Freudian and Pastoral
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing FREUDIAN AND PASTORAL BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Rainer Maria Rilke never deliberately drew upon the events of his autobiography as material for his poems. He believed that the...
...Through "the Duino Elegies" Rilke purged himself (and, it may be argued, 20th-century poetry) of looking at our world through the perspective of the next...
...Out of his alienation, Rilke conveyed the spirit of an era that had begun to see the universe as more indifferent than approving or hostile: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies...
...His approach can be summed up by the conclusion to Idyll XXII, which announces that "of all offerings made to the gods, the most handsome are poems...
...The Selected Poetry ofRainer Maria Rilke is invaluable as an introduction to a poet whose influence continues to grow...
...Theocritus delighted in portraying friends, whether shepherd and goatherd, or civilized matrons of Alexandria...
...They pass carefree hours whittling pipes, holding song competitions and dallying at erotic games...
...He really seems to have grown up on the Sicilian hills he described...
...One might conclude that such poetry should be left in the dead original...
...Working at the Library of Alexandria, he entertained the highly cultivated court of Ptolemy II by elegizing the loves of Daphnis and Amaryllis playing their pan-pipes as they tended sheep upon Aegean hills...
...Marie Antoinette cuddled lambs in her jeweled shepherdess' cottage, the Petit Trianon, for example, and the family of Tsar Nicholas II wore silk peasant's shirts...
...Religious classicists themselves are not immune to a longing for a time when everything was permitted because pagans, not knowing the Law, could not know sin...
...In the Introduction to Theocritus: Idylls and Epigrams (Atheneum, 145 pp., $ 17.95), Daryl Hine explains that despite the naivete of the theme, this poet displayed all "the best, or some might say, the worst characteristics of academic...
...The weather is always temperate, too, in pastorals (a circumstance less unrealistic in the Mediterranean world than in our gothic climate...
...His tone, however, was far from impersonal...
...Pastorals appeal deeply to decadent societies...
...Is it any less difficult for lovers...
...Jaded courtiers have traditionally affected being rustics...
...Theocritus, inventor of pastoral poetry, lived in the third century b.c.—the last era of classical Greece...
...Above it/Echoed the voice of the dead boy: 'Lovers, rejoice...
...Not angels, not humans, /and already the knowing animals are aware / that we are not really at home in/our interpreted world...
...A statue fell on the offender at the baths: "The water grew crimson...
...Besides the stilted diction that too often clouds classical renditions, most scholars have lapsed into dialect in misguided efforts to reproduce Theocritus' Doric...
...Mitchell's translation is, on the whole, exceedingly accurate and clear (though more faithful to the sound of the blank verse than to the rhymed poems...
...Facing German and French texts allow the English to assist readers who know a little of those tongues...
...Hine's skill in conveying the sunny atmosphere can only be appreciated by comparing this book with the many previous attempts at setting Theocritus into English...
...Let dis-dainers be loving, for Love is a just god.'" In a poetic essay that forms an "Epilogue: To Theocritus," Hine imitates the manner of the Greek poet to pinpoint the underlying fascination of the Idylls—their glorification of friendship...
...In our own day, plenty of upper-middle class men and women have retired to the woods to raise goats and make pots...
...against such a powerful current you cannot move...
...in the universe/ where he feels more powerfully, you are a novice...
...shameless artifice...
...Tell him of Things...
...Born in Prague in 1875, shortly before Austria annexed it from Bohemia, he was, almost by birthright, a man without a country...
...The disdainful/One is destroyed...
...In his "old-world frock coat," he looked back toward the absolutes of romanticism, while at the same time exalting the temporal as the only true subject of our time...
...He knew what actually inspired the shepherd to work and sing: Poverty's the only thing, Diophantus, that wakens the arts and Crafts...
...With age his methods became more subtle, but he remained homeless...
...Woe to the cruel youth who drove his young male suitor to suicide in Idyll XXIII...
...His poetry speaks continually of being a stranger and a sojourner: "Ah, whom can we ever turn to/in our need...
...But the surpassing strength of this collection is the way it places Rilke's persisting concerns in perspective...
...Rilke observed that in our imperfect realm unselfish attachments eventually lead to disappointment...
...In the Introduction, "Looking for Rilke," poet Robert Haas notes that one reason Rilke may have omitted his own circumstances from his verse is that his career sounds like an allegory...
...For my call is always filled with departure...
...Under the warm Sicilian sun, his herdsmen and nymphs live on apples, honey, cheese, and home-brewed wine...
...Not sol Hine manages to make Theocritus talk in witty English, sometimes formal, often colloquial...
...Companionship apparently reinforced Rilke's isolation...
...Classical writers, by contrast, were idealists...
...Every generation has longed to return to some golden age...
...But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate...
...His ideas have been seminal to postmodernist American poets attempting to escape the domination of Eliot and Pound...
...Late in life he also turned away from his native German and wrote in French because, he explained, it contained the word "absence...
...Moreover, he has closely approximated Greek prosody in difficult dactylic hexameters and syllabics—forms that in all except the most skillful hands sound too foreign...
...So show him / Something simple, which, formed over generations, /lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze...
...Rilkian angels are representatives of the eternal, who, complete in themselves, need nothing...
...Rilke seemed to speak out of a deep recess, rendering audible some impressions we recognize from our own thoughts, the ones we might find too disturbing or private to verbalize: He was the first poet of the Freudian age...
...As such, they are ultimately less than humans, since they cannot experience the losses that make such an impression on us: Don't think that I'm wooing...
...Daryl Hine, who labored six years over Theocritus: Idylls and Epigrams, carefully avoids the usual pitfalls...
...Even friendship becomes "that longed-after,/mildly disillusioning presence, which the solitary heart / so painfully meets...
...In advanced adolescence he expressed his estrangement by hawking his poems on street corners, wearing, in the description of a contemporary, "an old-world frock coat, black cravat, and a broad-brimmed hat, clasping a long-stemmed iris and smiling, oblivious of the passerby, a forlorn smile into ineffable horizons...
...In the "Sonnets to Orpheus" (of which Mitchell has included too few) Rilke abandoned his celestial creatures altogether, and raised a mortal lament to "a constellation of our voice,/glittering, into the pure nocturnal sky...
...and more than a craftsman's interest in form...
...Their sexuality is polymorphous and, since they are denizens of Eden, innocent...
...Furthermore, unlike the playful demigods, PanandPriapus, Eros was acknowledged as a dangerous deity, whose powers were not to be mocked with impunity...
...His intimate style is captured by Stephen Mitchell in a new translation of The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (Random House, 356 pp., $25.00...
...it is want that instructs human beings to toil, as their constant Cares do not even allow proletarians any repose, but Were one to doze for a bit of the night, his insistent and pressing Worries would suddenly throng in upon him, disturbing his slumber...
...That passage, from the first of the 10 famous "Duino Elegies," articulates Rilke's conviction that man is naturally lonely...
...He will stand astonished...
...Like Wallace Stevens, who knew that "Death is the mother of beauty," Rilke proclaimed that in our time it suffices to laud what is transient, and "us, the most transient of all...
...Theocritus' idylls were written to appeal to over-civilized Alexandrians, surfeited with their own high culture...
...He believed that the vocation of poets ought to be "transforming themselves into hard words...
...The ancient Greeks dreamed of a bucolic period when history was young and shepherds and gods disported themselves in woods and pastures new...
...verse: a verbal ingenuity carried often to obscure and facetious lengths...
...Rilke came to find the sublime too remote a subject...
...This was especially the case after his experiences in World War I and in psychoanalysis (he had been a patient of Freud's in 1913...
...Ultimately, man instructs the angel...
...adeptness at the lyrical or panegyrical set-piece...
...His rootlessness was enforced by a bizarre childhood—his mother dressed him as a girl until his father sent him away to a brutal military academy...
...Angel, and even if I were, you would not come...
...Like another citizen of Prague, Franz Kafka, Rilke preferred to conduct his relationships at a distance, through letters, or poems...
...Nevertheless, for all its lyrical charm, existence in Theocritus' meadows is not always idyllic...
...Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one,/you can't impress him with glorious emotion...
...After a year of marriage, he and his sculptor-wife agreed to live apart to allow themselves "artistic freedom...
...a certain detachment or dryness of tone in the treatment of subjects comic or pathetic but never truly tragic...
Vol. 66 • March 1983 • No. 6