In his Poems to Night, as elsewhere, Rilke is not philosophizing per se, but loosing strands of thought and ideas that ebb and flow and finally affix to the vertebrae of his lyricism, gifted to us as images; however, this poet studiously eschews any final declaration, any coherent position. Neither is Rilke a poet who offers an absolute poetry, something visibly constructed from a purely metaphysical design. Instead of a system or framework there is only a noble bid for transcendence beyond a finite reality through fluid and pliable poetic utterance, and the arcane aura, the almost organic indecipherability that seems to cloak the Poems to Night, serves to underline this. But the Poems to Night do not only possess a spiritual linkage to the Duino Elegies: it can also be argued that they look backwards, first to the existential desolation of Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, 1910) and still further to the presence of the angel in Das Stundenbuch (The Book of Hours, 1905).
As Anthony Stephens suggests in his Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Gedichte an die Nacht”: An Essay in Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 1972), the period of the Poems to Night is principally one of crisis for their author. Stephens explains that Rilke’s journey to Spain at the end of 1912 had initially appeared to provide the inspiration and energy he needed to make a dash for the summit of the Elegies, begun earlier that same year; but for reasons which are unclear there was a collapse in confidence, a breaking of the spell, and by the time Rilke wrote the first of the Poems to Night in Ronda in the new year of 1913, he was dispiritedly confined to base camp and a sense of dislocation and despair had set in. Stephens explains that most of the subsequent poems were written in Paris, however: “The city itself does not figure in the poems. Rather, it becomes a place of isolation, a kind of no-man’s-land in which the relation of self to world is explored without the rich allusiveness and décor of the Duino Elegies and Die Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus). There is the ‘Ich’, the night, the angel, the ‘Geliebte’ (The Beloved) and very little else.” Stephens posits that the period of the Poems to Night ends when Rilke met Magda von Hattingberg, or, as she was known to him, Benvenuta, early in 1914. In the poems to Benvenuta, Rilke seems consciously to reject the atmosphere of those of the previous year, and yet the darker material in the essay Puppen (Dolls), written in February 1914, tells a different story. The precise nature of Rilke’s creative configuration in this period remains contradictory and elusive. For example, the poem “Wendung” (“Turning Point”), written in June 1914, has been seized on as proof that Rilke was announcing a new beginning, but this may well be premature. Unfortunately, the sudden trauma of the war three months later means we will never know whether Rilke would have exploited this new beginning, celebrated in that poem and in his more upbeat letters to Benvenuta, or not. What cannot be doubted is that Rilke’s personal crisis was extenuated and compounded by the outbreak of hostilities in August 1914. Like many European writers that August, such as his friend Stefan Zweig adrift in Belgium, Rilke was trapped in Bavaria as the once-fluid borders rapidly solidified and he was unable to return to France. Paris and his possessions were out of reach and Rilke relocated to Munich, leaving everything behind in the French capital, including valuable manuscripts and books. In September 1915 he was horrified to learn that they had been sold and dispersed. The psychic strain he suffered in this period is manifest in his correspondence of the time, as well as in the few short texts he dedicated to the war. Yet even in 1915, as the destructive scale of the conflict sank in, Rilke managed to compose the fourth elegy and gamely sought to restore the creative impetus of 1913. This period of disorientation, self-doubt and incertitude lies behind the presentation of the Poems to Night to Kassner, as Rilke seeks to reassure a long-standing friend of the continuation of his creative endeavour even amidst the protracted periods of silence and inactivity, the brutal disconnection within the European family as nationalist jingoism strangled pluralism and tolerance. The metamorphosis Rilke regarded as necessary to extricate himself from this depressing period of limited cultural interaction and inner stagnation is famously elucidated in the ninth elegy, “What, if not transformation, is your deepest purpose.”
With the Poems to Night Rilke offered Kassner a provisory cycle of poems whose mesmerizing sublimity, lyrical reach and spiritual complexity seem to point to the aspiration for a new thematic collection on the lines of The Book of Hours or Das Buch von der Armut und vom Tode (The Book of Poverty and Death, 1905). The presence of night had haunted the poet since his earliest experience of Paris, the period of the Neue Gedichte (New Poems, 1907) and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and was still vital during Rilke’s final months in the Valais, as can be seen in the second part of this collection. Rilke’s work has a clear antecedent in that of Hölderlin, but also draws on Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night, 1800) by Novalis, that most mystical of German Romantic poets. In these six prose poems interspersed with verse, Novalis celebrates night as a means to gain entry to a higher realm in the presence of God. But although Rilke’s own hymns to night evoke his forebear, it is important to remember that Rilke is a poet writing in the era of modernism, only a year before
