Deeply Mysterious and Worthy of Reflection

from Rilke's Book of Hours
from "The Book of Pilgrimage"
Rainer Maria Rilke
Tr. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

So God, you are the one
who comes after.

It is sons who inherit,
while fathers die.
Sons stand and bloom.

You are the heir.

II, 9

I don't even know where to start with this.  The logic is so alien and yet so right that reading this opens many doors.  In what way, precisely is God the heir?  What is it that he inherits?  How is it that He comes after.  And yet-- "I am the alpha and omega,  the beginning and the end, the first and the last."  So not only is He father, but He is also the last, the one to whom all things must come.

As I said, there is a logic here that makes the poem like a little puzzle box, fascinating, mysterious, and worth the time to think about carefully.

Comments

  1. AnonymousApril 16, 2011 at 3:51 PM

    Hmm, lovely. It's almost a reversal of Christian thinking, isn't it? God isn't first. He's not figurehead from which all proceeds. Instead, there are two heirs. Sons who inherits life from fathers, as well as life's attendant blessings and curses, and God, who appears to be identified by Rilke as perpetual youthful blooming, who inherits its attendant glories of father, son, and life ever-changing. Life first, God second. Maybe. K

    ReplyDelete
  2. StevenApril 18, 2011 at 7:18 AM

    Dear Kevin,

    A lovely interpretation. I'm not certain how it fits in with the whole corpus--but this is certainly one way of viewing it, and a deeply mysterious way at that. Mystical, perhaps.

    Thank you.

    shalom,

    Steven

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Another Queen of Night

I post this because whenever I recommend to anyone the Queen of Night, I always recommend it in the Lucia Popp rendition.  It's a matter of personal taste, but what I love about this is that it is somewhat slower than the other versions and as a result, it would seem to me somewhat more difficult to perform and sustain--those high notes in which the Queen's voice becomes the Magic Flute itself are rounded, full, and deep while remaining light and airy. I have read some rather severe criticism of this ritardando; and while it may or may not reflect Mozart's intent, it is certainly within the options for staging.  It creates a real vocal showpiece from what is already a magnificent example of same. It really is an amazing example of a virtuoso composition sung by a virtuoso voice.  All of which should not be taken to mean that I do not truly appreciate the version posted earlier by Diana Damrau, it's just nice to see what a difference tempo can make. I think we can take
Read more

Angel Time--Anne Rice

Review copy received 11/04/09 From the time of its announcement, I had been looking forward to this new book by Anne Rice.  As I say in every review, I am not a die-hard Anne Rice fan.  I found Interview with a Vampire interesting and intriguing, but in hindsight, must lay much of the responsibility of the current vampire as victim and love-object obsession at its feet.  After that, I had no patience with her writing until Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. In that book I observed a kind of control and authorial voice that I had not seen in any of the books I had sampled since Interview .  So too with Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana. Perhaps because of the subject matter, perhaps for other reasons, these two books seemed to witness a level of control of language and story that the other books did not.  Gone were messy florid passages that lavished two, three, four paragraphs on the description of the lace and flounce of a jabot.  These new books were spare, polished, poetic. The
Read more