Poems to Night

the most murderous war in history swept away a generation and already God had been declared extinct, or at least absent without leave. Rilke treats night as the ultimate terrain for self-becoming, or rather self-securing. The vastness and unknowable nature of night is placed against the individual’s finiteness, where the self is constantly threatened with losing purchase on that greater being which binds us as humanity. We underestimate the spiritual governance of night at our peril. However, other factors come into play: the darker hue of Rilke’s poetic material was also certainly influenced by his recent peregrinations in Spain. Rilke set off to explore the historic locations of Spain in the hope of bridging the impasse in his creative inspiration, but the encounter with a strange land only served to increase his sense of alienation; “for every journey, above all one through Spain, demands a certain inner equilibrium, but at every moment the world breaks in on me, into my very blood, and all around is strangeness, an unrelenting strangeness.” Rilke’s willed immersion in its turbulent history and dark legends, his close readings of the Spanish mystics as well as the crucial encounter with the Koran, bled into the poems and fused into the arcane boundless depths of night. In Ronda, a place he had never even heard of and visited on a whim, he finally achieved the balance he sought and began to write; the result was the first of the Poems to Night, in terms of chronology, the so-called “Spanish Trilogy”, created between December 1912 and January 1913, whose Part I begins, “Out of this cloud, see: the one that so wildly obscures”.

Unlike the grander, more declarative Elegies, the Poems to Night tend hypnotically to reiterate a symbolic theme, a single meditation, through variant images around the mystery of being and the sense of man becoming exposed to the higher lessons of this mystery, and his self-becoming enabled through mastery of the resulting space. Night appears in manifold guises as this space expressly reserved for transcendence, as a force of nature, as helper to man, a guide, a seer. Night itself becomes the visionary from history:

Does the night not blow cool,

splendidly distant,

moving across the centuries.

But night is also threatened by humankind, as here in the opening poem:

And night has withdrawn into the rooms

like a wounded beast, in pain through us.

The Poems to Night begin to feel like something closer to an incantation, with its endless invocation of space, angel, stars, mouth, moon… images reconstituting, overlapping and morphing. The German word for face, Gesicht, is most prominent but slips in and out of various meanings, sometimes seeming closer to “features” and at other times “face”, a restless equivocation which Rilke appears to have encouraged throughout. Klaus E. Bohnenkamp, editor of the most recent German edition of Gedichte an die Nacht (Insel Verlag, 2016), sees the angel as bridge between the self and night’s cosmic enclosure: “In the Poems to Night the angel acts as an anthropomorphic figure, link and mediator between human, night and world space.” But perhaps the real mediator between self and night is the poem itself, as noted by Charlie Louth in his Rilke: The Life of the Work (Oxford University Press, 2020). Of the poem “Overflowing skies of squandered stars” he interestingly suggests: “The poem is a membrane between the self and the night, a tentative contour or interface which in trying to make out a possible relation, in seeking to situate our place in the world, creates not a ‘revelation of being’, but an ‘aperture upon being’.” Infinite as the night and stars, the desire of man and of the shadowing angel travel in constant flux, moving towards and away from one another, in perpetual momentum, each serving to shape their role in the mystery of the unknown.

Night has a long history of being commonly ascribed to states of religious or mystical consciousness, yet it exists right there before us, making its presence known with unswerving reliability, and for Rilke it represents a celestial gateway or enacting space between inner and outer reality, or the enclosure within which the self may, if courageous enough, extend from the earthly. As mentioned previously, the idea of night as space for transcendence can be traced back to The Book of Hours as a state of inwardness around man’s proximity to God, or to Das Buch der Bilder (The Book of Images, 1906), where night is exulted as the location or the moment when a sublime connection between the self and the external world is forged. But time has elapsed between these earlier collections and the period of the Elegies; Rilke has experienced Paris, the modern metropolis, and written his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and there is a radical shift in his vision of his own existence, his attitude towards God and the objective world. Rilke is not writing in the period of Romanticism or on the back of it: his demanding master is always a modern consciousness. Having said this, we cannot know the extent to which the poet’s own life course and its mental challenges infected the imagery of the Poems to Night, as Anthony Stephens affirms: “For by and large we simply lack precise knowledge of what correspondences or differences there may be between the poems. We cannot determine to what extent a poem such as ‘The Great Night’ may be a factual record of a single ‘existential moment’, whether it is an amalgam of a large number of different personal experiences or to what degree any actual experience may have been modified by the poetic imagination to produce what we encounter in the poem.”*

Yet what remains undeniable in this tantalizing web of confusion and enigma is that something significant dwells here, something of permanence, a clear sense of the sacred hovers palpably over these poems whatever their connective tissue, Rilke’s personal trials and the outflow from previous works. To seek consistency and reinforcement of a theme in Rilke’s poetic oeuvre is to attempt