Dowrick, Stephanie: In the company of Rilke. Allen & Unwin, 2009. ISBN 978-1-74237-180-1
The mesmerising, magniloquent poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke continues to exert its almost religious influence over readers. Rilke makes an entire world of meaning out of a personal vision, using religious language and images.
The valuable and main achievement of this book (subtitled 'Why a 20th-century visionary poet speaks so eloquently to 21st-century readers yearning for inwardness, beauty and spiritual connection') is its description and commendation of the reading of poetry as a satisfying and necessary practice, available to anyone.
Dowrick identifies Rilke as gifted with 'negative capability'. I know of several interpretations of what Keats meant by 'negative capability', and Dowrick herself definitely fits one of them: the ability to objectify in words her own experiences. In this case, Dowrick's experience of reading poetry. Poetry, its intimacy, its immediacy and intensity, its 'irrational truths', are encountered, examined and praised.
Dowrick is also good on translation and what languages owe to one another. She sees translation as a serious reciprocal arrangement. This takes on special force in her discussion of Rilke's use of the concept das Offene, where she argues persuasively for the English word open. Das Offene can mean the spaciousness of landscapes, but also the space or inner-world, the silent communal space that courses through all beings. Rilke's poems dwell on the inwardness of the soul, the inwardness that narrative and psychology cannot categorise.
In 'Archaic Torso of Apollo' Rilke famously exclaims. 'You must change your life'. This is a fundamental challenge of the spiritual life and Dowrick, who has made a career of teaching spiritual lessons, sees that 'to change one's life (one's vision of life and therefore one's living of it) is not a choice; it has become inevitable'.
She shows how 'Rilke achieves a reaarangement of our usual concepts and limitations using a writing register that is far more often sensual and emotional than it is abstract.' Granted, Dowrick does not use his poetry as 'scripture', but her sustained seriousness can sometimes be too reverent. Though she acknowledges that the poet was himself open to irreverent treatment, when she quotes Auden's brilliant depiction of Rilke as 'The Santa Claus of Solitude', we are left with the sense that Dowrick is not amused.
Rilke demands primarily an intuitive response: our responses force consciousness of our own inner world.
You darkness that I come from,
I love you