There is no special resonance in revisiting words written exactly a century ago, but Rilke’s ability to transform the ordinary into something transcendent has not lost anything of its power in the intervening years since the Neue Gedichte – ‘New Poems’ – were written, in 1907 and 1908. Their title, plain though it is, reflects the change of direction that Rilke felt he was taking, towards a new subtlety and intimacy.
I have set these three linked poems as a short unbroken cycle, the introspection of the first two opening into new directions in the third. The Island was composed in 2007 as a gift for Claire Booth and the Nash Ensemble. I am grateful to Carcanet Press for permission to use Stephen Cohn’s exceptional translation.
The Island in the North Sea
i. the island
The tide wipes out the path across the flats,
everything everywhere now looks alike.
The nearby island keeps its eyes tight shut.
Enclosing it on every side, the dyke
contains and stultifies the islanders,
born into sleep in which they will confuse
all worlds with one another. Words are sparse
and when they speak their only sentences
are like short epitaphs upon the weird
things, water-washed and unexplained,
which came to them and stayed. Objects like these
from childhood on are all that meets their eyes :
things inconsiderate, improvident,
which only underline their solitude.
ii. the farms
As if it lay within a ring, a crater
of the moon, a dam surrounds each farm.
Their gardens, dressed alike, have wind-combed hair
like orphans roughly schooled by storm
and daily saddened by the deaths it brings.
The people keep indoors and stare for hours
at crooked mirrors showing exotic things
among familiar objects on their dressers.
At evening, someone’s son might stroll outdoors
and draw some chords from his harmonica –
a wailing melody as soft as tears
he once heard playing in a foreign harbour.
Upon the outer dyke a sheep appears
larger than life and almost ominous.
iii. the star
What lies within is near. All else lies far
away. The things within, so busy, overfull
and everyday, stay inexpressible.
It is as if the island were a star
too small and space, fiercely dispassionate,
had crushed it unaware. It circles on
and unilluminated and unheard
proceeds alone
through darkness in an orbit of its own
intent on making end to all of this,
continuing blindly and outside the course
of galaxies, of other stars or suns