This is what Rilke knew to the inner marrow of his bones. The paper, the ink, the fingers, moving as in Fitzgerald’s sappy Persian poem. Having writ, they move on to other writing. Knowing that his words cannot be canceled. Because, I believe, Rilke felt himself to be a failure and a fraud except when he was writing. Then he was the writer who he wished was the man he wasn’t. Then he was the lover he hoped could—as we say now—commit. Rilke understood his shortcomings so thoroughly that his knowing was a shortcoming. But on the page, in a poem, the contradictions which were his chief affliction could be reconciled. There he could answer every question with “I praise.”Tell us, poet, what do you do?—I praise.But the dreadful, the monstrous, and their ways,how do you stand them, suffer it all?—I praise.But the anonymous, featureless days,how, poet, can you ask them to call?—I praise.What chance have you, in so many forms,under each mask, to speak a true phrase?—I praise.And that the calm as well as the crazedknow you like star and storm?—because I praise.1Those dashes read to me like replacements for “nevertheless.”
