RAINER MARIA RILKE

if one believes in it and demands everything from it”’ ; when he

was only twenty-four he had said: “my work remains the

highest court of appeal, and before the glance of a bestowing

hour all ordinary duties must be dumb” (Letters 1899-1902,
. 10).

Rodin also helped the poet to look at things, or rather to see
things. ““What he sees and surrounds with sight is always to him
the only thing, the world in which everything is happening ;
when he moulds a hand, it is alone in space, and nothing exists
but a hand ; and God in six days made only a hand and poured
out the waters round it and arched the heavens above it; and
rested upon it when all was completed, and there was a glory
and a hand” (quoted by Lou Andreas-Salomé in her Memoirs,
p- 36). Rodin was but confirming what the poet had already in
part learnt from Jacobsen, Cézanne and others: to concentrate
on the object (to Rilke always the Thing) rather than on his
feelings about that object, not to wrestle with it as Jacob wrestled
with the angel, until he should force it to tell its name and so
yield its secret power, but to wait upon it with infinite patience
and concentration, to gaze at—or rather into—it as Blake gazed
at his knot of wood, ““until it hurt”. Readers of Malte will recall
the saying : “He was a poet and hated the approximate.”

NoTE 7, PAGE 16

Since writing the previous letter Rilke had been full of
creative activity : the “bestowing hour”” came to him and within
a single week in April he wrote the whole of the third part of the
Book of Hours, the Book of Poverty and Death in which his horror
of Paris finds release in poetry.

NoOTE 8, PAGE 17
This is one of the shortest and slightest of Jacobsen’s Six Tales,
a little reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s fairy stories.
NOTE 9, PAGE 18

Richard Dehmel (1863-1920) was a poet of vigour and real
creative genius, neither of which was under adequate control.

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