments that also remained "unfinished."
In 1941, Valkry published Btudes pour "Mon Faust," containing the
fragments of Lust, La Demoiselle de Cristal, and Le Solitaire ou les
wzalhdictions d'univers, Fkerie dramatique (0, 11, 276-403) ; and the
figure of Faust, which preoccupied the poet for many years as borne
out by Notebook entries as early as the 1920s (cf. Cahiers X and X I ) ,
is yet another mask of the angelic Self. The dramatic fra,ments of 1941
represent again the attempt to reconcile Eros and Nous by transforming
the one into the other in Lust, while in Le Solitaire the conflict be-
tween "ttre" and "connaitre" attains a dramatic climax. Whereas Lust,
as the name with its Goetl~eanallusion suggests, deals with Love, Le
Solitaire presents the confrontation of a Cartesian Faust and an an-
tagonist in whom we recognize one of his own extremes, a dehumanized
absurdity demonstrating Pascal's thought (No. 358) that "le malheur
veut que qui veut faire I'ange fait la bite."35
A Notebook entry contemporary with the Fausf fragments sets forth
the problem :
Faust 111.
Comment "l'esprit" voit l'acte d'amour ? ...
I1 faudrait dans Lust, un acc6s dans F. qui opCrit la transformation (en scene)
de l'etat Ersls B l'etat Nous avec A ) vue transcendante de l'action d'amour ;

34 I wish to express my special gratitude to Mme Florence de Lussy of the

BibliothPque Nationale for permitting me to examine the dossier "Ange" in con-
nection with the preparation of a more extensive study of Valtry's angelology.
35 See Kurt Weinberg's brilliant analysis of The Figure of Faust in Vale'ry and
Goethe : An Exegesis of "Mon Faust" (Princeton, N.J., 1976).
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

and the remainder of the notation suggests what the fourth Act of Lust
might have been, could it have been written :
Puis . . . (peut-Ctre?) retour-
En somrne, l'enchanternent rornpu-la sctne de Lebwohl-8 moins de la placer
aprts quelque faute de la Lust. Ni mSme faute mais qui brise 1'Cdifice cristallin-
tout harn~oniqz6e.( C, XXIV, 16)
Thus the final act would have been tragic, the downfall of the couple,
the failure of the attempted marriage of "esprit" and "corps" in the
mythopoetic figures of Faust and Lust. I t would, in fact, have been the
story of the Fall. Ned Bastet's critical presentation of a wealth of
"Textes inCdits : Quatrieme acte de 'Lust' "3%hows how deeply ValCry
was absorbed in the dramatic project of the transformation of "ordinary
love" into "le grand amour" that would reconcile the warring halves of
the Self, the "terrible angels" of the "RCvClation anagogique." And the
drafts confirm the defeat of Eros by Nous, the failure of the transforma-
tion of the one into the other, and the Pyrrhic victory of the Moi an-
g Q E i q ~ eI t. ~is~a Faust, "restored to the desperate and triumphant void"
of his angelic Moi pur who, at the end of Le Solitaire, refuses the ulti-
mate temptation, the enticements by the "FCes" to "start all over again"
-cyclical return-with life :
Moi qui sus l'ange vaincre et le dCrnon trahir,
J'en sais trop pour airner, j'en sais trop pour hair,
E t je suis excede d'Ctre une creature.
(0,11,402)
A great angelic text contemporary with the Faust fragments is the
tale of the Angel's visitation of the couple, "Elihu" and "la fille de
Chanaan," in the twenty-fourth Notebook (C, XXIV, 21-23) which
contains the many entries on "Faust 111." The biblical quality of the
text (in the B.ible Elihu is an interlocutor of Job, Job 32) again dis-
tances and mythologizes the Angel-Eros conflict which here, too, re-
mains unresolved, and the text in fragmentary form. But in this text,
Elihu defends human love against the flaming Angel's admonitions in
one of the poet's most beautiful apologies pro vita and the human
against the "esprit pur" imaged as the messenger of a biblical and
jealous god.
One of ValCry's last angelic figures is "le dernier Atlante," directly
linked in the Kotebooks to the angelic Self (cf. C, XXVII, 475), and
36 "Textes inCdits : Ouatritrne acte de 'Lust' " in Cahiers Paul Vale'rv I I : "Mes
thicitres" (Paris, 1977Kpp. 51-158.
37 Bastet., D. 106 : "L'acte I V aura eu Dour but d"6~uiser' la tentative de 1'8r6s
A

et d'aller jusqu'au bout de ses rnalCfices, avant de restituer Faust au vide dCsespCrC
et triornphant de la conscience qui a dCjouC tous les pieges de la vie, et le plus
p6rilleux de tous, 'le piege epouvantable de la tendresse.' "
 VALQRY A N D RILKE

appearing in the a.tlvre in tlie posthumously published prose sequence

L'lle de Xiplzos ( 0 11, 437-50) in the Histoires bvis6es. In Valkry's
version of the ancient myth of the sunken island, that utopia, under the
sign of the Sword, the angel's emblem par excellence, evokes an Eden
to whose inhabitants the wisest of humanity would be "mere children
counting on their fingers"; they are so infinitely superior to man that,
the poet suggests, we rnight better call the111 "anges ou dev~idieux"(0,
11,436).
Finally, all of these angel-figures conyerge in ValCrp's last poem, the
prose poem "L'Ange" ( 0 , I, 205-OG), completed two months before his
death, but whose drafts reach back over more than twenty year~.~"n
the figure who in his reflection in the fountain sees a weeping-human
-face, ValCry's Angel and Narcissus blend. But tlie Narcissus-Angel's
wholeness is broken, the dichotomy of "connaitre" and "ttre" now
imaged and accentuated in the juxtaposition of the Angel's "couronne
de la connaissance unitive" and the face of sorrow that bears it. And
while the limpid transparency of the one-"Ctincelant comme un dia-
d&meW--remainsinfinitely remote from the sad opacity of the other, the
tears-"une Tristesse en forme d'Homine"-remain incomprehensible
to the Angel :
0 mon etonnement, disalt-il, Tete charmante et triste, il y a donc autre chose
que la lumi&re?"
E t it s'zizterrogeait duns I'zcnivers de sa sltl~stanct.spirituelle nzerz~eilleusefrze~zt
pz~re,ozi toutes les idkes zivaient kgalenzeizt distanfes enfrr elles et de hi-nzdnze,
et duns ulze tellc perfection de lezw lzarnzonze et pronzptitztde de lezirs correspon-
dances, ~ L L ' O T ZeCt dit qdil ezit s'hzanoz~ir, et le systhze, htincelant conz?tze 1112
diadhrne, de l e w ndcessitk sinzultanhe subsister par soi s c ~ d~al m sa sublinze pltilzi-
tz~de.
E t pelzdtrlzt nuce kterniti, il ne cessa de colznaitre et de ne pas contprendve.
RIai 1945.
?j7hile in '\'alC.ry the Angel is absorbed by the 910; a~zgc'liqlleallnost
from the outset, in Rilke we deal with a pluralistic image of a poetic
universe in which "keine Ideologic restlos don~inierenliann."3Und
despite their importance in the later poetry, angels are relatively rare
in Rilke's earliest collections, where they are influenced and shaped,
moreover, by the various artistic traditions in which the poet ininiersed
himself to nurture his art.
The seven "Engellieder" of Miv zur F c i ~ vwritten
, in the 1890s and
thus contemporary with the waning of ValCry's Symbolist phase, stand
under a "Gebet" in which the persona releases the guardian angel of
3" have given an extensive reading of this poem in "Valiry's Broken Angel,"
forthcoming in Roiizanic Recriew.
39 Anthony Stepliens, A'acht, Mensch and Engel, Rilkes Gedichte an die ~ V a r h t
(Frankfurt, 1978), pp. 163, 252, et passim.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

his childhood so that both may grow." The modest cycle, marked by
the young poet's characteristic verbal virtuosity, thus already suggests
the motif of "besitzlose Liebe" which will later assume great signifi-
cance in this poetry where it will always be linked, directly or obliquely,
to the angel nexus. The one lyric and several prose angels of the
F1oren.m~T~gebz[cJz*~ reflect Iiilke's Italian experience and the influ-
ence of Renaissance art, while those of Das Bztch vofx ~nb'nchischela
Leben ( S W ,I , 263,269-70,286-87), in which the Angel already begins
to usurp the place of god, are inspired by the Russian venture. The
Wovpszuedcr Tagebzich contains lyric prose passages celebrating Jtt-
gendstil angels under the sign of V0geler,4~culminating in verse which
will be echoed in the ~Waricn-lebenof 1912, dedicated to that friend.
One of those early angels from a poem originally dedicated to Rilke's
young wife, and then reworked for Das B t ~ i zd er Bilder (1902) under
the title "Der Schauendej9'ismost significant. Here the Angel becomes
the poet's great "Gegenspieler," one of his major roles in the mature
poetry. This Angel, moreover, has now completely usurped the place
of god : Angel and Poet, though ivorlds apart, touch in art ;for through
the artist the finite reaches toward the Absolute, whose personification
is now no longer god but the Angel. And in the confrontation with the
Angel in which he is defeated, the Poet extracts his inspiration from
that infinitely greater force, as Jacob did his blessing:
Wen dieser Engel uberwaad,
welcher so oft aui Knrnpf verzichtet,
dcl- geht gerecht und aufgerichtet
und grol3 aus jener harten Hand,
die sich. \vie formend, an ihn schmiegte.
Die Siege laden ihn nicht ein.
Sein Wachstum ist, der Tief besiegte
von immer GroPjerem zu sein.
(SW, I, 460)
The biblical topos, which grows into one of the major themes of Rilkean
angelology, is celebrated here for the first time. Other angels of this
collection are similar to those of earlier ones, all of ~ v l ~ i cdevelop
h an
increasing remoteness between an obscurely-working god and his bright
messengers, thus moving toward the erentual assimilation of the former
by tlie latter.
Rainer Maria Rilke, SGmtZiclze TVerke, ed. Ernst Zinn (Frankfurt, 1955), I,
156. All quotations from Rilke's work will refer to this edition, unless otherwise

indicated, and be cited in the text as SW, followed by volume ancl page numbers.

4 1 Rainer Maria Rilke, Tagebiici?er atrs der Friihzeif (Frankfurt, 1973), pp.

12-120,esp. pp. 15, 18,28,83,94.

42 Rilke, I'agt?biiclter. pp. 273-74. See also Kurt Eugene Webb, R a i m r Jfaria
Ritke a d J ~ u e l t d s t i l(Chapel Hill, X.C., 1978), pp. 22 ff.
 VALXlRY A N D R I L K E

Q7ith Neue Gedickte (SW, I, 481-642) of 1907-08, Rilke's art and

angels enter a new phase, now under the sign of R ~ d i n The . ~ ~collec-
tion's first part contains "Der dlbaumgarten" in which the Angel fails
to come to the forsaken Christ, and "L'Ange du Meridien, Chartres,"
inspired by the cathedral angel that the poet had admired with the
sculptor.44 Both the Old Testament and the cathedral angels are in-
finitely beyond human concerns-beyond Time, beyond Christ's suffer-
ing even-and of that sublime indifference and inlpassibility that will
characterize the Duino angels. Thus also "Der Engel" who, should he
choose to visit man-his traditional function-would come, again, as
his ideal adversary to test him in a nocturnal struggle like, once more,
Jacob's. And this Angel, too, has replaced god, as his angelic hands
assume the re-creative function :
Sie [the Angel's hands] k5men denn
bei Nacht zu dir, dich ringender zu priifen,
und gingen wie Erziirnte durch das Haus
und griffen dich als ob sie dich erschiifen
und brachen dich aus deiner Form heraus.
(STV,I, 509)
The collection's "Anderer Teil" contains several angels, like the
traditional biblical figure of the "Trostung des Elija" and those of "Das
Jiingste Gericht," recalling the poet's earlier treatment of that pictur-
esque theme. "Die Versuchung," however, contains forbidding angels
entirely of Rilke's own invention, in a nightmarish vision possibly sug-
gested by Hieronymous Bosch's great triptych of "The Temptation of
Saint Anthony." In "Rosa Hortensie," echoing the earlier "Blaue Hor-
t e n ~ i e , "the
~ ~ flower's beautiful fleeting color is received into the in-
visible by invisible angels, a motif of great importance : the sublimation
of the most precious of our world to the angelic. The two remaining
angel poems both feature annunciatory angels, though "Don Juans Aus-
wahl," linked to the Kierkegaardian motifs of "besitzlose Liebe" and
unrequited l o v e r ~ , ~ ~ ~ afits
r d lthe
y tradition. In "Mohammets Beru-
fung," on the other hand, Rilke evokes the archangel Gabriel in one of
his memorable missions, and this most splendid of annunciatory angels
43 See Brigitte Bradley, R. M. Rilkes Neue Gedichte, ihr sykZisches Gefiige
(Bern and Munich, 1967), pp. 5-17.
44 See Rilke's letter to his wife relating that visit, in Briefe, I, 120-21.
45 Judith Ryan, in Neue Gedichte Uacschlag und Verwandlu+zg (Munich, 1972),
p. 28, reminds us that Rilke thought at one time of using these two as title poems
for the two parts of Neue Gediclzfe.
46For the influence of Kierkegaard on the poet's love mythology, which, as
noted earlier, is linked to the angel nexus, cf. Frederick G. T. Bridgham, Ruiner
Maria Rilke : Urbild und Verzicht (Stuttgart, 1975), esp. pp. 1-35, "Renuncia-
tion in Love : The Example of Kierkegaard."
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

so far recalls the poet's interest in Koranic a n g e l ~ l o g y The

. ~ ~ poem,
which we read as an allegory for the poet's consecration for his calling
through the Angel, demonstrates, moreover, Rilke's concept of the
"Umschlag," the sudden nliraculous change from one state into its
opposite-here the confused and frightened merchant's transformation
to prophet of the holy Word:
Der Engel aber, herrisch, wies und wies
ihm, was geschrieben stand auf seinem Blatte,
und gab nicht nach und wollte wieder : Lies.
Da las er : so, daB sich der Engel bog.
Und war schon einer, der gelesen hatte
und konnte und gehorchte und vollzog.
( S W , I, 638)
In the sketches and posthumously published poetry written from
1906 to 1909, the angels become gradually more and more remote from
their origin in traditional iconography and Scripture. We recall here a
cathedral cycle of August 1907, in whose first poem the poet sings a
hymn to the human heart and to the pain out of which the cathedral and
its rose window were created ; he prays that his own heart may endure
what surpasses it, even to the very angels :
es kiin+tenplotzlich, lautlos das vollenden
was wir, zu grol3 fiir uns, beginnen sehn,
und lachelnd, in der einen von den Blenden
alles, bis an die Engel, iiberstehn.
(SW, 11,351)
The emphasized "konnen" will become an important notion in the late
poetry and especially in the Elegies, vaguely reminiscent of ValCry's
"que peut un homme ?" But whereas in ValCry the "pouvoir angklique"
-a Teste's-refers almost exclusively to heightened intellectual vir-
tuality, in Rilke "konnen" has a wider and deeper meaning, including
that of leisten, of acconlplishing Dasein, existence itself, to both the
intellectual and emotional limits of human possibility, to where the
angels begin. The angels, like their broken statues in the cathedral of
Notre Dame, are man's ultimate projection of himself. In the cycle's
second poem, the poet says : "Fiihlst du nicht wie wir uns unbegrenzter
/ in dem allen immer wiederholen? / . . . diese Stiicke Engel, das sind
wir" (SW, 11, 351). In a fragment of 1909, the persona despairs of
the Angel's, rather than god's, intervention. How, he asks god, could
the Angel possibly come down to man witliout denying his angelic
essence ?
47 See the famous letter to Hulewicz many years later (1925) about the Angel
of the Elegies, inspired in part by "den Engelgestalten des Islam" (Brieje, 11,
484).
234
 VALBRY AND RILKE

Wie diirfte denn ein Engel, Herr, in dies

Vernachtete und Niezerteilte steigen :
Im Himmel wiirden alle auf ihn zeigen
und ihn verleugnen.
(SW, 11,372)
T h e poet has now totally inverted the traditional order of angels as
intermediaries between man and an inaccessible god, as the persona
freely confesses to god his despair of being worthy of the Angel's atten-
tion. These "Entwiirfe," then, show vividly how Rilke increasingly
diverges from the traditional angelology as lie develops his own.
The two long Requiems ( S W , I, 643-64) of 1908, which develop
Rilke's notion of "der eigene Tod," also contain angels. In commemo-
rating the young painter Paula Becker-Alodersohn, the poet projects
his overwhelming sorrow and pain at her untimely death to the angels ;
while in the poem for Kalckreuth, the young poet who had ended his
life by suicide, the poet-persona, reconciled, hears the other's angel
articulate the poetry of the departed new and gloriously.
A s the angels assume a progressively more significant role in Rilke's
poetry, we see them, contrary to Valkry's, remain distinctly separate
from the lyric Self that projects them. Only once does the poet-persona
identify with the angel, in the sketches of poems to Atarthe, where he
assumes the role of the angel revealing her radiance to that child of
misery ( S W , 11, 381-83).
But the angels are back in their heaven in the Marien-Leben ( S W ,
I, 665-81), written one year later (1912) at D ~ i n o This . ~ ~ cycle is
dominated by magnificent angels whose radiance outshines that of their
divine master; we recall that these poems were written mere days be-
fore the onset of the First Elegy with its shattering Azlftakt to the
Angels. Of the fifteen poems, taking us from Mary's birth to her death
and assumption, the most noteworthy is the "Verkiindigung," in which
the entire world seems to disappear, as it were, into the irradiating
glance uniting Mary and Gabriel :
aber dai3 er dicht,
der Engel, eines Jiinglings Angesicht
so zu ihr neigte ; daB sein Blick und der,
mit dern sie aufsah, so zusammenschlugen
als ware drauUen plotzlich alles leer
und, was %Iillionen schauten, trieben, trugen
.
hingedrangt in sie ; nur sie und er ; . .
dieses erschreckt. Und sie erschralien beide.
(pp. 669-70)
The intensity of the angelic glance as it meets that of the Chosen One
45 About the genesis of the Marien-Leben, cf. J. I?. Angelloz, Ruiner Maria
Rilke : Leben u+td W e r k (Zurich, 1955), p. 284.
C O M P A R A T IV E L I T E R A T U R E

annihilates the world about them and even frightens tlie blessed pair
themselves. What wonder, then, as tlie poet says in the First Elegy,
that if an angel, even a compassionate one, should take man unto his
heart, he would be destroyed by that radiant presence ?
A suppressed outcry to the great Angels is the broken opening chord
of the first of the Duineser Elegien (SW, I, 683-726), a hopeless,
shattering cry, for "Mrer, wenn ich schriee, 116rte mich denn aus der
Engel / Ordnungen?" Marie von Thurn und Taxis, to whom the
Elegies are dedicated, recalls the genesis of what is probably one of the
most famous lines of German poetry, as related to her by the poet.49
This most amazing record of poetic Diktat brings to mind ValCry's
"Les dieux, gracieusement, nous donnent pour rien tel premier vers ;
mais c'est i nous de faqonner le second, qui doit consonner avec I'autre,
et ne pas Are indigne de son ainC surnaturel" (0, I, 482). ValCry,
whose poetic technique has so frequently been contrasted wit11 that of
Rilke,60 describes this miraculous conception better than any other
fellow-poet again in a 1931 Notebook entry, entitled "SCsame," where
he writes : "Le commencement vrai d'un po?me . . . doit venir i I'auteur
comme une formule magique dont il ignore encore tout ce qu'elle lui
ouvrira. Car elle ouvre en effet-une demeure, une cave et un labyrinthe
qui lui Ctait intime et inconnu" (C, XV, 301).
"Who, if I cried, would hear me from the angels' / orders ?" opens
that intimate and unknown labyrinth that it will take the poet ten years
to explore and construct; and the entire structure is, from the outset,
dominated by the Angels :
Wer, wenn ich schriee, hijrte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen? und gesetzt selbst, es nahme
einer mich plotzlich ans Herz : ich verginge von seinem
stiirkeren Dasein. Denn das Schone ist nichts
als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen,
und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmzht,
uns zu zerstoren. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.
(P. 685)
The Angels have now become the inaccessible figures of the sacred and
noumenal; they are "terrible" like those of the Bible. But the Duino
Angels exceed the biblical messengers, as they have themselves become
the felos of a lyric voice speaking for modern man.51 Frank Wood sees
49 Marie von Thurn und Taxis Hohenlohe, Erinnerungen an Rainer Maria
Rilke (Munich, 1933), p. 41.
50 See the fine study by Priscilla Washburn Shaw, Rilke, Vale'ry and Yeats:
Tlze Dopnain of the Self (New Brunswick, N.J., 1964) ; and most recently, Maja
Goth, Rilke und Valtry : Aspekte ihrer Poetik (Munich, 1981). See also Judith
Ryan, "Creative Subjectivity in Rilke and Valkry," in CL, 25 (1973), 1-16.
5 1 See the Catholic theologian Romano Guardini, Rainer Maria Rilkes Deutung
des Daseins (1953; rpt. Munich, 1961), p. 29.
 VALBRY A N D R I L K E

in these angels "the ultimate court of appeal from experience, the sym-
bolic goal of the artist's striving," whose "frigid exclusiveness is ...
conditioned by the absolute existential vulnerability of man."52
The Second Elegy opens with an echo from the great angel opening
of the First: "jeder Engel ist schrecklich"; but now the poet's sup-
pressed cry has become praise of those "almost deadly birds of the
soul." Then the lyric voice nostalgically evokes an earlier age, when a
heavenly Father would send his messengers down to earth, with a remi-
niscence of the biblical episode of Tobias, in which Raphael himself
became the guardian angel and traveling companion of the youth on his
initiation journey: "lhrohin sind die Tage Tobiae, / da der Strahlend-
sten einer stand an der einfachen Haustiir ?" (p. 689). But those days
are past, for now the Angel's approach would kill us :
Trate der Erzengel jetzt, der gefahrliche, hinter den Sternen
eines Schrittes nur nieder und herwarts : hochauf-
schlagend erschlug uns das eigene Herz. W e r seid ihr?
(P.689)
This terrified interrogation is then answered in the second verse para-
graph in the most magnificent apostrophe to the Angels in all of Rilkean
-all of modern-poetry, which evokes Dionysius' heavenly hierarchies,
and the soaring baroque angels of a Tintoretto :
Fruhe Gegluckte, ihr Verwohnten der Schopfung,
Hohenzuge, morgenrotliche Grate
aller Erschaffung,-Pollen der bluhenden Gottheit,
Gelenke des Lichtes, Gange, Treppen, Throne,
Raume aus Wesen, Schilde aus Wonne, Tumulte
stiirmisch entziickten Gefiihls.

But all this swirling motion is then suddenly arrested, as the Angels
become mirrors drawing the beauty flowing from them back into them-
selves. I n emanating their own-not god's-radiance only to reabsorb
it into their own essence, the angels are the opposite of man, who
breathes himself out and away, his strength diminishing with each
breath : "Ach wir / atmen uns aus und dahin ; von Holzglut zu Holz-
glut / geben wir schwachern Geruch." But, asks the persona, would
the angels, perhaps-"as if by mistake9'-salvage some of our being
scattered out into the cosmos, as they retrieve "their o.cvn?" If we could
only become mingled with their features by the merest hint! But no,
we are entirely lost, and they do not notice us as, in a whirl, they return
to themselves. The Second Elegy stresses the impossibility of the
Angels' slightest concern with the human, as they are caught up in their
52 g Forms (New York, 1970), p. 151.
R a k e r Maria Rilke and the R i ~ of

237
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

whirling self-preoccupation and s e l f - r e a l i ~ a t i o nFrom

. ~ ~ the Duino win-
ter of 1912 also stems the opening section, the angel passage of the
Tenth Elegy, destined already then to become the final one.54 Elere the
aloof angels are finally concluered into consent, the poet, his mission
accomplished, singing praise to "consenting Angels" : "Dass ich der-
einst, an den? Ausgang der gritnmigen Einsicht, / Jubel und R u l ~ m
aufsinge zustimmenden Engeln" (p. 721). Duino gave Rilke the be-
ginning of his culminating work-but then the Angels disappeared.
Unable to continue the Elegies, Rilke went to Spain, and a Notebook
passage reveals not merely the profound effect of Toledo and E l Greco
but the formation of an Angel figure-that stream that flows through
both realms and the element that permeates the spiritual atmosphere
which includes both the living and the dead, the visible and the invisible
-which is not El Greco's but Rillre's own :
Nichts \vie Toledo, wenn man sich seinem EinfluB iiberlieae, vermdchte in
solchem Grade zur Darstellung des Ubersinnlichen auszubilden . . . Greco, ge-
trieben von den Verhaltnissen Toledos begann ein Himmelsinneres einzufiihren,
gleichsam oben himmlische Spiegelbilder dieser Welt zu entdecken . . . Der Engel
ist bei ihm nicht mehr anthropomorph wie das Tier in der Fabel, auch nicht das
ornamentale Geheimniszeichen des byzantischen Gottesstaates. Sein Wesen ist
flieaender, er [the angel] ist der FluB, der durch beide Reiche geht, ja, was das
Wasser auf Erden und in der Atmosphare ist, das ist der Engel in dem grosseren
Umkreis des Geistes, Bach, Thau, Tranke, Fontane des seelischen Daseins, Sieder-
schlag und Aufstieg.55

Finally, at Ronda, inspiration returned, not to complete the Elegies

but to write "Die Spanische Trilogie" and a group, if not a cycle, of
poems, "Die Gedichte an die Nacht." As the theme of the Night had
been linlred to the Angels in the First and Tenth Elegies, the angels
now play a major role in the Night poems. T h e most significant Ronda
poem, addressed "An den Engel," contrasts the angelic and the human
and culminates in a desperate cry to the Angel, again not to be heard,
but to be illuminated merely by his great radiance :
Starker, stiller, an den Rand gestellter
Leuchter, oben wird die Nacht genau.
W i r ver-geben uns in unerhellter
Ztigerung an deinem Unterbau .. .
Unser ist den Ausgang nicht zu wissen
aus dem drinnen irrlichen Bezirk,

53 See Ulrich Fiilleborn's and Manfred Engel's recent publication of drafts of

the beginning of the Second Elegy in Materialien zu Rainer Maria Rilkes "Duine-
ser Elegien" (Frankfurt, 1980), I , 56-58.
54 See Rilke's letter to Lou Andreas-Salami., written ten years later, in Briefe,
11,310-11.
55 Fiilleborn and Engel, pp. 79-80.
 VALBRY AND RILKE

du erscheinst auf unsern Hindernissen

und begluhst sie wie ein Hochgebirg .
Engel, klag ich, klag ich?
Doch wie ware denn die Klage mein?
Ach, ich schreie, mit zwei Hiilzern schlag ich
und ich meine nicht, gehort zu sein.
( S W ,I I , 4 8 )
W e hear something infinitely anguished in these lines ; for the lament
is no longer even that of a human voice, but that desperate beating "with
two pieces of wood" that "does not intend to be heard" anyhow. And as
angelic luminosity here magnifies human negativity, this Angel is,
again, man's ideal opposite.56 This Angel is, moreover, much closer to
those of the first Elegies than to those of some of the other Night poems,
in which we find a shift away from separation and remoteness toward
reciprocity between Angel and Self.57
This changed orientation becomes apparent in "Bestiirz mich, Mu-
sik" (SW, 11, 60-61)) and in the poems of the Night group completed
in Paris from 1913 to 1911, like "Atmete ich nicht aus Mitternachten"
(pp. 70-71)) where the persona turns from the Beloved to the Angels,
calling them to reap the hars-est, "dieses blaue Leinfeld," of his height-
ened state of being. Here the angels are barely disguised figures for the
Muse, for inspiration, in a poetological economy that transforms the
energy of Eros into Art, a phenomenon we frequently encounter in
ValCry. In "So, nun wird es doch der Engel sein," the Angel drinks
his sustenance from the poet's features, replacing woman in a mystic
consun~mationwith a strong erotic undercurrent :
So, nun wird es doch der Engel sein,
der aus meinen Zugen langsam trinkt . . .
Diirstendcr, wer hat dich hergewinkt ? .. .
Und ich fuhle fliefiend, wie dein Schaun
trocken war, und bin zu deinem Blute
so geneigt, daB ich die Augenbraun
dir, die reinen, vollig iiberflute.
(P. 71)
This imagery of flowing recalls the "FluB-Gott des Bluts," the Eros of
the Third Elegy
-. which was conceived at the same time as these Night
poems. In the following poem of the group, the persona again sends the
Beloved away, as the Angel is already "irresistibly approaching behind
56TThis figure, like the Duino Angels, has indeed become a metaphor for the
inexpressible, a notion developed in Karl Greifenstein's "Der Engel und die Di-
mension des Unsaglichen bei Rainer Maria Rilke," Diss. Ruprecht-Karls-Uni-
versitat 1949.
57 For a most lucid exegesis of "Die Gedichte an die Nacht," as well as their
"Entstehungsgeschichte," see Stephens.
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

the stars in the East." W e recall that this poetic theme of the unknown
Beloved and her rejection in favor of the Angel-the conflict between
Eros and Art, again reminiscent of Valkry-almost coincided with the
appearance of the Unknown Beloved, Magda von Hattingberg, in the
life of the poet who, like his persona, had to reject her for the Angel.68
The "inconceivable polarity of life and extreme work" is again reflected
in the sequence of "Gedichte fiir Lulu Albert-Lasard" (SW, 11, 217-
25) of 1914.
With the Fourth Elegy, written in Munich in two November days
of 1915, the angels reappear. In this most complex and most despairing
of the Duineser Elegien, created in the second war year, the principal
theme is again man's existential situation in a world in which he is not
at home, controlled by incomprehensible forces, imaged here with the
false dancer and then the marionette performing on the puppet stage.59
The persona, a solitary spectator, alone in the cold, forsaken theater
before the stage of his heart, would force an Angel down to play by the
sheer power of his persistence and at the cost of utter solitude. For only
if the Angel played these puppets would there be real action, the Hei-
deggerian "authentic" existence :
wenn mir zumut ist,
zu warten vor der Puppenbiihne, nein,
so vollig hinzuschaun, da13, um mein Schauen
am Ende aufzuwiegen, dort als Spieler
ein Engel hinmul3, der die Balge hochreifit.

Only the Angel could bring about that "Umschlag" from the un-
authentic to the authentic :
Engel und Puppe : dann ist endlich Schauspiel.
Dann kommt zusammen, was wir immerfort
entzwein, indem wir da sind. Dann entsteht
aus unsern Jahreszeiten erst der Umkreis
des ganzen Wandelns. Uber uns hiniiber
spielt dann der Engel.
(SW, 11,698-99)
The Angel szust (hinwzup) come-but will he? Will the U.t?zschlagto
salvation come about? Then the Fourth Elegy suddenly, in the same
line, returns to the theme of "die Sterbenden," the dying who are closer
to that unity that escapes us, and who, in their having crossed over from
this to the other side, understand how "unreal" our existence is : "Alles
58 See Rilke's letter of June 8, 1914, to Lou Andreas-SalomC for the effects and
the lesson of the "Benvenuta Erlebnis," in Briefe, I, 499-504.
69 See H. I?. Peters' summary of some of the highly divergent interpretations
of the poem in his Ruiner Maria Rilke: Masks and the Man (New York, 1960),
pp. 136 ff.
 V A L B R Y '4ND RILICE

ist nicht es selbst" ; existence is "unauthentic," the Existentialists would

say. And from the dying, we pass to the other extreme of life-child-
hood; for children, too, exist more authentically in their world, "when
behind the figures there was more / than merely past and before us not
the future." But that was merely brief, "the interval between world and
toy" of pure becoming. The themes of death and childhood then fuse in
the closing section with the "Kindertod / aus grauem Brot," recalling
that "gray gust of wind" from the empty stage above. W e can accept,
nay understand, murder and murderers, but the death of a child, "den
ganzen Tod, noch vov dem Leben so / sanft zu enthalten und nicht bos
zu sein, / ist unbeschreiblich." For once in these Elegies death finds no
acceptance but leaves the poet stunned. By now, Rilke's Europe is
plunged into senseless death and destruction, and it will be a long
while before the Angels come. Rilke had to wait for his for many years.
After the war, in 1921, Rilke found his last abode, Muzot, ancl the
poetry of ValCry. The following year the Dzcineser Elegien were at last
completed, in a great surge of inspiration within an incredibly short
time in February of 1922-when the poet also "received" the fifty-five
Sonette a22 Ovpheus.
The Fifth Elegy was composed last, on February 14, and Rilke then
placed it centrally into the already completed cycle, replacing a former
Fifth, "Gegen-strophen" (SIV, 11, 136-38). In the Fifth, the central
"Saltimbanque" Elegy, under the sign of Paris and Picasso, the elegiac
lament over the human condition takes us from the puppet stage to the
street acrobats, the "fugitive ones" syn~bolizingmodern man." These
acrobats perform a life routine requiring consummate skill, but become
mechanical and meaningless. Only their children are not yet completely
reduced to their roles in life, as we see from the young boy acrobat's
tears and smile. And here the lyric voice calls on the Angel, to gather
up that most ephemeral, but most precious, expression of the heart :
das LBcheln ...
Engel ! o nimms, pflucks, das kleinblutige Heilkraut.

60 Like the preceding elegy, the Fifth offers a wealth of suggestiveness, am-
biguity and complexities that have resulted in many different, and at times con-
flicting, interpretations, of which Franz J. Brecht discusses some fifteen in his
examination of the text, Schicizsal zcltd Auftrag des il/lelzsclzetz: Plzilosophische
Interpretatton au Raiwcr Maria Rilkcs Duineser Elegieti (Munich, 1919), pp. 137-
39. Two principal orientations emerge. One sees the homeless acrobats and their
fleeting and mechanical performance as an image of modern man; the other, one
of whose most significant representatives is Eudo C. Mason, takes the Saltim-
banques for a symbol of the poet. I agree, rather, with Jakob Steiner, who thinks
"da13 die Falzre+tden nicht die Kiinstler vertreten, ... sondern daB sie fur die
Menschen uberhaupt stehen und deswegen als Symbole des Menschen gesetzt
sind, weil an ihnen gewisse allgemeine Zuge des Alenschen besonders deutlich
hervortreten" ( R i l k e s Duineser Elegiej$, Bern and Munich, 1969, p. 103).
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Schaff eine Vase, verwahrs ! Stells unter jene, uns noch nicht
offenen Freuden ; in lieblicher Urne
riihms mit blumiger schwungiger Aufschrift : "Subrisio Saltat."
(SW, I, 703)
Like the heavenly voices of the holy women of "BCguignage" (SW, I,
535), like the glorious evanescent color of the "Rosa Hortensie" (p.
633), or the pain over a friend's early death (the Requiems), the child's
fleeting smile is projected to the angels with whom it may subsist and
survive our passing. The imagery suggests the redemptive value of the
smile, a "sn~all-blossomedhealing herb" for which the Angel must form
a special vessel. One feels that the Angel will indeed come to perform
the service of salvation.
From the scene of the Saltimbanques' routine on their worn-out car-
pet, their children condemned to perpetuate their parents' meaningless
existence, we continue to another Parisian "showplace," where the
milliner, significantly named Madame Lawort, winds and twists-as
the acrobats were wrung, bent, and twisted-her ruffles and ribbons,
which figure "the restless ways of the earth," that is, our aimless striv-
ing, to end eventually in a meaningless death. Then, in the poem's final
section the persona addresses the Angel, with the invocation of "ein [en]
Platz, den wir nicht wissen" which contrasts with that "Schauplatz" of
Madame Lamort which we know only too well :
Engel ? : E s ware ein Platz, den wir nicht wissen, und dorten,
auf unsaglichem Teppich, zeigten die Liebenden die's hier
bis zum Konnen nie bringen, ihre kiihnen
hohen Figuren des Herzschwungs,
ihre Tiirme aus Lust, ihre
langst, wo Boden nie war, nur a n einander
lehnenden Leitern, bebend,-und kcnntens,
vor den Zuschauern rings, unzahligen lautlosen Toten.
(P. 705)
This hypothetical subjunctively evoked showplace contrasts with the
"real" showplace of the big city, as reflected in Malte ; here, in an ideal
place, the acrobats' worn carpet would be replaced by an "indescrib-
able" one, and the mechanical, spiritually dead performers then~selves
would now become lovers performing "their daring high figures of the
heart's momentum, / their towers of desire." They would achieve that
"konnen" of Dasein we have discussed (see p. 234). Yet, this ideal and
expanded sphere of being is only invoked through the Angel, and we
do not know it ; it is a mythic realm, whose guiding figure is the mytho-
poetic Angel.
The Sixth Elegy, begun in 1912 at Duino and completed in February
1922, is devoted to another mythic figure, but a human one: the hero.
 VALBRY A N D RILKE

I t is perhaps for this reason that tlie poet does not invoke the Angels
in this poem which sings the praises of the exemplary human existence,
exemplified in the biblical Samson.
In the Seventh Elegy, a high song of praise-"Hiersein ist herrlich"
-completed in one day on February 7, the poet conveys his bequest to
posterity: the transformation of the fleeting visible into the lasting
invisible inner world, the "Weltinnenraum." Evoking the monuments
with which civilizations have covered the earth, he calls on the Angel as
ultimate authority and final court of appeal. The Angel is to bear wit-
ness to human greatness and preserve its most precious works from the
destruction of time-as he had "saved" a fleeting smile, or the heart's
pain, or beauty before :
Engel,
dir noch zeig ich es, da! in deinem Anschaun
steh es gerettet zuletzt, nun endlich auirecht.
Saulen, Pylone, der Sphinx. das strebende Stemmen,
grau aus vergehender Stadt oder aus fremder des Doms.
And the Angel must not merely save, but admire and praise their
greatness :
0 staune, Engel, denn w'r sinds,
wir, o du GroBer, erzahls, daB wir solches vermochten, mein Atem
reicht fiir die Riihmung nicht aus.
Thus here the Poet's and the Angel's functions almost fuse : to preserve
the fleeting in praise is the Poet's mission par excellence. Yet, in the
end, the poet-persona recalls that the deadly Angel cannot come ; his
invocation-imaged in the open hand and outstretched arm-becoming
both a calling and a warding off :
Glaub niclzt, da13 ich werbe.
EngeI, und wiirb ich dich auch ! Du kommst nicht. Denn mein
Anruf ist immer voll Hinweg ; wider so starke
Stromung kannst du nicht schreiten. Wie ein gestreckter
Arm ist mein Rufen. Und seine zum Greifen
oben offene Hand bleibt vor dir
offen, wie Abwehr und Warnung,
UnfaBlicher, weitauf.
(pp. 712-13)

This gesture of the outstretched arm, whose hand remains open and
does not grasp the incomprehensible (zinfakliclz) Angel, creates an
extraordinary tension between the Poet and that invisible power whose
presence sustains and yet would destroy him. The lines invoke the
image of a biblical prophet calling out to his terrible, invisible god.
The Eighth Elegy, which once more intones a lament over man's
tragic existence in a world where, as the poet had said in the First,
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

11
we are not very reliably at home," contains no angels.
The Ninth Elegy once more questions the meaning of human exis-
tence, and finds it in the world's need of us, who through our "sagen"
and naming give it permanence and meaning, "Sind wir vielleicht hier,
um zu sagen : Haus, / Briicke, Brunnen, Tor" (p. 718). But is not the
Poet the "Sagenc1e"-and "der Wagende," according to Heidegger-
above all others Thus we encounter here one of the great unresolved
questions in poetry since MallarmC : can the "explication Orphique de
la terre" really save Man, or only the Poet? With "sagen" then height-
ened to "riihmen," we pass, in fact, from the more generally human to
the distinctly poetic mission; and it is here that the Angel is invoked
again, for the poet must praise the things of this world to him, his
transcendental witness :
Preise dem Engel die Welt, nicht die unsagliche, ihnz

kannst du nicht grofitun mit herrlich Erfiihltem ; im Weltall

wo er fiihlender fiihlt, bist du ein Neuling. Drum zeig

ihm das Einfache, das, von Geschlecht zu Geschlechtern gestaltet,

als ein Unsriges lebt, neben der Hand und im Blick.

Sag ihm die Dinge. E r wird staunender stehn.

(P. 719)
The poem closes with the poet's affirmation of the mission conferred
upon him by the earth, the great message also of the Seventh Elegy, to
preserve the fleeting visible world in the inner, invisible one : "Erde,
ist es nicht dies, was du willst: unsichtbar / in uns erstel~n?"This
transformation is man's-the poet's-reason for being, and that greater
realm including both the visible and the invisible, the living and the
dead, the "double realm," is that of the Angel, who must sanction the
poetic transformation.
I have already discussed the great opening angel passage of the Tenth
Elegy, conceived and composed with the first poems of the cycle, an
elegiac cycle in which lament grows into affirmation and the terrible,
inaccessible Angel is at last brought to earth-an admiring sanction and
validation of the Poet's endeavor : the Orphic transformation and pres-
ervation of the world.
In the famous letter to his Polish translator Witold Hulewicz, writ-
ten in 1925, Rilke hesitates to "explain" the Duineser Elegien; "und
bin ich es, der den Elegien die richtige Erklarung geben darf? Sie
reichen unendlich iiber mich hinaus." But then he does give some sug-
gestions for reading the difficult texts. The Elegies affirm both life and
death, as death is but the other, "uns abgeltehrte Seite des Lebens" ; the
distinction between a "here" and a "beyond" is merely a limited and
false perspective : "Die wahre Lebensgestalt reicht durch beide Gebiete,
61 Martin Heidegger, H o l m e g e (Frankfurt, 1972), pp. 287-95.
244
 VALBRY A N D R I L K E

das Blut des grijl3ten Kreislaufs treibt durch beide: es gibt weder ein
Diesseits noch Jenseits, sondern die grol3e Einheit in der die uns iiber-
treffenden Wesen, die "Engel," zu Hause ~ i n d . " ~ ~
The great Duino Angels never returned in Rilke's remaining work
and are absent from the Sonette an Orplzeus, where the Angel is ab-
sorbed in the sonnets' guiding presence, Orpheus, mythic poet and god
of the "double realm," who, like the Angel, is at home among both the
living and the dead. And in Rilke's French poems, the angels are very
different, inspired by a different-foreign-language.
Angels, then, permeate the entire poetic cosmos of both ValCry and
Rilke ; in both poets, these dominant symbolic figures reach their most
imposing proportions in their creators' culminating work-a culmina-
tion that for Rilke, according to the poet, could not have come about
without the ValCryan encounter. Yet we are struck by the divergence
of these angels. Whereas in ValCry the Angel becomes progressively
internalized and absorbed into the "Moi angklique," in Rilke the figure
remains distinct from the lyric Self in order to serve as its ideal Op-
posite and "Gegenspieler," like the Angel of Jacob. ValCry, who tried
to assimilate the angelic into his human psyche, remained, paradoxically
but also logically, essentially dualistic to the end, as figured in his last
poem's broken Angel. Rilke, on the other hand, declined to force the
lyric Self and the Angel into an impossible union, thus preserving the
integrity of each. The Rilkean universe attains, nevertheless, an ideal-
mythopoetic-unity in the "Weltinnenraum" and the "double realm,"
the Angel's and the Poet's, where death is but "the other side of life"
and the underlying configuration is the sphere. When in Rilke Angel
and Poet do blend, both are assimilated into a new mythopoetic figure :
Orpheus.
The poets' diametrically opposed existential, ontological stances
shaped their Angels and the textual cosmoses from which they emerge
-into angelic fragments projected unto various personas in ValCry,
poet of a textual universe largely made up of fragments ; into the in-
accessible figures of the noumenal in Rilke, vitally essential and yet pro-
foundly threatening to the persona of the poet of closed cycles--even
to that of the Elegies at last. In Rilke the Angels remain, as they began,
iconic-the early Jugendstil figures, the many biblical angels and those
inspired by art, finally evolving into the no longer imageable but never-
theless whole and "terrible" Angels of the Duineser Elegien. In ValCry,
the Angel, after the early Symbolist incarnations, and aside from such
rare biblical messengers as those of "Palme" or the tale of "Elihu et
la fille de Chanaan," subsists as ideal intellectual aspiration, as the
62 Rilke, Briefe, 11,480-81.

245
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

unique all-seeing unseen "regard," influenced by Thomistic angelology.

Thus, a Teste's conceptual configuration of the "homme de verre," or
the related "tCte rkfringente" of the Notebooks' ego scriptor, and finally
Narcissus' "diademe spirituel," or the "couronne de la connaissance
unitive" of the last poem.
The Angels also reflect, of course, their creators' basic-and fre-
quently diametrically opposed-attitudes as poets : ValCry utilized his
work as a means, for the sake of the Moi that had also absorbed the
Angel ; Rilke, on the contrary, surrendered himself wholly to his work,
immolating himself for it and calling on the Angel to witness that
sacrifice and bless it in fruition.
But in both poets we find the conflict of Eros and Art, love-life-
and artistic creativity, associated with the Angel nexus, an association
which reveals one of the Angel's most important roles : that of the Muse
who, paradoxically protective and cruel, assures the realization of the
poet's vocation. Thus, even secularized, these modern Angels are both
messengers of "the divine calling" and guardians of "the religious life,"
ever threatened by the demands and the temptations of the other, "or-
dinary," existence. And whether the Angel comes from deep within-
Valkry--or from above-Rilke-is a mere matter of perspective.
I n ValCry, where the Angel was almost from the beginning (1892)
the symbolic image of the intellectual Self-whether analytic or poetic
-victorious over the affective and the sensual and the person (al), the
Angel is threatened only by human love; and the impossible harmo-
nizing of Eros and Angel dominates most of the late work. Its fragmen-
tary, "unfinished" quality, moreover, suggests that the conflict re-
mained unresolved. The tension between life, love, and art, his poetic
mission, shaped Rilke's entire existence ; and it is most poignantly ob-
jectified in the "Gedichte an die Nacht" whose Angels defeat the Be-
loved. The theme of deceived love and defeated lovers haunts the
ValCryan Narcissus fragments and Rilke's Elegies, which celebrate the
victory of the Angels not merely thematically but by their very exis-
tence.
And whether the culminating Rillcean and ValCryan Angels signal
their creators' victory or defeat-tears of rapture (Tenth Elegy), tears
of sorrow ("L'Ange")-is, again, a mere matter of personal and tem-
poral perspective; for what remains, after all, for survival, for these
texts' posterity of readers, is the lasting poetry of Man's agon with the
Angels.
Grand Valley State Colleges