Rilke’s Roses

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926) was one the early German modernist poets - and obsessed with roses.  He wrote about roses all of his life, but intensively in the last four years of his life - in French. He moved to Paris in 1902 eventually working for Rodin, and was one of the few poets who was moderately financially successful, with his Book of Hours selling throughout his life.  He was also patronized and supported by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Chateau de Muzot in the upper Rhone Valley, was his home in the last years of his life, chosen partly for the chance to cultivate his roses in the garden there. A myth surrounding his death says that he died from an infection that developed after cutting his hands on a thorn while gathering roses from his garden for a young Egyptian woman.  His tomb bears the epitaph:

Rose, o pure contradiction, desire

to be no one’s sleep beneath so many lids.

David Need in his excellent book, Roses, The Late French Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke writes:

“The basic relationship between theme (interiority) and gesture (exteriority) that Rilke worked out in the figure of the rose, was consistent with the idea of serial or sequential stages of a primary motif, each of which augments the other.

Rilke’s Roses calls us into a more intimate relationship with things, asks us to consider the material world as sister of our imagination, rather than nameless patient of our ideas.

XIX

Because it is not work

to be a rose, it’s said.

XXVI

Do we know how she lives?

One of her days, without doubt,

is all the earth, all

the infinity of this moment.

And last but not least, from The Bowl of Roses from New Poems - 1907

And this: that one opens like an eyelid

and beneath it lie nothing but more eyelids,

closed, as if, in tenfold slumber,

to have subdued one’s inward sight.