RAINER MARIA RILKE: TRANSITIONS

‘Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes’, a narrative poem in free verse of ninety-six lines, is among the greatest of Rilke's Neue Gedichte (New Poems) of 1907, the first collection of his maturity. The poem was inspired by the depiction of the three mythological figures on an Attic stele dated c. 400 BC, a Roman copy of which Rilke saw, probably the one in the Louvre. (The full stops in the title allude to the mason's craft.) The poem also opens the view on the Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) written between 1912 and 1922, the consummation of Rilke's entire work.

Orpheus, ‘the fox roaming in the wilderness’, belongs to the oldest strain of Greek mythology. The Muse Calliope was his mother, Apollo is sometimes mentioned as his father, but he is a hero, not a god. It is he who introduced a religion of ecstasy without intoxication into the world. Pindar names him as ‘the father of song’; the lyre is his emblem. ‘Poiein’ (hence our ‘poetry’) is the making of something, a concrete creative activity: with his music Orpheus drew the trees from the rocks, made the rivers change their course, charmed wild beasts into submission – in short, ancient myths invoke on his behalf the activity we call ‘perlocutionary speech acts’. Orpheus's wife, the nymph Eurydice, while fleeing from Aristeus, was bitten by a snake and died. By his music Orpheus softens the hearts of Pluto and Persephone, rulers of the underworld, and is allowed to bring Eurydice, guided by the god Hermes, back among the living.