place into poetry : time and space in rilke's neue gedichte

Place into Poetry

Time and Space in Rilke’s Neue Gedichte

Helen Bridge, University of Exeter

The tension between referentiality and hermeticism inherent inRilke’s Neue Gedichte has produced a divide in the criticalliterature, where either one pole or the other tends to be privileged.Studies of the relationship between Neue Gedichte and space eitherread the poems biographically in relation to real places, orconcentrate on the classic Dinggedichte, showing how thesetransform objects into self-contained patterns of motion. Thisarticle argues instead that the references to places in Neue Gedichtereinforce the ambivalence between referentiality and hermeticism.Close comparative readings of three poems which are neitherobvious examples of the Dinggedicht nor exercises in visualperception or ‘sachliches Sagen’ – ‘Der Turm’, ‘VenezianischerMorgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ – demonstrate Rilke’sconcern with the relationship between real space and aestheticspace, and with the nature of poetic ‘space’, given the temporalnature of language. It is shown how the poems both give space atemporal dimension and transform temporal processes intoaesthetic space. Beyond Rilke’s own concern with learning moreproductive ways of seeing, vision plays an important aesthetic rolein making it possible to convey space as a temporal process.

The relationship between time and space was central to Rilke’s aesthetic

concerns during the period in which he wrote the Neue Gedichte. In a letter

of 8 August 1903 to Lou Andreas-Salome he describes Rodin’s sculpture as

a process of rescuing beauty from the transience of time and transforming

it into the permanence and security of space:

Rodin […] sah besser als irgendeiner, daß alle Schonheit an Menschen undThieren und Dingen gefahrdet ist durch Verhaltnisse und Zeit, daß sie einAugenblick ist, eine Jugend die in allen Altern kommt und geht, aber nichtdauert. […] Er wollte daß sie sei und sah seine Aufgabe darin, Dinge (dennDinge dauerten) in die weniger bedrohte, ruhigere und ewigere Welt des Raumeszu passen;1

Orbis Litterarum 61:4 263–290, 2006Printed in Singapore. All rights reserved

While a poem may be said to have the same effect in transforming a

transient phenomenon into a permanent form, it is more problematic to

define this overcoming of time as a transformation into space. The

question arises as to what kind of space can be created by an art form

whose medium is traditionally regarded as a temporal one. As Manfred

Engel and Ulrich Fulleborn have noted, the striving of the poems in Neue

Gedichte towards spatial form, in combination with their inevitable

temporality as language, provides the basis of Rilke’s poetological solution

at this stage in his career. Rilke emphasizes the tension ‘zwischen dem

innersprachlichen Prozeß des Gedichts als einem Zeitphanomen und dem

auf raumliche Konturierung und ‘‘Dingwerdung’’ zielenden Gestaltungs-

willen’, in order then to attempt to create a balance between the temporal

and spatial dimensions.2

This article will examine the forms that this relationship between time

and space takes in three poems which do not easily fit the aesthetic

paradigms often used to understand the Neue Gedichte. ‘Der Turm’,

‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ are not classic

examples of the Dinggedicht; nor are they exercises in visual perception or

‘sachliches Sagen’, though each does involve vision. By examining poems

that exemplify particularly clearly the tensions within the Neue Gedichte,

this article will highlight the variety of ways in which the poems of the two

volumes explore solutions to the problem of representing and constructing

space within the temporal medium of language. In some respects ‘Der

Turm’ and the two Venice poems represent opposite ends of a spectrum of

poetic possibilities in Neue Gedichte. While the former is unusual for its

overt focus on a subjective experience of space, the latter are unusual

because of the marginality of any subjective perspective. Through close

readings of these poems, I shall suggest that both the Dingasthetik and the

interest in seeing and the visual are facets of a broader concern with space

which encompasses both the referential relationship to the spaces of reality

and the construction of poetic space. Criticism on the Neue Gedichte, as on

Rilke’s other works, has been dominated by the poet’s own aesthetic

categories and terminology.3 The poems’ significance in the context of

literary modernism derives from the more general questions that they raise

about the relationship between real space and aesthetic space, and about

the nature of poetic space, and the solutions that they offer to these

problems.

264 Helen Bridge

The Neue Gedichte are frequently read in relation to a Dingpoetik

derived from the aesthetic principles espoused in Rilke’s writings on

Rodin’s sculpture. Alternatively, or often simultaneously, the two volumes

of poetry are approached as reflections on, and exercises in, seeing;

attempts at a ‘sachliches Sagen’ based on precise and unprejudiced visual

perception, such as Rilke admired in Cezanne’s paintings and outlined in

his ‘Briefe uber Cezanne’. There is clearly some overlap between these two

ideas: sculpture, after all, is a visual art, and Rilke saw both his time with

Rodin at Meudon and his study of Cezanne’s work as schoolings in visual

perception. However, the tension between the two models has often been

overlooked, as has the fact that, taken together, they embody an

ambivalence which is at the heart of the Neue Gedichte. While the

Dingasthetik outlined in the monograph and lecture on Rodin emphasizes

the autonomy and self-containment of the art object, as well as – rather

surprisingly, in the case of Rodin’s sculptures – insisting on its non-

referential quality,4 learning to see and practising ‘sachliches Sagen’ imply

a strong connection between art and reality. Engel and Fulleborn regard

the Neue Gedichte as spanning the ‘Gegensatz zwischen der Symbolik und

zum Teil handfesten Allegorik Rodinscher Provenienz, die noch der

Jahrhundertwende zugehoren, und der nicht mehr symbolischen Formen-

und Farbensprache Cezannes, mit der die Geschichte der modernen Kunst

anhebt’. These critics see the unifying basis of these two poles in the fact

‘daß Rilke durchgehend seinen Ausgangspunkt bei einer gegenstandlich

aufgefaßten Welt, ihrem reichen Vorrat an ‘‘Dingen’’, nimmt’.5 In fact, this

basis itself – which needs to be seen in conjunction with the autonomy that

Rilke persistently claims for the finished art object – manifests the

ambivalence I have mentioned: the tension between referentiality and

hermeticism runs through all Rilke’s reflections on the visual arts – and

consequently also his own poetics and poetic practice – between 1902

and 1908.6

Criticism on the Neue Gedichte tends to privilege either the referentiality

of the poems or their hermetic quality. The predominance in critical studies

of analyses of those poems which take as their subject matter relatively

self-contained objects indicates that the term Dinggedicht has frequently

been understood (whether this assumption is explicitly stated or not) as

referring primarily to the object represented by the poem. At the other end

of the spectrum, critics have attempted to emancipate the poems

265Place into Poetry: Rilke’s Neue Gedichte

completely from their referential relationship to real space, and to locate

their significance and value in abstract shapes constructed in poetic space.7

While the first approach reduces the variety within the Neue Gedichte to

one kind of subject matter, the second is perhaps even more reductive,

since it risks regarding all the poems as interchangeable examples of a

single poetic strategy.

This critical divide is the result of the ambivalence within Rilke’s poetics

and the poems themselves. As Hartmut Engelhardt has pointed out,

Rilke’s conception of Rodin’s artistic practice as the creation of art objects

which exist autonomously and are not bound by their relationship to the

real objects or people that inspired them becomes problematic when

applied to the practice of a poet. Whereas in the case of Rodin’s work the

word Ding can apply both to the original model and to the sculpture, since

representation and form in sculpture are identical, poetry’s medium is of a

different order to spatial reality, so that it is unclear whether the Ding in a

Dinggedicht is the object represented or the poem as an aesthetic form: ‘die

stillschweigende Ubereinkunft, der Dichter forme wie der Plastiker, laßt

Ding als Sujet des Gedichts und Ding als Gedicht selbst ineinanderspie-

len’.8 Engelhardt sees this ambivalence negatively, and it is true that

Rilke’s quest to conceive of his own art by analogy with Rodin’s involved a

certain amount of anguished self-delusion.9 Yet the conception of writing

a poem as the creation of a physical, spatial object which is at once a

representation and an autonomous construction, can equally be seen as a

highly successful strategy which enabled Rilke to move beyond the poetics

of his early works and resulted in a collection of poems which took

German poetry in new directions. By the time he encountered Cezanne’s

work in autumn 1907, the tension between representation and material

form was at the centre of Rilke’s attention. It is precisely the balance in

Cezanne’s paintings between depicting recognizable objects and construct-

ing abstract patterns of colours on a two-dimensional surface which

fascinates him. Like these paintings, which mark the threshold between

traditional representational art and modern abstraction, the Neue Gedichte

move in the direction of hermeticism, but without leaving reality behind.

The idea of art as a process of transformation, in which the term Ding is

used to designate both the real object which is transformed and the

resulting aesthetic form, expresses the ambivalence inherent in Rilke’s

poetics of this period. This tension, at times the source of contradictions in

266 Helen Bridge

the writings on Rodin, is reconciled to some degree by the idea of balance

between reality and autonomous artistic form which Rilke develops

through his engagement with Cezanne. As he comments on the portrait of

Madame Cezanne in a red armchair:

so sehr sorgt jede [Stelle] in ihrer Weise fur das Gleichgewicht und stellt es her:wie das ganze Bild schließlich die Wirklichkeit im Gleichgewicht halt. Denn sagtman, es ist ein roter Fauteuil (und es ist der erste und endgultigste rote Fauteuilaller Malerei): so ist er es doch nur, weil er eine erfahrene Farbensummegebunden in sich hat, die, wie immer sie auch sein mag, ihn im Rot bestarkt undbestatigt. Er ist, um auf die Hohe seines Ausdrucks zu kommen, um das leichteBildnis herum ganz stark gemalt, daß etwas wie eine Wachsschicht entsteht; unddoch hat die Farbe kein Ubergewicht uber den Gegenstand, der so vollkommenin seine malerischen Aquivalente ubersetzt erscheint, daß, so sehr er erreicht undgegeben ist, doch andererseits auch wieder seine burgerliche Realitat an einendgultiges Bild-Dasein alle Schwere verliert.10

Two different kinds of critical study have been concerned with the

relationship between the Neue Gedichte and space. First, the connections

between the poems and real spaces – places – have been examined.

‘Nachtliche Fahrt’, for instance, is frequently considered in the context of

studies of Rilke’s relationship to Russia.11 More broadly, the biographical

connection between the collection as a whole and Rilke’s experience of the

modern city in the form of Paris is widely acknowledged.12 While critical

studies of the influence of actual places on the poems tend either to be

strongly biographical in orientation or to read selected poems in the

context of discourses connected with a particular place, the second kind of

study examines the role of space, in a more abstract sense, within the

poems themselves. The most detailed study of this kind concerned

specifically with space in Rilke’s poetry is Richard Jayne’s monograph of

1972. Like many other commentators, Jayne concentrates on the classic

Dinggedichte, those poems that represent objects and their movements in

space. He analyses ‘Der Panther’, ‘Das Karussell’, ‘Spanische Tanzerin’,

‘Schlangen-Beschworung’, ‘Der Ball’ and the Buddha poems, showing how

each poem transposes its object out of a concrete physical context and into

abstract patterns of motion and repose which open up symbolic dimen-

sions, connecting inner and external reality.13 Selecting only poems of this

kind for analysis makes it easy to reduce the Neue Gedichte to the

Dingasthetik developed in the writings on Rodin. Like a Rodin sculpture

which, according to Rilke, occupies its own space, separated from ordinary


reality, and unites within itself stability and constant, self-contained

motion,14 poems such as ‘Der Panther’, ‘Das Karussell’ and ‘Der Ball’

present their objects as self-contained patterns of motion which seem to

exist outside real space. In contrast with Das Stunden-Buch in its cyclical

unity, the Neue Gedichte can thus be seen as a collection of independent

aesthetic objects which, like sculptures or other artefacts in a gallery or

museum, are on display alongside each other, removed from any context in

real time and space.

‘Der Turm’, ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ are

amongst the many poems in Neue Gedichte that refer, either in the title or

– more usually – in a subtitle, to a place. In a recent analysis of ‘Der

Turm’, Engel has drawn attention to the ‘Dialektik von Ge-

genstandsbezug und Abstraktion’ produced by the generic title which is

given specificity by the subtitle.15 This dialectic is characteristic of all the

poems which employ locative subtitles in this way: the abstraction from

real time and space inherent in the Dingasthetik is counteracted, in poems

like ‘Der Panther’ and ‘Romische Fontane’, by this connection of the

subject matter to specific locations. These subtitles have occasionally

given rise to a quest to identify the original object which inspired a

particular poem,16 but have more commonly been overlooked in readings

of the poems, or dismissed in the light of evidence suggesting an

alternative form of inspiration.17 With the exception of Engel’s comment,

the tensions which they introduce into the poems – between the abstract

and the concrete, the generic and the specific – have received little critical

consideration. The effect of the subtitles is to reinforce the ambivalence

in the poems between referentiality and hermeticism. On the one hand

they evoke an original experience of reality which has been transformed

into the poem; on the other, they allow the poem to be regarded as a self-

contained art object comparable to a painting or museum artefact which

is labelled with a place.18

The positioning of ‘Der Turm’ and the two Venice poems in cycles of

poems concerned with Flanders and Venice respectively gives a special

prominence to their association with a place, as well as diminishing their

self-containment as individual poems. Both the Belgium cycle of poems

and those at the heart of the Venice sequence (‘Venezianischer Morgen’,

‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ and ‘San Marco’) were written in Paris, the former

between 18 and 21 July 1907, almost exactly a year after Rilke’s trip to

268 Helen Bridge

Flanders, and the latter in early summer 1908, drawing on Rilke’s most

recent visit to Venice in November 1907. This retrospective treatment of a

place he had experienced is typical of Rilke’s way of working. Despite the

time lapse between the original experience and a poem’s genesis, many of

the poems that name places in their subtitles create an impression of

immediacy. As Judith Ryan has noted, the idea that the poems were

created ‘sur le motif’ was one of the myths about Neue Gedichte that Rilke

was keen to uphold.19 However, even though the processes of memory

involved in writing about a place retrospectively are not made apparent in

the poems themselves, their importance as part of a poetological strategy

anticipates the more explicit role that memory plays in Rilke’s later

understanding of space. Beda Allemann was the first to recognize that the

concept of ‘Weltinnenraum’ has a temporal dimension, that it exists only

‘als erinnerter, aus dem Vergangenen vergegenwartigter Raum’.20 More

recently, Manfred Koch, emphasizing the continuity between Neue

Gedichte and the late work, has pointed out that Rilke’s programme of

‘sachliches Sagen’ operates ‘unter der Intention der Vergegenwartigung

eines Abwesenden’, and so anticipates the later ‘Weltinnenraum’ idea.21 In

the ‘Briefe uber Cezanne’, Rilke’s attempts to convey the visual space of

individual paintings are simultaneously exercises in remembering what he

has seen and giving it a new, linguistic form of presence.22 His

transformation of impressions of place into poems in Neue Gedichte is

similarly mediated through the internal space of memory.

There are strong thematic parallels between the Belgium and the Venice

poems, a consequence partly of the similarities between the cities they take

as their subject matter. Both Venice and the Belgian cities – particularly

Bruges, the ‘Venice of the North’ – interest Rilke because of the way they

still embody a past in which they enjoyed more glory than in the present.

In literary discourses around 1900 both Venice and Bruges were associated

with decadence, decay and death.23 Bernhard Blume has pointed out

Rilke’s predilection for cities like Venice, Bruges and Toledo – ‘Stadte, in

denen der Schatten einer großen Vergangenheit hineinragt in einen

gestaltlosen Alltag’.24 My concern here, however, is less with the thematic

parallels between Rilke’s poetic treatment of Venice and Belgium than with

the question of how the poems construct the specific geographical spaces to

which they refer, and with their configuration of the relationship between

time and space.


Each of the Belgium poems is given a title signifying an individual

architectural or topographical feature (and, in the case of ‘Die Marien-

Prozession’, an event), and a subtitle indicating a broader geographical

location. Accordingly, the cities Furnes, Bruges and Ghent are presented

from specified perspectives within their geographical space. Each poem is

structured by a shifting vantage point, but in most cases this is not the

perspective of an observing human subject. Instead, perspective and

motion are attributed to personified elements of the scenes themselves. In

‘Der Platz’ the perspective is at first that of the square looking outwards

(‘ladet der Platz zum Einzug seiner Weite/die fernen Fenster unaufhorlich

ein’), then later that of the houses looking inwards (‘In die Giebel

steigend,/wollen die kleinen Hauser alles sehn’). In ‘Quai du Rosaire’ the

perspective is provided by the personified ‘Gassen’, whose form in space is

described as movement. Just as Rilke’s poetological approach to place as a

product of memory emphasizes the interdependence of time and space, so

the spaces represented by these poems are made dynamic and given a

temporal dimension by a perspective which projects the movement of a

human subject in time onto the spaces themselves.

‘Der Turm’, the first poem of the group, is an exception. Here, space is

constructed from the perspective of an experiencing subject – typically for

the Neue Gedichte, a ‘du’, rather than an ‘ich’.25 As we have seen, the title

and subtitle create a tension between the generic and the geographically

specific. In this poem, however, the reference to a specific place – the tower

of St Nicolas in Furnes – is less dominant than in most of the other

Belgium poems. In Engel’s analysis the poem’s ‘Mitteilungslinie’ – the

spiral upward movement of the second person subject’s climbing the tower

staircase, followed by the movement of his gaze from the sky down to the

ground and then away into the distance – is overshadowed by its

‘Gemutslinie’, the emotional dynamic that determines the linguistic

structure of the poem.26 Even the more concrete ‘Mitteilungslinie’,

however, is less dependent on specific geographical space than is the case

in other poems. The same pattern of motion could be produced by

climbing any tower. Some commentators have drawn on biographical

details of Rilke’s visit to Flanders in July and August 1906 and on local

information in attempts to explain the imagery of the poem. H.

Uyttersprot, for example, associates the fear felt by the poem’s speaker

with the story of the Furnes bell-ringer’s falling to his death which was

270 Helen Bridge

related to Rilke during his visit, and attempts to explain the reference to

Patenier by pointing out how the view from the top of the tower of St

Nicolas is restricted by the roof and parapet of the church, so that the

landscape can only be seen in small fragments at a time.27 Such details may

help to explain aspects of the poem’s genesis, but the poem as a finished

product does not transform essential characteristics specific to Furnes into

linguistic structures in the way that, as we shall see, the Venice poems do.

In this case the experience of climbing the church tower is taken as a

starting-point for exploring more abstract questions about the subjective

experience, and poetic construction, of space.

‘Der Turm’ is structured by a contrast between the speaker’s experience

of climbing the tower in the first half and his feeling of liberation upon

emerging into daylight and seeing the surrounding landscape in the second

half. The poem has given rise to widely varying – and sometimes rather

fanciful – interpretations which grapple with the bewildering combination

of images and attempt to explain the enigmatic twelfth line (‘o wenn er

steigt, behangen wie ein Stier’). Uyttersprot sees the bull image as central

to the poem’s meaning and, by associating it, rather surprisingly, with

Switzerland (‘der Stier von Uri’) and with an old Flemish dialectal

expression, interprets it as a symbol of the unity of life and death. Heidi

Heimann’s reading revolves around the equally implausible assumption

that the bull represents Orpheus.28 Franz Schuppen reads the climb of the

tower as an expression of the Leistungswille central to both Rilke’s own

biography and social and philosophical developments of his age.29

Unfortunately, Schuppen’s otherwise intriguing argument remains rather

distanced from the poem itself. In a recent analysis Judith Ryan has

explained the poem’s imagery by uncovering various intertextual refer-

ences, in order to offer a reading of the poem as an expression of Rilke’s

rejection of aestheticism and attempt to move towards a new aesthetic

ideal based on the ‘clarity, orderliness and connectedness’ of Patenier’s

paintings.30 Ryan’s approach is the most able to provide convincing

explanations of the assortment of images.31

The contrast between the two halves of the poem is most obviously one

between two different experiences of space. In the first half the subject’s

interaction with the space of the tower is felt bodily and psychologically.

The long, convoluted sentence conveys both the physical effort of climbing

the seemingly never-ending staircase and the increasing fear and confusion


felt by the speaker. The effects of the climb on the senses, body and

emotions are emphasized in the phrases ‘wohin/du blindlings steigst’,

‘durch die/sich dein Gesicht […] drangt’ and ‘erschreckt und furchtend’. In

the course of the climb an increasing sense of confusion about subject–

object relations is felt, so that the speaker has the impression that the

movement is not his own, but in his surroundings, which threaten to

collapse onto him. In the second half of the poem, by contrast, the speaker

is a stationary and sovereign observing subject, able to survey the extensive

and well-lit space around him from a safe and superior position. As Ryan

notes, the speaker’s address to himself gives way to a focus on external

objects.32 Now feeling physically weightless (‘fast fliegend’), he is able to

take in his surroundings visually, without their posing any physical or

emotional threat. The convoluted hypotactic syntax of the first half is

replaced by clearer paratactic structures.

Despite the strong sense of opposition between the two halves, certain

elements in the poem suggest connections between the two experiences they

convey. In both the first and the fourth stanza the speaker perceives the

space around him in terms of a vertical opposition between above and

below, the ‘Himmel’ and ‘Tiefen’ of the second half echoing – and

reversing – the ‘Erd-Inneres’ and ‘Erdenoberflache’ of the opening. In both

cases the deictic ‘dort’ indicates that the poem is constructing space from

the perspective of the experiencing subject. However, whereas at the outset

the ‘du’ is caught between the two poles, laboriously moving from one

to the other, so that the ‘dort’ is a projection of the goal he is attempting to

reach, after emerging into the daylight he has the whole vertical axis within

his vision, and the ‘dort’ conveys an effortless movement of the eyes. The

idea of blindness also features in both of these stanzas. Whereas the effect

of the darkness is conveyed adverbially as a quality of the speaker which

affects his physical activity (‘blindlings steigst’), the subsequent blinding

effect of the light remains separate from the speaker, expressed in a

nominal abstraction (‘Blendung uber Blendung’), and indeed seems not to

impede his ability to perceive and describe his surroundings.

Both halves of the poem convey a similar process in which the subject

attempts to make sense of the space around him. In the first half the

darkness and consequent absence of visual information about his

surroundings mean that the speaker orients himself using an imaginary

image – the metaphor of an underground river bed. This imaginary

272 Helen Bridge

landscape, lacking in identifiable topographical features and bearing

similarities to the psychological landscapes in ‘Orpheus. Eurydike.

Hermes’ (‘der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk’) and the Third Duino Elegy,

forms a contrast to the geographical specificity of the subtitle: the speaker’s

– and the poem’s – imaginary construction of the space of the tower has

the effect of abstracting from the specific location. In the following two

stanzas, as the speaker’s eyes become accustomed to the darkness, and the

underground imagery gives way to a perception of his actual surroundings

in the tower, his sense of orientation does not become stronger as might be

expected. On the contrary, the physical impressions of the long climb in the

darkness have the effect of disrupting the spatially logical image which

initially provided orientation. As the speaker begins to rely instead on his

vision, his ability to distinguish between himself and his surroundings

diminishes, resulting in terrifying confusion. Moreover, the greater his

sense of insight, the more confused he becomes. The emphatic ‘die du

plotzlich siehst’ (emphasis mine) conveys the speaker’s impression of

sudden visual clarity; however, the object of his vision is ‘die Dunkelheit’,

and the result is a new mental construction of his surroundings which

introduces paradoxical inversions in place of the clearly fixed co-ordinates

of the underground landscape imagery (‘als fiele sie/aus diesem Abgrund,

der dich uberhangt’). In the third stanza the speaker’s renewed sense of

insight (‘den du […] erkennst’) is contradicted by the awkward interruption

of the clause by a further long subordinate clause in which the abyss

becomes the subject, defying the speaker’s attempt to gain the distance and

cognitive sovereignty implied by the verb ‘erkennen’. In the climactic

twelfth line the speaker makes a renewed attempt to capture his

impressions of his surroundings in an image. The reference may, as Ryan

suggests, be to the moment in a bullfight when the bull’s head is uncovered

and it is driven out of a narrow tunnel, known as the toril, into the arena.33

However, in the context of the speaker’s thoughts, the motivation for the

image, whose opacity is increased by the lack of an obvious referent for

‘er’, is far from clear. The line represents a climax not only in the speaker’s

fear, but also in the failure of his attempts to conceptualize his

surroundings in a meaningful way.

With his emergence from the tower the speaker gains the clarity of vision

and sovereignty of perspective which he had struggled to attain in the

darkness.34 In contrast to the threatening enclosure of the tower, the open


space of the landscape now before him seems to offer itself up for

utilization and appropriation (‘voll Verwendung’). These different condi-

tions mean that the speaker’s attempt to make sense of what he sees and to

impose a conceptual structure on the space around him is more successful

than in the first half of the poem.35 Although his actual surroundings are

now clearly visible, after registering elements of the landscape in very

general terms (‘windiges Licht’, ‘Himmel’, ‘Tiefen’), the speaker once again

abstracts from the specific scene before him by using imagery, this time

likening the landscape to a painting by Patenier. Unlike the initial

underground imagery, which was disrupted by visual perception, the

painting simile is able to provide a way of structuring the speaker’s vision

and offering a perspective for the poem. By the final stanza the landscape

has become the painting to which it was compared (‘im Hintergrunde’ – as

opposed to ‘in der Ferne’ – implies a painting).

This aestheticization of the landscape involves a conflation of time and

space. First, the space of the landscape is presented through a temporal

metaphor (‘kleine Tage’), then the dimension of time is removed

(‘gleichzeitige, mit Stunde neben Stunde’) and the simultaneous hours

become part of a spatial image (‘durch die die Brucken springen wie die

Hunde’). The comparison of the landscape with Patenier’s painting

provides an image of the transformation of real space as it is experienced in

time into aesthetic space which is able to overcome temporal differenti-

ation and embody time as a totality. A similar image occurs in ‘L’Ange du

Meridien’, where human time is contrasted with the angel’s time, which is

embodied by

der vollen Sonnenuhr,auf der des Tages ganze Zahl zugleich,gleich wirklich, steht in tiefem Gleichgewichte,als waren alle Stunden reif und reich.36

In ‘Der Turm’ and some of the other Belgium poems, the spaces of the

Belgian landscape provide images in which time is spatialized and

transformed into a totality, so that past and present exist simultaneously

in the aesthetic image. In ‘Quai du Rosaire’ and ‘Beguinage II’ reflections

serve to create a unity between past and present.37

Transforming a place into an aesthetic space in which time is overcome,

and drawing on painting in order to create a poetic perspective on space,

274 Helen Bridge

are ideas which Rilke explores in a variety of poems in Neue Gedichte.

However, it seems problematic to equate the thematic and formal contrast

between the two halves of ‘Der Turm’ with a transition in aesthetic style

which Rilke was struggling to achieve in Neue Gedichte, as Ryan suggests.

This reading follows the poem’s speaker’s own emotional responses to the

experience of climbing the tower, associating his fear and confusion with

the ‘solipsism and self-reflexivity’ of the aestheticist mode Rilke is,

according to Ryan, trying to leave behind, and the subsequent relief and

clear-sightedness with a new aesthetic ideal which might point the way

forward. In fact, the meaning of the contrast between the two halves is

rather more ambiguous. The speaker may respond positively to his

emergence from the tower and the sovereignty his new position gives him,

but aspects of the poetic form counteract this sense of liberation. The

rhyme scheme in the second half of the poem is in tension with the

referential emphasis on clarity and regularity: the self-contained and

regular, though variable, patterns of the first half give way to a less ordered

scheme with rhymes across stanza breaks. The echoes of ‘Stier’ in the

rhymes of the second line of the fourth stanza and the first line of the fifth

belie the impression that the fear and confusion of the climb have been left

behind. Similarly, the fact that the final stanza consists of only three lines,

and so disappoints the expectations created by the preceding five regular

quatrains, undermines the peace and harmony which are the focus of the

last line. This shortened last stanza also points back to the line ‘o wenn er

steigt, behangen wie ein Stier – :’, because the absence of a fourth line

means that the poem as a whole is a symmetrical structure with the twelfth

line as its central axis. While the referential content of the poem follows the

speaker’s gaze and consciousness into the distance, its form insists on the

unity of the two halves: the sovereign aestheticization of space is possible

only as the result of the climb in the darkness. The tower which causes the

terrifying claustrophobic experience of the first half is also the means by

which the speaker is able to attain the clear perspective over the landscape

in the second half.

The experience of climbing the tower is more fruitfully read as a

metaphor for the processes of artistic production by which the space of the

world is transformed into a poem, than as a programmatic statement of

aesthetic intent. It is the speaker’s attempts to translate his experience of

space into images – a fundamentally poetic activity – that provides


continuity between the two halves of the poem. The shape of the emotional

experience conveyed by the poem conforms to what Manfred Koch has

called ‘Rilkes poetologische Grundfigur des Ballwurfs’.38 Like ‘Der Ball’,

‘Der Turm’ is structured as a curve of motion around a central point, ‘an

dem die angestrengte, in zeitliche Spannung gestellte Eigentatigkeit mit

einemMale leicht wird und ubergeht in eine ‘‘fliegende’’ Zusammenfassung

und Verwandlung all dessen, was an muhseliger Erfahrung in die

Aufstiegsbewegung eingegangen war’.39 Koch associates this spatial

pattern with the unity of technique and inspiration in Rilke’s model of

poetic creativity. As well as being a metaphor for the shifting relationship

between poet and poem during the creative process, the two different

positions which the speaker of ‘Der Turm’ adopts in relation to the tower

also convey the dual nature of poetry. In the first half of the poem the

tower is experienced temporally, as a structure with its own internal

dynamic; in the second half it is a complete and unified object in space,

which provides a vantage point over its surroundings. Similarly, a poem is

at once a temporal structure – both for the poet and for the reader – and a

complete aesthetic object with its own (linguistic) space. Hellmuth Himmel

has shown how this duality is central to Rilke’s poetics at this stage:

Die ‘Neuen Gedichte’ dynamisieren das Objekt und schaffen damit etwasTransitorisches im Objekt, das durch das transitorische Element der Sprache als‘Handlung’ wiedergegeben werden kann; gleichzeitig bewirkt die Art der Sprach-und Versbehandlung jedoch, daß die unbegrenzte transitorische Sprachbewe-gung in eine abgeschlossene verwandelt wird und die sprachliche Gestaltung denCharakter eines ‘Dinges’ annimmt, das ‘ganz mit sich beschaftigt’ ist und nichtuber sich hinausweist.40

Interestingly, the principal characteristic of the tower as a Ding is precisely

that it does point beyond itself, by providing a view of the surrounding

landscape. Although many of Rilke’s seemingly self-contained objects –

the Roman fountain and the blue hydrangea, for example – point beyond

themselves because of the metaphors and similes used to describe them, the

shift in ‘Der Turm’ from an internal dynamic to an outward-looking

perspective cannot be seen as representative of the aesthetic direction of

the Neue Gedichte in general. The explicit presentation of a subjective

experience of space may be unusual in Rilke’s poetry of this period, but the

multiple perspectives and the interaction between subject and object in the

first half of ‘Der Turm’ are rather more typical than the return to a

276 Helen Bridge

conventional, post-Renaissance conception of perspectival space in the

second half. The final five lines of the poem imitate Patenier’s paintings in

their emphasis on spatial depth and their assumption of a single, stationary

and subjectively limited viewpoint.41 The secure, stationary standpoint of

an observer who is separated from and above the object of his vision, and

who naively attributes the limitations inherent in his perspective to features

of the landscape itself (‘den unbeholfne Hauser manchmal nur/verbergen’)

is far from typical of the Neue Gedichte, where vision is more usually

presented as a reciprocal process in which the object of perception is

capable of making demands of, or even posing a threat to, the viewer.42

The duality of poetry as both a temporal and a spatial structure is not

just evoked thematically by ‘Der Turm’: the poem itself demands to be

read as both temporal and spatial. Ryan’s reading privileges the temporal

process of experience which the poem describes, but plays down the spatial

dimension which undermines any sense of progress in time. As we have

seen, formal elements serve to connect the two halves of the poem,

counteracting the sense of liberation in the second half. The title refers to a

spatial structure, and the shape of the poem on the page resembles the

tower which is its subject matter. The two temporal experiences conveyed

are thus shown to be constitutive of a single spatial object. If the tower is

taken as the central subject matter of the poem, then the poem as a whole

can be seen to undermine the conventional construction of space from the

perspective of a stationary, distanced and sovereign viewpoint. In

presenting the landscape from such a perspective, the poem is simulta-

neously offering a rather more unusual perspective on the tower itself.

‘Der Turm’ thematizes the process of abstracting from a concrete

experience of a specific place by transforming it into poetry. This process

occurs both at the level of the speaker’s consciousness, as he attempts to

conceptualize his experience of space in aesthetic images, and at the level of

the poem itself, which allows us to interpret both the speaker’s experience

and the tower as metaphors for the creative process and the nature of

poetry. The Venice poems to which I will now turn transform a concrete

place into poetic space and time without reflecting on the process as ‘Der

Turm’ does.

In respect of their construction of geographical space, a contrast

between the two cycles is immediately apparent. Whereas the Belgium

poems focus on individual architectural and topographical features, the


subject matter of the Venice poems is the city as an entity in itself.43 Unlike

‘Der Turm’, which takes a concrete geographical location as the starting-

point for more general reflections, the Venice poems are concerned

centrally with the city and its qualities. Paul Requadt has pointed out that

it is appropriate to describe Rilke’s Venice poems as ‘Venedigdichtung’

because they represent the city ‘als Sinnganzes’ and engage with the

tradition of images associated with Venice, whereas he produced no such

‘Romdichtung’, since Rome features in the poems only in individual

motifs.44 The same contrast could be drawn with any other city named in

the Neue Gedichte: it is invariably on individual buildings, scenes or people

that Rilke focuses. ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’,

however, deal with Venice as a whole.45

The Venice poems represent a clear rejection of the tradition of

Stimmungslyrik about the city – a tradition to which Rilke’s own earlier

poems about Venice belonged.46 There is no impressionistic description

of the features usually associated with Venice, and specific sights are

named only twice (San Giorgio Maggiore in ‘Venezianischer Morgen’,

and San Marco in the sonnet of that title). ‘San Marco’ is the only poem

in the group that constructs space through the perspective of an

experiencing subject, but even here, as in the preceding poem, Rilke’s

topic is the history of Venice – in this case, as embodied in its

architecture – rather than its atmosphere. The poems owe as much to

Rilke’s studies of Venetian history as to his visit to the city in November

1907.47 The dedication of ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ to Richard Beer-

Hofmann, who lent Rilke some rare books about Venice during his 1907

stay there, supports this.48

Both ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ include

references to the process of perception: the opening lines of ‘Veneziani-

scher Morgen’ indicate that what follows is a description of Venice as

perceived by the personified ‘furstlich verwohnte Fenster’, while ‘Spat-

herbst in Venedig’ signals the presence of an observer with the phrase ‘an

deinen Blick’. The perspective from which each poem constructs the city,

however, is not that of a subjective viewer with a standpoint which is

confined in both space and time. Nor does the temporal dimension of each

poem construct a subject’s experience or perception as a process in time.

The two titles situate the poems in time and space in a way that might

appear at first to suggest a subjective perspective on the city at a particular

278 Helen Bridge

point in time. Yet the titles also create a unity of time and place. Whereas

‘Der Turm’ created a tension between a temporal subjective perspective

and the spatial structure of the title, time in these poems is a dimension of

the city itself.

K. Deleu has noted that the opening two lines of ‘Venezianischer

Morgen’ themselves form a frame or window through which Venice is

seen.49 Windows have been associated with perspectival space perceived

from a fixed subjective standpoint. Citing the nineteenth-century theoreti-

cian of the Renaissance Leon Battista Alberti, Erwin Panofsky defined

perspectival space in painting as, ‘wo sich das ganze Bild […] gleichsam in

ein ‘‘Fenster’’ verwandelt hat, durch das wir in den Raum hindurchzu-

blicken glauben sollen’.50 The windows in ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ have

the opposite function. These windows are not just a frame for human

vision, but are themselves the subjects of vision. The two kinds of vision

are both contrasted and set in parallel by the opening of the poem. The

object of the vision (‘die Stadt’) is the same in both cases; the contrast is

between the permanence of the windows’ vision (‘immer’) and the more

ephemeral vision of human subjects (‘manchesmal’), and between the

leisurely attitude of the ‘verwohnte Fenster’ and the effort on the part of

the human viewers (‘uns zu bemuhn’). Far from signalling a limitation of

perspective, these windows are associated with a (primarily temporal,

rather than spatial) totality of vision. As the confinement of the more

limited, momentary human vision to a subordinate clause suggests, it is –

despite the temporal specificity of the title – the unrestricted perspective of

the windows which constitutes the frame, or in fact absence of any frame,

through which the poem constructs its subject. The ensuing description of

the city’s form of existence as a constantly re-enacted (‘immer wieder’)

process of creation which never attains permanence (‘sich bildet ohne

irgendwann zu sein’) presupposes a perspective which is not temporally

limited. Similarly, the focus on ‘die Stadt’ as the object of vision suggests a

spatial perspective which cannot be reduced to a localized point within the

city. Until the specific reference to San Giorgio Maggiore at the end, the

poem presents only broad spaces (‘Himmel’, ‘Flut’, ‘Kanale’) from an

unspecified vantage point.

The personification of Venice has the effect of collapsing the space of the

city into a single figure. Unlike the personification in ‘Die Kurtisane’,

where the topographical features of Venice are mapped onto the


courtesan’s physical features, here the personified Venice seems to be

separate from the actual spaces of the city: the ‘Reihn von Spiegelbildern’

in the canal are not part of her, but the objects of her perception and a

reminder of the process of creation as it has occurred on previous

mornings. By the end of the poem Venice has become the subject of the

creation, but its object – San Giorgio Maggiore – is a separate entity. The

Venice which is the subject of this poem is not coextensive with the spatial

topography of the city: it is everywhere (‘wo ein Schimmer/von Himmel

trifft auf ein Gefuhl von Flut’), and yet, as this image suggests, it has no

internal space. Similarly, it is constantly taking shape, without ever existing

in time (‘ohne irgendwann zu sein’; emphasis mine).

The daily emergence of Venice is presented as a mythical creation in

which the city arises out of the union of sky and sea.51 This dimension

becomes explicit with the likening of Venice to ‘eine Nymphe, die den Zeus

empfing’. The product of this mythical process with cosmic dimensions,

however, is both a concrete, geographically specific entity (‘San Giorgio

Maggiore’) and a self-contained aesthetic object (‘das schone Ding’). Deleu

understands the poem in terms of a process of aesthetic transformation, in

which the visible is transformed into something internal (‘Reihn/von

Spiegelbildern’) and then into a ‘Ding’.52 The poem also presents a

temporal development from generalized spaces (‘Furstlich verwohnte

Fenster’, ‘Himmel’, ‘Flut’, ‘Reihn/von Spiegelbildern’) which signal a

totalizing perspective on the city, to a specific feature of the city, perceived

– implicity – from a particular standpoint.53 However, these developments

in the course of the poem are counterbalanced by a mirroring effect, or

circularity, in the poem’s structure. The poem begins and ends by focusing

on architectural features of the city (the palace windows and the Church of

San Giorgio Maggiore) and, like the opening two lines, the last two have

vision as their subject, this time the personified Venice’s gaze at San

Giorgio Maggiore. The form of the poem – a rearrangement of the sonnet

so that the tercets form one central section, preceded and succeeded by a

quatrain – allows a vertical symmetry around the central axis ‘Reihn/von

Spiegelbildern’, so that the poem itself re-enacts the process of reflection

which is at the heart of its subject matter. The reflections are presented as

emerging from the canal and so as independent of the buildings being

reflected; they also have a higher degree of reality than the personified

Venice – they pre-exist and trigger the creation of Venice itself. As in ‘Quai

280 Helen Bridge

du Rosaire’ and ‘Beguinage’, the reflections belong to a realm of

permanence and so are able to induce a consciousness of the past in the

present (‘und sie erinnern an die andern Male’). The symmetrical form of

the poem has a second function in its circularity: the creation of ‘das

schone Ding’ may be a climax, but it is not an end-point, and the process

the poem has described is one which is to be constantly repeated.

The poem creates a dialectic between permanence and ephemerality,

which is also one between the concrete features of the city and Venice as

an abstract idea: while Venice itself has no permanent form, its windows,

reflections and buildings do. This dialectic is embodied in the space of the

poem itself: although its subject matter is an ongoing process of creation,

the poem, as a ‘schones Ding’, lends permanent form to this process. As

in ‘Der Turm’, the poetic form creates a tension between a spatial and a

temporal dimension. By moving, at the referential level, from Venice’s

buildings to the reflections in the canal, and then to San Giorgio

Maggiore on the other side of the water, the poem’s space reflects the

spatial form of Venice. At the same time, the poem conveys a temporal

process occurring within this space, from a hazy totality in time and

space, through the awakening of consciousness in the personified Venice,

to clear temporal and spatial differentiation: the closing lines convey a

moment in time, in contrast with the ‘immer wieder’ of the opening

stanza, and the act of perception they construct is based on a distanced,

perspectival separation of subject and object. The direction of the poem is

thus away from the abstract quality of Venice as an idea outside time and

space, towards the city’s concrete reality in time and space. Paradoxically,

though, the clear vision of San Giorgio Maggiore remains dependent on

the viewpoint of the personified Venice, as an abstraction outside the

space of the city.

It has often been pointed out that the relationship between ‘Venezia-

nischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ is one of complementarity:

while the former presents Venice as a dream-like city which constantly has

to regain consciousness of its existence, in the latter the decaying Venice of

the present is contrasted with the will to power embodied by its past.54 This

difference of emphasis is reflected by the contrast in poetic form: despite its

radical departures from the internal rhythms of a conventional sonnet,

‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ uses the framework of the sonnet form to create an

impetus towards a triumphant final climax.55


In contrast to the temporal totality of perspective created by the opening

of ‘Venezianischer Morgen’, ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ opens with a deictic

‘nun’, which implies a fixed standpoint in the present. After the initial

general statement about the city as a whole, the speaker comments on

details in turn – the ‘glasernen Palaste’ and, rather less characteristically

for Venice, the gardens.56 The phrase ‘an deinen Blick’ suggests that these

details are the objects of a human subject’s perception, but the complete

absence of specific topographical reference points means that, as in

‘Venezianischer Morgen’, the poem’s perspective is not determined by a

limited spatial standpoint within the city. The perception of the city

rendered in the first three sentences of the poem is not constructed as a

process: the three statements seem to convey parallel, rather than

necessarily sequential, observations. Whereas ‘Venezianischer Morgen’

constructed the present as an ongoing process, here it is, as the ‘nun’

suggests, a point in time which enables comparisons with the past.

The present is contrasted with the past on two levels. The opening three

sentences define the late autumnal Venice according to how it differs from

Venice in high season. The ‘Aber’ half-way through the second quatrain

introduces a contrast to this tired, decaying city: the idea of a will rising

from the bed of the sea and from the depths of the past (‘vom Grund aus

alten Waldskeletten’). The remainder of the poem envisages a resurgence

of Venice’s former power. The poem is one of the most frequently analysed

in Neue Gedichte, and the relationship between its imagery and subject

matter, and thematically related passages in Rilke’s letters to Sidonie

Nadherny of 24 November 1907 and to Gisela von der Heydt of 24 March

1908, and in Malte, have received much commentary.57 The central

contrast in the poem, between the unreal Venice of the tourists and a real,

historical Venice which is not visible to visitors, is expressed more fully in

the Malte passage:

Das weiche, opiatische Venedig ihrer Vorurteile und Bedurfnisse verschwindetmit diesen somnolenten Auslandern, und eines Morgens ist das andere da, daswirkliche, wache, bis zum Zerspringen sprode, durchaus nicht ertraumte: dasmitten im Nichts auf versenkten Waldern gewollte, erzwungene und endlich sodurch und durch vorhandene Venedig.58

In ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ this contrast is constructed through the time

structure of the poem. The tourists’ Venice of high summer which is now

282 Helen Bridge

past is not described in any detail: as Bernhard Blume has pointed out,

only the word ‘Koder’ hints at its nature.59 It exists in the poem only as a

negative (‘nicht mehr’) and as an implied point of comparison (‘sproder’).

The continuing existence in the present of the will-power of the historical

Venice, by contrast, is stated as fact (‘steigt Willen auf’). The concluding

vision of Venice’s display of naval might is presented as a possibility which

is dormant in the present. However, the phrase that signals this

hypothetical status, ‘als sollte uber Nacht’, is separated from the details

of the vision, so that the two tercets construct this scene from Venice’s past

as a self-contained reality in the present of the poem. The syntactical shift

from verbal infinitives (‘verdoppeln’, ‘zu teeren’) to the active and finite

‘sich drangt’ reflects the transition from hypothesis to reality.

Whereas the poetic form of ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ constructed both

spatial and temporal dimensions of Venice, the emphasis in ‘Spatherbst in

Venedig’ is very much on the temporal. The city’s existence is conveyed

through a series of temporal contrasts, and the poem is also structured as a

progression in time: the focus on Venice in a present (late autumn) which is

defined entirely by its relation to the recent past (summer) gives way to a

vision of the near future (‘uber Nacht’) in which the Venice of a more

distant past is reborn. In contrast with ‘Venezianischer Morgen’, which

progresses from the abstract to the concrete, the movement here is from

the concrete features of Venice in the present to an abstract idea of Venice,

invisible in the present but expressed as a union of the future and the past.

However, at the referential level the poem gives this invisible, abstract

Venice a spatial reality, the ambiguity of the phrase ‘Grund aus alten

Waldskeletten’ creating a unity of time (the depths of the past) and space

(the depths of the sea). Furthermore, as an aesthetic form the poem creates

a space in which this abstract Venice can be realized as a visual image. As

Egon Schwarz comments, the form of the poem supports Rilke’s intention,

‘die empirische Zeit zu vernichten, das vergangliche Venedig aus der

Sichtbarkeit zu heben und in das unsichtbare Venedig in der Zeitlosigkeit

des Geistes zu verwandeln’.60

Whereas the tensions in ‘Der Turm’ between the temporal and the

spatial, and between the concrete and the abstract, resulted from a

subject’s experience of space, in ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst

in Venedig’ such tensions are presented as inherent in Venice itself.

However, despite the absence of an experiencing and conceptualizing


subject, and of reflection on the processes involved in transforming real

space into the aesthetic space of poetry, the abstract ideas of Venice

invoked by the two poems are ones which can be read as metaphors for

aspects of Rilke’s biography and work as an artist. In ‘Venezianischer

Morgen’ the daily creation of the city is presented as a process with clear

parallels to the act of artistic creation, whereas in ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’

Venice’s achievement of glory through sheer will-power to overcome its

unfavourable starting conditions can be read as a metaphor for Rilke’s

understanding of his own career as a poet.61

Critics have often taken up Rilke’s pronouncements on Rodin’s work

and applied them to the Neue Gedichte, to suggest that the poems effect a

transformation of time into space.62 Close analysis of these three poems

has made it clear that the relationship is not unidirectional. The poems

both give space a temporal dimension and transform temporal processes

into aesthetic space.63 In ‘Der Turm’ space is dynamized in three ways.

First, the space of the tower is transformed into the temporal process of the

speaker’s experience of it. Second, the space of the landscape is

transformed into the temporal sequence by which the speaker looks at

it. In each of these cases, this enables space to be conveyed through the

temporal medium of language. Third, the poetic image which likens the

landscape to a Patenier painting conceives of space as the juxtaposition of

units of time. Just as the painting simile transforms this temporalized space

into a higher, aesthetic space in which temporal distinctions disappear, so

the poem as a whole temporalizes space in order to create a new space: the

imaginary tower invoked by the poem, or the poem itself as an aesthetic

structure. The conception, in ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ and ‘Spatherbst in

Venedig’, of the city as a space which has an integral temporal dimension

can be likened to this image of the landscape in ‘Der Turm’. Despite the

marginality of a subjective perspective in the Venice poems, vision is used

here too to dynamize space by constructing tensions within Venice itself –

between the visible Venice of the present and the invisible Venice of the

past, and between the abstract, personified Venice and the concrete

buildings and spaces of the city.

Beyond Rilke’s own concern with learning more productive ways of

seeing, vision has a clear aesthetic function in these poems: by creating

dynamic relationships, whether between a subject and a landscape or

between different elements within a landscape, vision makes it possible to

284 Helen Bridge

convey space as a temporal process. All three poems create a relationship

between space and time, both referentially in their treatment of their

respective subject matter, and aesthetically in their poetic form. In ‘Der

Turm’ and ‘Venezianischer Morgen’ the relationship is one of tension: the

poems embody both temporal processes and spatial relations, but

appreciating both dimensions requires a shift of focus on the part of the

reader. ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’, by contrast, constructs the relationship as

one of unity: here the space of Venice has an integral temporal dimension,

and an abstract idea of Venice which exists only temporally, since it

belongs to the past, is given spatial form.

NOTES

1. Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome, Briefwechsel, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer(Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 1989), p. 94. The same idea is expressed inthe monograph on Rodin, where Rilke talks of the aesthetic object being ‘getrenntvom Zufall und von der Zeit’ and ‘eingeschaltet […] in die stille Dauer des Raumesund in seine großen Gesetze’. Rainer Maria Rilke, Werke: Kommentierte Ausgabein vier Banden, ed. Manfred Engel, Ulrich Fulleborn, Horst Nalewski and AugustStahl (Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig: Insel, 1996) [henceforth abbreviated asKA], IV: Schriften, ed. Horst Nalewski, pp. 410–411.

2. KA, I: Gedichte 1895 bis 1910, ed. Manfred Engel and Ulrich Fulleborn, pp. 907–908.

3. Cf. KA, I, p. 906.4. See, for example, Rilke’s comments on the independence of Rodin’s sculptures

from the ‘Stoff’ which formed their initial inspiration. KA, IV, pp. 430–431.5. KA, I, p. 908.6. It is generally accepted that Rilke’s engagement with the work of visual artists had

the function primarily of helping him to work out new directions for his ownpoetry. See, for example, Herman Meyer, ‘Rilkes Cezanne-Erlebnis’, in ZarteEmpirie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1963), pp. 244–286; Michaela Kopp, Rilke und Rodin:Auf der Suche nach der wahren Art des Schreibens (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin,Berne, New York, Paris and Vienna: Lang, 1999).

7. Paul de Man sees the significance of the Neue Gedichte in the structural principle ofchiasmic reversal. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche,Rilke, and Proust (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 20–56. David Wellbery proposes a generative model for understanding Rilke’s poetics,arguing in his analysis of ‘Die Gazelle’ that the poem does not refer in any way to areal gazelle, but is rather constituted by a ‘Figurationsprozeß’ which creates aninterplay of various levels of meaning, thus constructing ‘hermeneutische Raume,durch die die Gazelle lauft’. ‘Zur Poetik der Figuration beim mittleren Rilke: ‘‘DieGazelle’’’, in Zu Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. Egon Schwarz (Stuttgart: Klett, 1983), pp.125–132.

8. Hartmut Engelhardt, Der Versuch, wirklich zu sein: Zu Rilkes sachlichem Sagen(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 36.


9. In his letter to Lou Andreas-Salome of 8 August 1903 Rilke laments his inability toreconcile life and art in the way he had observed Rodin doing, and expresses hisdesire to model his approach to his work on Rodin’s, asking ‘wo ist das Handwerkmeiner Kunst, ihre tiefste und geringste Stelle, an der ich beginnen durfte tuchtig zusein?’. On 10 August Andreas-Salome responds by pointing out the differencesbetween a sculpture’s work and a poet’s. Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome, Briefwechsel, pp. 90–101.

10. KA, IV, pp. 630–631.11. For example, Patricia Pollock Brodsky, Russia in the Works of Rainer Maria

Rilke (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1984), pp. 192–197; HelmutNaumann, Rußland in Rilkes Werk (Rheinfelden and Berlin: Schauble, 1993), pp.162–166.

12. See, for example, Karlheinz Stierle, ‘Rilkes Pariser Bilder’, in Romanistik als ver-gleichende Literaturwissenschaft: Festschrift fur Jurgen von Stackelberg, ed. Wil-helm Graeber, Dieter Steland and Wilfried Floeck (Frankfurt am Main, Berlin,Berne, New York, Paris and Vienna: Lang, 1996), pp. 387–411.

13. Richard Jayne, The Symbolism of Space and Motion in the Works of Rainer MariaRilke (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaum, 1972), pp. 65–91. The older study by BedaAllemann is concerned with the Neue Gedichte only in so far as they anticipate theconcept of ‘Figur’ in the late work, but here too poems which represent objects –e.g. ‘Der Ball’ – are prominent. Zeit und Figur beim spaten Rilke: Ein Beitrag zurPoetik des modernen Gedichtes (Pfullingen: Neske, 1962).

14. KA, IV, pp. 417–418.15. Manfred Engel, ‘Rilke als Autor der literarischen Moderne’, in Rilke-Handbuch:

Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Manfred Engel, with Dorothea Lauterbach (Stuttgartand Weimar: Metzler, 2004), pp. 507–528 (p. 523).

16. Martin Sutton, for example, pursues the question of whether the model for Rilke’s‘Romische Fontane’ was the same fountain as that which inspired C. F. Meyer’s‘Der romische Brunnen’, in ‘C. F. Meyer and R. M. Rilke: Which Roman Foun-tain?’, German Life and Letters 40 (1986–1987), 135–141.

17. Jacob Steiner is not alone in pointing out that ‘Der Panther’ was originally inspirednot by the sight of a panther in the Jardin des Plantes, but by a statuette of a tiger inRodin’s atelier. ‘Kunst und Literatur: Zu Rilkes Kathedralengedichten’, in Wissenaus Erfahrungen: Werkbegriff und Interpretation heute. Festschrift fur HermanMeyer zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Alexander von Bormann, with Karl Robert Man-delkow and Anthonius H. Touber (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1976), pp. 621–635 (pp.621–622).

18. Ray Ockenden reads the indications of place as suggestive of museum exhibits, in‘Rilkes Neue Gedichte: Perspektive und Finalitat’, in Rilke und die Moderne, ed.Adrian Stevens and Fred Wagner (Munich: Iudicium, 2000), pp. 89–108 (pp. 90–92).

19. Judith Ryan, ‘The Intertextual Maze: Rilke’s ‘‘Der Turm’’ and his Relation toAestheticism’, Comparative Literature Studies 30 (1993), 69–82 (69).

20. Allemann, Zeit und Figur beim spaten Rilke, p. 18.21. Manfred Koch, ‘Mnemotechnik des Schonen’: Studien zur poetischen Erinnerung in

Romantik und Symbolismus (Tubingen: Niemeyer, 1988), p. 205.22. KA, IV, pp. 629–630.

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23. The long tradition of cultural representations of Venice is well known. At the endof the nineteenth century the city became a symbol of the seductions of decay forwriters such as Hofmannsthal, Schnitzler and Thomas Mann. See Bernhard Blume,‘Rilkes ‘‘Spatherbst in Venedig’’’, Wirkendes Wort 10 (1960), 345–354 (346–347).Bruges was famously presented as a symbol of death in Georges Rodenbach’s 1892novel Bruges-la-morte.

24. Bernhard Blume, ‘Die Stadt als seelische Landschaft’, in Existenz und Dichtung:Essays und Aufsatze, selected by Egon Schwart (Frankfurt amMain: Insel, 1980), pp.43–86 (p. 57). See also Michael Pleister, Das Bild der Großstadt in den DichtungenRobert Walsers, Rainer Maria Rilkes, Stefan Georges und Hugo von Hofmannsthals(Hamburg: Buske, 1990), 2nd, reworked and expanded edn, p. 116.

25. I follow Ryan in assuming the ‘du’ is a transposed first person, that is, that thepoem is a speaker’s address to himself.

26. Engel, ‘Rilke als Autor der literarischen Moderne’, pp. 523–524.27. H. Uyttersprot, ‘R. M. Rilke: Der Turm’, Neophilologus 39 (1955), 262–275.28. Heidi Heimann, ‘ ‘‘O wenn er steigt, behangen wie ein Stier’’: Rilkes Gedicht ‘‘Der

Turm’’ ’, Publications of the English Goethe Society n. s. 32 (1961–62), 46–73. Seealso the response by Herbert W. Belmore: Herbert W. Belmore and Heidi Hei-mann, ‘ ‘‘Behangen wie ein Stier’’: Entgegnung und Berichtigung’, Publications ofthe English Goethe Society n. s. 33 (1962–1963), 1–9.

29. Franz Schuppen, ‘Lebensbilder aus dem flachen Land: Die westflamische StadtVeurne (Furnes) als poetisches Motiv bei Rainer Maria Rilke’, in ‘Stets wird dieWahrheit hadern mit dem Schonen’: Festschrift fur Manfred Windfuhr zum 60.Geburtstag, ed. Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, Winfried Hartkopf, Ariane Neuhaus-Koch and Hildegard Stauch (Cologne and Vienna: Bohlau, 1990), pp. 335–355(pp. 342–349).

30. Ryan, ‘The Intertextual Maze’. A revised version of the article is published in Rilke,Modernism and Poetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),pp. 65–72.

31. For further analyses, see Brigitte L. Bradley, R. M. Rilke, Neue Gedichte: Ihrzyklisches Gefuge (Berne and Munich: Francke, 1967), pp. 135–137; WolfgangMuller, Rainer Maria Rilkes ‘Neue Gedichte’: Vielfaltigkeit eines Gedichttypus(Meisenheim am Glan: Hain, 1971), pp. 147–150.

32. Ryan, ‘The Intertextual Maze’, p. 77.33. Ryan, Rilke, Modernism and Poetic Tradition, p. 70. Alternatively – and perhaps

more plausibly – the line may refer to the resemblance in shape between the bellhanging in the tower and a bull’s genitalia.

34. This transition from a deliberate and intentional form of vision, informed by theintellect, to a much more successful kind of perception based on passive receptivityanticipates an idea which Rilke was to formulate explicitly in the context of hisaesthetic reflections prompted by the encounter with Cezanne’s paintings in au-tumn 1907. There he uses the image of a dog’s intentionless gaze as a metaphor forthe objective, unprejudiced way of looking at things, and the absence of consciousreflection, which he sees at the heart of Cezanne’s aesthetic. KA, IV, pp. 614, 627–628. See also Annette Gerok-Reiter, ‘Perspektivitat bei Rilke und Cezanne:Zur Raumerfahrung des spaten Rilke’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 67 (1993), 484–520 (516–517).


35. According to Theodore Ziolkowski, the ascent of the tower is ‘a gyrelike ascent ofconsciousness from an ominous darkness to blinding illumination’ and ‘achievedconsciousness enables the poet to structure the reality surrounding him in the formof art’. The View from the Tower: Origins of an Antimodernist Image (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 111.

36. Allemann (Zeit und Figur beim spaten Rilke, pp. 34–35) uses this poem to dem-onstrate the identity, at this stage of Rilke’s career, of the ‘Figur’ as a poeticformation in which this higher form of time is realized and the ‘Figur’ in the senseof ‘statue’. In fact, the idea of a ‘full’ time in which all temporal dimensions arepresent simultaneously is associated not just with aesthetic objects, but also withmore diffuse spaces in the Neue Gedichte.

37. Paul de Man shows how the figure of reversal in ‘Quai du Rosaire’ – by whichBruges, conventionally an emblem of transience and mutability, becomes, in itsreflective surfaces, the space in which a lost reality is recovered – produces a newtotality which is itself temporal in nature (the sound of the carillon, which markstime). De Man, Allegories of Reading, pp. 40–43.

38. Koch identifies this ‘Grundfigur’ in ‘Der Ball’ and ‘Falken-Beize’, but does notmention ‘Der Turm’.

39. Koch, ‘Mnemotechnik des Schonen’, p. 218.40. Hellmuth Himmel, ‘Rilke und das Transitorische’, Sprachkunst 6 (1975), 301–313

(311–312).41. Schuppen (‘Lebensbilder aus dem flachen Land’, p. 348) wrongly understands the

reference to Patenier in terms of the ‘unperspektivisches Nebeneinander’ of medi-eval painting. Heimann (‘ ‘‘O wenn er steigt…’’ ’, pp. 55–56), emphasizes instead theraised vantage points and convincing impression of depth which are typical ofPatenier’s work. Even if his paintings are not constructed strictly according toperspectival rules, they share the illusion of depth and the unitary viewpoint whichare defining characteristics of Renaissance perspective according to Erwin Panof-sky in ‘Die Perspektive als ‘‘symbolische Form’’’, in Aufsatze zu Grundfragen derKunstwissenschaft, collected by and ed. Hariolf Oberer and Egon Verheyen (Berlin:Hessling, 1964), pp. 99–167 (pp. 99–101).

42. The most obvious examples of this are ‘Archaischer Torso Apollos’, ‘DieFensterrose’ and ‘Schwarze Katze’. When Rilke uses the process of viewing apainting to structure a poem in the second volume of Neue Gedichte, his techniquehas much in common with that of modern painters, such as Monet and Cezanne,who rejected Renaissance perspective, instead emphasizing the two-dimensionalityof the picture surface. See Helen Bridge, ‘Rilke and the Modern Portrait’, ModernLanguage Review 99 (2004), 681–695.

43. In a letter to Gisela von der Heydt on 24 March 1908, Rilke emphasizes the need toapproach Venice as a whole, saying that the Baedeker guide is of no use in a city, ‘inder alles sehenswert ist oder nichts’. Rainer Maria Rilke, Briefe an Karl und Elis-abeth von der Heydt 1905–1922, ed. Ingeborg Schnack and Renate Scharffenberg(Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1986), pp. 144–145.

44. PaulRequadt, ‘Rilkes Venedigdichtung’, inRilke in neuer Sicht, ed.KateHamburger(Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne and Mainz: Kohlhammer, 1971), pp. 38–62 (p. 38).

45. ‘San Marco’ takes an individual building as the starting-point for reflections on thehistory of Venice more generally.

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46. The four poems in the ‘Fahrten’ section of Advent, for example, take up traditionalVenetian motifs – gondola rides, palaces, morbidity – in order to create a fairlysuperficial impression of atmosphere. Rainer Maria Rilke, Samtliche Werke, ed. theRilke Archive, with Ruth Sieber-Rilke, 6 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1955;repr. 1987), I, pp. 116–118.

47. This was Rilke’s third stay in Venice. He had visited previously in March 1897 andin August 1904. See Ingeborg Schnack, Rainer Maria Rilke: Chronik seines Lebensund seines Werkes 1875–1926, 2nd, rev. edn, (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1990), pp.56–57, 171, 292–294; Bernard Dieterle, ‘Italien’, in Rilke-Handbuch, ed. ManfredEngel, pp. 88–98 (pp. 94–96); John Sandford, Landscape and Landscape Imagery inR. M. Rilke (Leeds: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1980), pp. 30–35; Joachim W.Storck, ‘Rilkes fruhestes Venedig-Erlebnis’, Blatter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 16/17(1989–1990), 19–32; Richard Exner, ‘ ‘‘Dieser Streifen Zwischen-Welt’’ und derWille zur Kunst’, Blatter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 16/17 (1989–1990), 57–68.

48. See Schnack, Rainer Maria Rilke, p. 293. Rilke was to pursue more detailed studiesof Venetian history in 1912. See his letter of 1 March 1912 to Lou Andreas-Salome.Briefwechsel, pp. 264–267.

49. K. Deleu, ‘R. M. Rilke: Venezianischer Morgen’, Handelingen 12 (1958), 43–52(44).

50. Panofsky, ‘Die Perspektive als ‘‘symbolische form’’ ’, p. 99.51. Deleu (‘R. M. Rilke: ‘‘Venezianischer Morgen’’ ’, p. 45) discusses this aspect of the

poem in detail.52. Ibid., 52.53. Manfred Koch (‘Mnemotechnik des Schonen’, pp. 236–237) reads this development

as a metaphor for a human subject’s daily emergence from sleep.54. See for example, KA, I, p. 985; Wolfgang G. Muller, ‘Neue Gedichte/Der Neuen

Gedichte anderer Teil’, in Rilke-Handbuch, pp. 296–318 (p. 313). John Sandfordsees the contrast in gendered terms, describing the summer Venice of ‘Veneziani-scher Morgen’ as ‘the female city, glittering and beautiful, a permanent embodi-ment of fickle transience’, while ‘Spatherbst in Venedig’ portrays the ‘hard, active,male Venice’. Sandford, Landscape and Landscape Imagery in R. M. Rilke, pp. 32–33.

55. Volker Klotz shows how the optical impression of a sonnet is not supported by thesound structure of the poem, in ‘Roter Faden im Gedicht?’, Sprache im technischenZeitalter 33 (1995), 200–234 (222–224).

56. See Rilke’s comments on his discovery of Venice’s gardens in his letter to Giselavon der Heydt (24 March 1908), Briefe an Karl und Elisabeth von der Heydt, p. 149.

57. See, for example, Bernhard Blume, ‘Rilkes ‘‘Spatherbst in Venedig’’ ’, WirkendesWort 10 (1960), 345–354; Ernst Rose, ‘Rainer Maria Rilke’s ‘‘Spatherbst inVenedig’’: An Interpretation’, The Germanic Review 16 (1941), 68–71; EgonSchwarz, ‘Zu Rilkes neuem Gedicht ‘‘Spatherbst in Venedig’’ ’, Wirkendes Wort 16(1966), 273–275. August Stahl argues that the poem is inspired by two paintings byTintoretto which Rilke had seen in the Hof-Museum in Vienna. ‘Zu einigen, auchfruheren Bildgedichten Rilkes’, Modern Austrian Literature 15 (1982), 317–335(320–321).

58. KA, III: Prosa und Dramen, ed. August Stahl, pp. 624–625.59. Blume, ‘Rilkes ‘‘Spatherbst in Venedig’’ ’, 349.


60. Schwarz, ‘Zu Rilkes neuem Gedicht’, 275.61. Blume, ‘Rilkes ‘‘Spatherbst in Venedig’’ ’, 353–354.62. Kate Hamburger identifies a ‘Verraumlichung der Zeit’ in Rilke’s work. ‘Die Ka-

tegorie des Raums in Rilkes Lyrik’, Blatter der Rilke-Gesellschaft 15 (1988), 35–42(35). Winfried Eckel sees ‘Rettung’ as the central idea in Rilke’s aesthetics at thetime of Neue Gedichte, and defines this process as, amongst other things, a trans-formation of time into space. Wendung: Zum Prozeß der poetischen Reflexion imWerk Rilkes (Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1994), p. 104. L. McGlashaneven goes so far as to deny that there is any progression in time in the NeueGedichte, arguing that Rilke’s main interest is in spatial relationships. ‘Rilke’s NeueGedichte’, German Life and Letters 12 (1958–1959), 81–101 (95).

63. Michael Kahl has shown how Rilke strives to use language in such a way as toachieve the ‘Synthese von Raum und Zeit’ which he perceives in Rodin’s work.Lebensphilosophie und Asthetik: Zu Rilkes Werk 1902–1910 (Freiburg im Breisgau:Rombach, 1999), pp. 59, 65–76. Martina Lauster has examined Rilke’s use of thesonnet form to create such a synthesis, in ‘Stone Imagery and the Sonnet Form:Petrarch, Michelangelo, Baudelaire, Rilke’, Comparative Literature 45 (1993), 146–174.

Helen Bridge. Born 1972. D.Phil (Oxon.). Lecturer in German at the University ofExeter. Recent publications: Women’s Writing and Historiography in the GDR (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2002); ‘Rilke and the Modern Portrait’, Modern LanguageReview 99 (2004), 681–695.

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place into poetry : time and space in rilke's neue gedichte

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