Letters to a Poet

By Rainer Maria Rilke

I received this book from my niece Hilary, who is more a cherished friend than a niece.  Over the past two years since my move to the Minneapolis, we were once a week dining partners.  Then in the summer of 2014 she was my house guest, along with my son Jack.  We all grew close in spirit.  They being young were pursuing careers and lives that would eventually send us in separate directions.  Our spirits will forever be entwined.  Hilary an artist appreciates that I write poetry, a form of literary art one could say.  She left this book as a motivator for me to continue writing, especially through tough lonely times.

The book is merely ten letters that Rilke has written to a friend of his who is a young soldier of the military.  Rilke is an Austro-Hungarian German of the 19^th century, with a French pen,  whose critics claim him to be ineffable, a mystic.  In his indirect response and merely coincidence, Rilke writes a letters to his protégé espousing the values of poetry’s seed.  Poetry in my mind and apparently Rilke’s is intended to convey a thought that transcends words and therefore falls into the category of art.  So where is the rub?  Words in a scientific world state ‘black & white’ fact with the intent to convey a physical observation.  In life there is more than science, there feeling, the internalization of physical observation. There is meaning.  Poetry allows for the meaning of life to be expressed in a way, through metaphor and abstract.  That said, being critical is counter-intuitive to Rilke.

Rilkes’ ten letters, ironically ten, have two common themes.   The first is apologetic for tardy responses to the ‘Young Poets’ letters.  There is in my mind no relevance to the Rilke’s intended message.  It only makes this short book a little longer to read.  Also, in this collection of letters the reader does not have the perspective of reading the corresponding letters from his recipient.  One could only conclude that the ‘Young Poet’ is a poet by nature, stuck in a military career that hopefully will see an end.  This being the character of the book only adds to the mystique and method of Rilke.  The reader is left to internalize in his own first person to draw a relevance of pertinent meaning.  The second theme is to use the time spent alone, the seclusion from society, to go within.  In my words Rilke consistently recommends his reader to leverage the loneliness of military life to go within, for there is where you find true meaning, yourself, God.

His last letter to me is my favorite.  I’ll  provide an excerpt to give example of Rilke’s lyrical prose.

The silence must be immense where there is space for such sound and movements.  And when one realizes that the presence of the distant sea and its melody is added to all this, perhaps as the innermost tone in this prehistoric harmony, then I can only wish that you trustingly and patiently allow that grand solitude to work in you.  It is no longer possible to be erased from your life.  It shall be imminent in all that you experience and all that you do.  It will act as an anonymous influence, akin to how ancestral blood constantly moves and merges with our own links with that of an individual, never to be unlinked.  It is gently decisive at each crossroad of our life.

In keeping with the theme to not be critical, and rather to be a participant in the spirit of Rilke; I close this review with my very first poem.  I was eighteen at the time, a student living in a tepee, at Northwestern Michigan College.  I was sitting on a hillside in Leelanau County over looking Grand Traverse Bay.  The poem is still forty years later, untitled.

Sitting along the bay’s shore

My feelings relate to the moody waters

Sitting with just my thoughts and I

And the calm waters reflecting the blue sky.

My soul and the bay relaxed and content

Exchanging a piece of mind for a touch of beauty

Then as the wind raises the waters in contempt

Society’s frustrations stir my thought with good intent.

The bay must live with the wind,

And I must live with society.

So together we rock and roll.

Flocculating to and fro, harmonizing with our foe.

Eventually everything is calm

The bay and I writing another song.