LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

NOTE 22, PAGE 41

Rilke was happy and creative in Sweden, and some of his
finest poems, including Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes and the Birth
of Venus, were conceived there. But he could write later: “I
went then to friends in Sweden, who offered me everything that
the most open hospitality can give, but they still could not give
me one thing, that limitless solitude, that regarding cach day as
a lifetime, that oneness with everythmg, in 2 word the spacious-
ness whlch one cannot see the end of, in the midst of which one
stands surrounded by the uncountable” (Letters 1902-1906,
p- 309). Rilke never learnt the lesson of Goethe’s Wilhelm
Meister : “Here is thy America, here or nowhere !”’

NoOTE 23, PAGE 42

This was either a set of three poems, Invitation, The Last Supper
(which he wrote after a visit to Leonardo’s tempera painting of
the “Cenacolo” at Milan), and The Confirmands (inspired by
the sight of white-veiled little girls in Paris in the spring of the
previous year) ; or more probably The Lay of the Love and Death
of Cornet Christopher Rilke. Both of these were published from
Prague at this time.

NOTE 24, PAGE 42

The previous nine letters were all written within a space of a
year and a half] and there had now been an interval of four years,
during which Rilke had travelled extensively and written much.
He had published both parts of his New Poems, written the first
two of the Requiems, and almost finished Malte Laurids Brigge ;
and he was on the threshold of perhaps his most creative period,
fortified by the financial security which he owed to his friend
and publisher, Kippenberg. He was back in Paris, which was—
if anything can so be called—his headquarters ; it cannot be called
his home—indeed, it must be remembered that Rilke was in a
real sense homeless all his life. Besides his native tongue and
French he knew some Czech, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Danish
and Swedish, though not English. “Everything English is far
off and alien to me ; I do not know the language of that country,

65