ABSTRACT
The stern command in the last line of “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is gently lengthened in the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus as if we were given time to change our lives, narratively, within each poem and from one to the next, to labor through this mortal transformation and to accept that wholeness is both life and death, composition and decomposition, form and fragmentation. But all of it always remains unaccomplished among us the living, always as yet to be endured, always as yet to be suffered. “And we,” Rilke asks in one of the uncollected poems, “not yet/finished to nothing” “noch nicht/fertig zu nichts” (798). In the thirteenth of the Orphic sonnets (second series), this existential insight is authoritatively and most literally reiterated in the call to be: “Sei—und wisse zugleich des Nicht-Seins Bedingung” “Be—and know at the same time the condition of non-being,” which amounts to an existential imperative insisting, as the poem goes on, that fully to be is to be “ahead of all parting,” it is to be “ever dead in Eurydice” (703)—but not yet, not abruptly but gently—for the condition of non-being is “the infinite ground of your most inward rhythm” (703). In Rilke’s German, the word “Bedingung” (condition) rhymes with “Schwingung” which I have translated into “rhythm.” The rhyme in German underscores the intimate association of the condition of non-being with the embodied rhythm of one’s being. Rilke’s angels serenely, unknowingly perform this unity.
