Sonnets to Orpheus

Notes

NOTES FIRST PART 1-2. The double subject, god and girl, is introduced. Both exist in the imagination, and the "problem" of the sequence seems to be whether the girl's death, as well as her existence, is something the god can "sing" through the medium of the poet. 3-9. Exfoliating, the sequence explores definitions of singing, suffering, and their interaction. The interdependence of life and death is demonstrated and affirmed from various angles. 10. An exemplary subject, in terms of preceding themes: Roman sarcophagi that have served for a long time as watering troughs. 11. Unity and separation, in riding and in the imagining of figures among the stars. 12—15. The "fruit" group. The duality of existence is well illustrated in the fact that fruit is both fulfillment, fruition, and the process, often mysterious , that brought that about. 16. Addressed to a dog. Somewhat jarring as a transition from the first fifteen sonnets. The dog-master relationship of separate but interdependent realities implies a way of understanding the human-divine relationship explored in the sequence as a whole. 17. The "fruit" motif combined with the Orpheus theme by means of a timescape. 18. First "machine" sonnet. The speaker worries about the future, given the increasing dominance of mechanism. 19. Reaffirmation. 20. A memory now used as an offering to the deity. Again, the animal to human relation seems to help define the human to god relation. 21. First "spring" sonnet. Renewal's place in the scheme of things is now easy to perceive and celebrate. 22. Temporalrelativity. 23. Another "machine" sonnet, provoked by early aviation. Imaginative flying is more meaningful. 24. Deus versus machina. 25-26. Again, the young dancer who died and the god, who also died but survived as the spirit of poetry, are paired as in the two opening sonnets. SECOND PART 1—4. Celebratory sonnets, one on breathing, two on mirrors, one on the unicorn. These poems stand on the shoulders of the accomplishments 115 and definitionsof Part One, confidently knowledgeable about the dual world they present. 5-7. The "flower" sequence. ComparTable to the fruit group of Part One, though again able to "assume" more from the reader. 8-9. Poems that seem at first glance sharply contrasted in their treatments of innocence and suffering, Rilke is taking large risks here, and it is easy to misunderstand him. 10. A "machine" sonnet that is less querulous than those in the first part. The confidence of the sestet is particularly impressive. 11. More riskiness. Rilke is not defending hunting and killing, but trying to make a place for them as facts in the existence he has defined as his poetic terrain. 12. A carefully placed summary. Homage to Ovid, possibly also to Petrarch (who punned on his Laura's name as "laurel"). 13. Another summary. The wide arc that Rilke swings here takes in poet, god, and reader. 14. Flowers and gravity. Compare I, 4. 15. The ancient fountain corresponds to the sarcophagi-troughs of I, 10. The two sonnets demonstrate the imaginative mastery with which Rilke combines the material and spiritual worlds in the sequence. 16. Another startling definition. 17. Recapitulationof the fruit and flower themes. 18. Again, matter and spirit, visible and invisible, defined as a unity, with images from earlier sonnets: dancer, tree, fruit, pitcher, blossom. 19. Social misery enters the sequence through the image of the beggar. 20. Again, familiar images in a magnificent summary. 21. It helps to recall that oriental carpets are abstract depictions of ideal gardens. 22. Distinguishingamong kinds of excess. Haste is mostly waste. Architectural ornaments—caryatids, bells, a column supporting nothing—are another matter. 23. Unusual intimacy between poet and reader. Or poem and reader. Recapitulation of praise theme and of the paradoxical sense of existence. 24. Spring again, and renewal. 25. One of the best spring poems ever written. 26. Even as he "prays" for the transformation of suffering to beauty, noise to music, the speaker is accomplishing it. After Orpheus was torn apart, his head and lyre, carried down the river to a sacred cave, continued to make music. 27. Death, like Time, may well be an illusion we suffer from instead of a terrible reality. 28. The dancer and the god, mortal and immortal, come together. They also come and go. 29. Addressed most of all to the reader. 116 Other books by David Young Poems Sweating Out the...