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In the Company of Rilke: Why a 20th-Century Visionary Poet Speaks So Eloquently to 21st-Century Readers
Connecting to your inner life through the transformative poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. In the Company of Rilke is a rare book about a rare poet. Rainer Maria Rilke was a giant of twentieth-century writing who remains a visionary voice for our own time, captivating readers not only with his brilliance but also his fearlessness about the "deepest things." Speaking through his own contradictions and ambivalences, he gives readers a profound understanding of the complex beauty of human existence. Here, questions matter more than answers. Here, a poet can speak directly to God while also doubting God. Astonishingly, this is the first major study of Rilke from a spiritual perspective, even though the greatest of Rilke' s gifts was to show how inevitably life centers upon a profound mystery-to which we can freely open ourselves. Drawing on her deep understanding of the gifts of Rilke's writings, as well as her own personal spiritual seeking, Stephanie Dowrick offers an intimate and accessible appreciation of this most exceptional poet and his transcendent work.
368 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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April 17, 2014
Rainer Maria Rilke had written this to a friend, yet he could have very well written it to Samuel Beckett, the naughty author of "Waiting for Godot" which my GR friend Hanneke said we should stop reading:
"If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame IT; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place."
Rilke can be uplifting and one can rhapsodize about his wondrous, poetic images hours on end without knowing why. This may be because, as the author wrote, in Rilke's poetry "(t)he limitations of language wrestle with what language makes possible" and where myths and symbol often supply the place of "not yet thinkable thoughts." (Leishman)
A shamanic poet, a poet of longing, the persistent seeker, a poet of life and death. He often wrote about death and the need not to fear it, to embrace it even, as we embrace life. Death, and onward to "The Open" ("an inner-world space, a silent communal space that courses through all beings")! Yet when he died of leukemia on 29 December 1926 aged 51, he was unreconciled to dying, ignoring the imminence of his death, and forbidding anyone to even mention it.
The romantic could also swoon over his idealistic conception of love and marriage--
"In marriage, the point is not to achieve a rapid union by tearing down and toppling all boundaries. Rather, in a good marriage each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude and thus shows him the greatest faith he can bestow.
"It is good, too, to love, because love is difficult. For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us: the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is mere preparation. ...Love calls to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world in himself for the sake of another person. Love is a vast, demanding claim on us, something that chooses us and calls us to vast distances."
Yet after his marriage and living briefly with his wife he left her for his solitude. He had a daughter by her whom he saw only for a few times in his entire life. When this daughter got married he didn't attend her wedding. He never saw his son-in-law, ever.
He flitted adulterously from one woman to another, becoming predictably distant to each of them after a while. But he was such a famous poet that despite his seeming emotional cruelty many of these hapless objects of his abandonment remained devoted to him and his memory even after his death.
Like Kafka (with his overbearing father) Rilke had a fucked-up childhood. He was born prematurely while his mother was still grieving the death of his older sister who died in her infancy. Longing for a daughter, his mother dressed him up like a girl.
Some saw Rilke as a mystic with a strange and powerful connection with the divine, yet he rejected his pious mother (who, upon his birth, dedicated him to the Blessed Virgin Mary) and her Christian beliefs, mocking Christ in some of his missives. But all these do not matter! The author quotes D. H. Lawrence:
"You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writer."
So Rilke's viciousness is to be forgiven.
This is not an easy book to review or to even say something about it. It may well be that anyone who attempts to do so (like myself here) will end up blabbering nonsense. I was, in fact, initially tempted to imitate the two reviewers before me who played it safe by just limiting themselves to two or three short sentences, one as cryptic as Rilke himself on a rainy day. Rilke will never be an easy read. I dare say, in fact, that maybe he himself didn't really understand what he had written; and those who write about him likewise secretly wallow in the same self-incomprehension.
But still! There are those who feel the strong need to read Rilke no matter what insurmountable obstacles there are, like my GR friend Aldrin who boldly announced recently that he will read Rilke's "The Book of Images." How true, then, and quite apt, that in Rilke's simple, priestless burial, these were the lines that were read (from his own "First Elegy")--
"Finally, those torn from us early no longer need us; losing their attachments to earthly things as naturally as one outgrows a mother's breasts. But we who need such great mysteries, for whom so often blessed progress grows from grief--could we be without them?"
"If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame IT; blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place."
Rilke can be uplifting and one can rhapsodize about his wondrous, poetic images hours on end without knowing why. This may be because, as the author wrote, in Rilke's poetry "(t)he limitations of language wrestle with what language makes possible" and where myths and symbol often supply the place of "not yet thinkable thoughts." (Leishman)
A shamanic poet, a poet of longing, the persistent seeker, a poet of life and death. He often wrote about death and the need not to fear it, to embrace it even, as we embrace life. Death, and onward to "The Open" ("an inner-world space, a silent communal space that courses through all beings")! Yet when he died of leukemia on 29 December 1926 aged 51, he was unreconciled to dying, ignoring the imminence of his death, and forbidding anyone to even mention it.
The romantic could also swoon over his idealistic conception of love and marriage--
"In marriage, the point is not to achieve a rapid union by tearing down and toppling all boundaries. Rather, in a good marriage each person appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude and thus shows him the greatest faith he can bestow.
"It is good, too, to love, because love is difficult. For one human being to love another is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us: the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is mere preparation. ...Love calls to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world in himself for the sake of another person. Love is a vast, demanding claim on us, something that chooses us and calls us to vast distances."
Yet after his marriage and living briefly with his wife he left her for his solitude. He had a daughter by her whom he saw only for a few times in his entire life. When this daughter got married he didn't attend her wedding. He never saw his son-in-law, ever.
He flitted adulterously from one woman to another, becoming predictably distant to each of them after a while. But he was such a famous poet that despite his seeming emotional cruelty many of these hapless objects of his abandonment remained devoted to him and his memory even after his death.
Like Kafka (with his overbearing father) Rilke had a fucked-up childhood. He was born prematurely while his mother was still grieving the death of his older sister who died in her infancy. Longing for a daughter, his mother dressed him up like a girl.
Some saw Rilke as a mystic with a strange and powerful connection with the divine, yet he rejected his pious mother (who, upon his birth, dedicated him to the Blessed Virgin Mary) and her Christian beliefs, mocking Christ in some of his missives. But all these do not matter! The author quotes D. H. Lawrence:
"You have to have something vicious in you to be a creative writer."
So Rilke's viciousness is to be forgiven.
This is not an easy book to review or to even say something about it. It may well be that anyone who attempts to do so (like myself here) will end up blabbering nonsense. I was, in fact, initially tempted to imitate the two reviewers before me who played it safe by just limiting themselves to two or three short sentences, one as cryptic as Rilke himself on a rainy day. Rilke will never be an easy read. I dare say, in fact, that maybe he himself didn't really understand what he had written; and those who write about him likewise secretly wallow in the same self-incomprehension.
But still! There are those who feel the strong need to read Rilke no matter what insurmountable obstacles there are, like my GR friend Aldrin who boldly announced recently that he will read Rilke's "The Book of Images." How true, then, and quite apt, that in Rilke's simple, priestless burial, these were the lines that were read (from his own "First Elegy")--
"Finally, those torn from us early no longer need us; losing their attachments to earthly things as naturally as one outgrows a mother's breasts. But we who need such great mysteries, for whom so often blessed progress grows from grief--could we be without them?"
March 3, 2013
This book took me to "the open" and left me there to languish in the sublime. Enough flooring here to read it again.
February 15, 2016
Isn’t this the wisest advice ever, ever, ever given across all of history and time? ”Here, where an immense country lies about me over which the winds pass coming from the seas, here I feel that no human being anywhere can answer for you …be patient toward all that is unresolved in your heart. Try to live the questions themselves like locked rooms or books that are written in a foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point it, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps, then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Be careful if you want to preserve the magic of an artist. They are all selfish, crazy and unlikable, it seems, time after time, which is the source and inspiration of their genius, I guess. (I don’t think that is always true, of course, it is a convenient generalization and stereotype. Mary Oliver seems normal, right?) I saw a clip of my hero Annie Dillard receiving a Humanities award recently and either she was drunk or demented, her behavior was that odd and she has admitted to being a hermit now, suffering from issues. So I accept oddness in my heroes. However, Rilke was truly batty and unlikable and a misogynist and narcissist that was incapable of genuine love. Poor guy. I was just surprised since his poetry and wisdom to me speak of genuine and authentic experience of life and love.
Much of his poetry is about God, and he wasn’t religious; nature, which he didn’t say he particularly spent much time in; and wisdom, and he was original through and through. He brought mystical language to nature and God in ways that resonate down time and will as long as words last.
Stephanie Dowrick may not win any awards but she is a good writer who offers an accessible, honest portrait of an iconoclast while keeping the sacred and mystery alive. (She’s kinda new agey, down under style, I think!)
No, what my heart will be is a tower,
and I will be right out on its rim;
nothing else will be there, only pain
and what can’t be said, only the world.
Only one thing left in the enormous space
that will go dark and then light again,
only one final face full of longing,
exiled into what is always full of thirst,
only one farthest-out face made of stone,
at peace with its own inner weight,
which the distances, who go on ruining it,
force on to deeper holiness.
…Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.
Breath, you invisible poem!
Pure, continuous exchange
with all that is, flow and counterflow
where rhythmically I come to be.
Each time a wave that occurs just once
in a sea I discover I am.
You, innermost of oceans,
you, infinitude of space.
how many far places were once
within me. Some winds
are like my own child.
Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room. where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go…
Unknowing before the heavens of my life
I stand in wonder. O the great stars.
The rising and the going down. How quiet.
As if I didn’t exist. Am I part? Have I dismissed
the pure influence? Do high and low tide
alternate in my blood according to this order?
…ONE space spread through all creatures equally-
inner-world-space. Birds quietly flying, go
flying through us. Oh I that want to grow,
the tree I look outside at grows in me!
Ah, not to be cut off,
not by such slight partition
to be excluded from the stars’ measure.
What is inwardness?
What if not sky intensified,
flung through with birds and deep
with winds of homecoming?
You are the future, the immense morning sky
turning red over the prairies of eternity.
You are the rooster-crow after the night of time,
the dew, the early devotions, and the Daughter,
the Guest, the Ancient Mother, and Death.
You are the shape that changes its own shape,
that climbs out of fate, towering,
that which is never shouted for, and never mourned for,
and no more explored than a savage wood.
You are the meaning deepest inside things,
that never reveals the secret of its owner.
And how you look depends on where we are:
from a boat you are shore, from the shore a boat.
Be careful if you want to preserve the magic of an artist. They are all selfish, crazy and unlikable, it seems, time after time, which is the source and inspiration of their genius, I guess. (I don’t think that is always true, of course, it is a convenient generalization and stereotype. Mary Oliver seems normal, right?) I saw a clip of my hero Annie Dillard receiving a Humanities award recently and either she was drunk or demented, her behavior was that odd and she has admitted to being a hermit now, suffering from issues. So I accept oddness in my heroes. However, Rilke was truly batty and unlikable and a misogynist and narcissist that was incapable of genuine love. Poor guy. I was just surprised since his poetry and wisdom to me speak of genuine and authentic experience of life and love.
Much of his poetry is about God, and he wasn’t religious; nature, which he didn’t say he particularly spent much time in; and wisdom, and he was original through and through. He brought mystical language to nature and God in ways that resonate down time and will as long as words last.
Stephanie Dowrick may not win any awards but she is a good writer who offers an accessible, honest portrait of an iconoclast while keeping the sacred and mystery alive. (She’s kinda new agey, down under style, I think!)
No, what my heart will be is a tower,
and I will be right out on its rim;
nothing else will be there, only pain
and what can’t be said, only the world.
Only one thing left in the enormous space
that will go dark and then light again,
only one final face full of longing,
exiled into what is always full of thirst,
only one farthest-out face made of stone,
at peace with its own inner weight,
which the distances, who go on ruining it,
force on to deeper holiness.
…Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.
Breath, you invisible poem!
Pure, continuous exchange
with all that is, flow and counterflow
where rhythmically I come to be.
Each time a wave that occurs just once
in a sea I discover I am.
You, innermost of oceans,
you, infinitude of space.
how many far places were once
within me. Some winds
are like my own child.
Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room. where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go…
Unknowing before the heavens of my life
I stand in wonder. O the great stars.
The rising and the going down. How quiet.
As if I didn’t exist. Am I part? Have I dismissed
the pure influence? Do high and low tide
alternate in my blood according to this order?
…ONE space spread through all creatures equally-
inner-world-space. Birds quietly flying, go
flying through us. Oh I that want to grow,
the tree I look outside at grows in me!
Ah, not to be cut off,
not by such slight partition
to be excluded from the stars’ measure.
What is inwardness?
What if not sky intensified,
flung through with birds and deep
with winds of homecoming?
You are the future, the immense morning sky
turning red over the prairies of eternity.
You are the rooster-crow after the night of time,
the dew, the early devotions, and the Daughter,
the Guest, the Ancient Mother, and Death.
You are the shape that changes its own shape,
that climbs out of fate, towering,
that which is never shouted for, and never mourned for,
and no more explored than a savage wood.
You are the meaning deepest inside things,
that never reveals the secret of its owner.
And how you look depends on where we are:
from a boat you are shore, from the shore a boat.
February 13, 2024
A wonderful analysis of Rilke's work, his perspectives, and a look at the artistic, familial, and romantic events that shaped his life and writing.
Dowrick writes like an admirer who is equally capable of seeing Rilke's foibles. The writing is poetic yet accessible. I truly enjoyed "In the Company of Rilke" and highly recommend it.
Dowrick writes like an admirer who is equally capable of seeing Rilke's foibles. The writing is poetic yet accessible. I truly enjoyed "In the Company of Rilke" and highly recommend it.
July 29, 2023
“In the company of Rilke” by Stephanie Dowrick is a wonderful and insightful exploration of the poetry of Rilke. It's not a biography of Rilke, although it certainly contains relevant biographical facts about the poet's troubled life. Instead, the book is more of a dialogue about poetry as such, using Rilke's profound poems and his life as an authentic poet as a foundation. Thus, Dowrick is not trying to “explain” Rilke, but more to be in discussion with Rilke's poetry, letters and biographers about some of the deepest questions we, as humans, could ask. These are questions about the meaning and purpose of poetry and art, about death, and about God. Besides many wonderful quotes from Rilke, Dowrick also uses quotes from other profound thinkers in order to further illuminate the points she is making.
Rilke is my favourite poet and Dowrick makes a beautiful case for why Rilke speaks to a so wide ranging demographic of readers. Listening to the book made me want to pick up the poems I love most dearly. Works such as “The Book of Hours”, “The Duino Elegies”, and “The Sonnets to Orpheus” all contain poems and lines that grips me every time. I believe that if you fall in love, the world appears more slowly before your eyes, and you are able to also love the world more. As Dowrick points to, Rilke is asking us to do a similar thing: to slow down and learn to love what we lay our eyes on, whether it's ourselves or some thing that especially speaks to us. He asks us to be open and take in the world in its entirety. “Let everything happen to you”, Rilke says, “Beauty and terror, Just keep going, No feeling is final”.
In the book, I was pleased to find poems and quotes that I didn't know before, but I also very much appreciated repetition of those quotes I knew. I'd recommend this to any fellow admirer of Rilke.
Rilke is my favourite poet and Dowrick makes a beautiful case for why Rilke speaks to a so wide ranging demographic of readers. Listening to the book made me want to pick up the poems I love most dearly. Works such as “The Book of Hours”, “The Duino Elegies”, and “The Sonnets to Orpheus” all contain poems and lines that grips me every time. I believe that if you fall in love, the world appears more slowly before your eyes, and you are able to also love the world more. As Dowrick points to, Rilke is asking us to do a similar thing: to slow down and learn to love what we lay our eyes on, whether it's ourselves or some thing that especially speaks to us. He asks us to be open and take in the world in its entirety. “Let everything happen to you”, Rilke says, “Beauty and terror, Just keep going, No feeling is final”.
In the book, I was pleased to find poems and quotes that I didn't know before, but I also very much appreciated repetition of those quotes I knew. I'd recommend this to any fellow admirer of Rilke.
April 14, 2020
Stephanie Dowrick has a lovely voice and listening to her read Rilke aloud was pure delight. Her ideas surrounding Rilkes was very intriguing. I listened to the audio book and found I couldn’t do anything else- it was very absorbing. Not a good book for a subway commute.
February 12, 2012
I had expected the book to be more biography than analysis. It is still a good book. Bogs down at a point but still good.
December 20, 2019
Also listened to the audiobook, read by the author. A 5-star reading.
September 6, 2014
Aimless anecdotes of Rilke's life. I was looking for critiques of his writing, but go mostly a loose biography.
September 2, 2022
I believe I have not mined the depths of this work. I will continue to "read" Rilke through this book.
Rilke continues to mend my mind, be true in all times. This work contains the afore-mentioned, and more.
Rilke continues to mend my mind, be true in all times. This work contains the afore-mentioned, and more.
October 12, 2018
Currently my favorite book on Rilke. Subtitle says what it offers.
February 19, 2022
Live through the answers...
January 19, 2021
If I had it to do over again, I would not have bought this book. But since I bought it and started it, I finished it, because: OCD. At first I liked the voice and accent of the reader (also the author), but eventually they got on my nerves, mostly because she is writing/reading about a poet - poets are passionate - in the most UN passionate way possible. Very monotone. Then, even though I love both reading and writing poetry, I am not that crazy about literary criticism (even though I was an English major!) and making an exception by reading this did nothing to change that bias. I think everything I found beneficial here I could probably have gotten from a wikipedia article. I was sucked in by the title, which somehow promised more to me than was delivered. Save yourself, go read Rilke instead of reading about Rilke.
January 11, 2024
R. M. Rilke was an extremely complex human being who wrote some utterly extraordinary poetry. In some translations his complexity is ironed out which is a great pity as through his poetry and letters he lets readers experience in a unique way what reading (thinking/reflecting/reframing) can bring when we consciously choose to open to that.
Reading is the best way we have to expand our understanding of the world - as well as ourselves. This is a fascinating book as it allows us to explore how we read, not just "texts" but life itself.
In an unusual chapter, the author herself "analyses" Rilke from the perspective of post-Jungian prolific writer James Hillman and then very differently from the perspective of Alice Miller ("The Drama of the Gifted Child").
Highly recommended well beyond poetry lovers!
Reading is the best way we have to expand our understanding of the world - as well as ourselves. This is a fascinating book as it allows us to explore how we read, not just "texts" but life itself.
In an unusual chapter, the author herself "analyses" Rilke from the perspective of post-Jungian prolific writer James Hillman and then very differently from the perspective of Alice Miller ("The Drama of the Gifted Child").
Highly recommended well beyond poetry lovers!
September 24, 2021
This is a complex book that rewards slow reading. It is also one I often return to. The perfect companion for anyone who loves Rilke and has been inspired by his work.
November 11, 2014
I've just begun to read this book, and moving through it with slow, patient steps, but so far this seem to be an excellent meditation on Rilke's work...
September 21, 2016
An awesick scholarly wandering and murmuring that are filled with meaningless words and uncomprehending sentiments
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews