LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

  

century before him (Italian Journey Nov. 1786); and Albrecht
Diirer had said Rilkean things about humility before the object,
two hundred years even before that. Schiller describes Nature
as “voluntary being, the arising of things by themselves, their
existence according to their individual and immutable laws. . . .
What we love in them is the quiet creative life, the gentle
working out of themselves, the subsistence according to their
own laws, the inner necessity, the eternal oneness with them-
selves. They are what we were ; they are what we are again to
become. . . . They are therefore at the same time delineation of
our lost childhood, which remains eternally the most precious
thing to us; therefore they fill us with a certain melancholy.
They are also delineations of our highest completion in the
ideal, therefore they exalt us to a sublime emotion” (On Naive
and Sentimental Poetry). In the middle of the nineteenth century
Mérike was attempting to solve, in his “thing poems”, exactly
the problem that faced Rilke when he was writing the Book
of Images. ‘

The first stage, for Rilke, was the simple experiencing of
Things, through love and patience ; the poet speaks quietly about
things, rather than listens to their secret. Later this subjective
approach yields to pure objectivity ; the accidents of the Things
fall away, the substance stands revealed as pure Being, a hypo-
static realization of the unutterable. The task of the artist, in
Rilke’s view, was so to transform the visible into the invisible,
the outward into the inward, that he would finally himself
become world. The Things that began by needing human
deliverance, now support and nourish mankind ; they mediate
between man and not-man, and help the artist not indeed to see
the beatific vision, but (to anticipate for one moment a discussion
of Rilke’s theology) to create it, to work upon God. Thus Things
speak to man of God. In Martin Buber’s phrase the I-If has given
place, for ever, to the I-Thou. There are features of this private
poetic gnosticism which recall some of the less orthodox descrip-
tions of the mystic scale, as well as the stages prescribed by
Diotima (Plato’s, not Holderlin’s) for the ascent of love. In the
third and final stage, the distinction between Thing and poet
appears to have broken down, and by a species of divine

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