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Where Silence Reigns
In this collection of excerpts from his essays, notebooks, and letters, pre-eminent modern poet Rainer Maria Rilke meditates on subjects as varied as a dolls, walking among trees, and the great sculptor Rodin. Where Silence Reigns, a sampling from his essays, notebooks, and letters, shows Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), the pre-eminent modern poet of solitude and inwardness, seeking to reconcile his personal conflict between the claims of "life" and the claims of art. His subjects are commonplace, seemingly innocuous at the encounter between a man and a dog, a collection of dolls, a walk among trees. But always the deceptively simple external phenomenon is seen as the symbol, the catalyst of an intensely felt inner experience. As he confided to his friend Frau "Oh, how often one longs to speak a few degrees more deeply! My prose... lies deeper... but one gets only a minimal layer further down; one’s left with a mere intimation of the kind of speech that may be possible THERE where silence reigns." In addition to occasional pieces and notebook entries, this volume contains selections from the strange and haunting "Dream-Book," the lyrical "Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke," and the entire "Rodin-Book"––Rilke’s appreciation of the great sculptor whom he had served as secretary.
- GenresPoetryNonfiction
164 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1977
6 people are currently reading
200 people want to read
About the author
Rainer Maria Rilke
1,799 books6,956 followersA mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include
The Book of Hours
(1905) and
The Duino Elegies
(1923).
People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.
His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .
He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.
People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.
His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.
His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .
He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
August 1, 2019
In this short little book I found yet again a soul I ought to explore more.
I can't remember I've been touched by prose as beautiful as this for sometime now.
Rilke is a beautiful writer certainly and I am already yearning to read his poetry.
I can't help but remember him whenever I am surrounded by nature and art, by dreams, poetry, beauty.
His presences, his voice streaming between the lines, his lexical beauty, (natural beauty, too) were so prominent, almost divine, and they go ever so seamlessly and wondrously together.
He is a powerful and beautiful coalescence of all the beauty I wish to see in literature. And it is marvelous to read his words and feel him immensely close. It was a touching read, truly.
I still remember the lines Marina Tsvetaeva wrote to him in her poem 'New Year' and one of her letters to him and now I understand why she thought that he is poetry in human form:
"how’s writing in the new place?
if you’re there, there must be poetry. you
are poetry. how’s writing in the good life,
no table for your elbows, no forehead for your strife,
I mean your palm?
drop me a line, I miss your handwriting.
Rainer, do you delight in the new rhymes?
am I getting the word rhyme right,
is there a whole row of new rhymes,
is there a new rhyme for death?
and another one, Rainer, above it?
nowhere to go. language is all learned up.
a whole row of meanings and consonances
anew."
I can't remember I've been touched by prose as beautiful as this for sometime now.
Rilke is a beautiful writer certainly and I am already yearning to read his poetry.
I can't help but remember him whenever I am surrounded by nature and art, by dreams, poetry, beauty.
His presences, his voice streaming between the lines, his lexical beauty, (natural beauty, too) were so prominent, almost divine, and they go ever so seamlessly and wondrously together.
He is a powerful and beautiful coalescence of all the beauty I wish to see in literature. And it is marvelous to read his words and feel him immensely close. It was a touching read, truly.
I still remember the lines Marina Tsvetaeva wrote to him in her poem 'New Year' and one of her letters to him and now I understand why she thought that he is poetry in human form:
"how’s writing in the new place?
if you’re there, there must be poetry. you
are poetry. how’s writing in the good life,
no table for your elbows, no forehead for your strife,
I mean your palm?
drop me a line, I miss your handwriting.
Rainer, do you delight in the new rhymes?
am I getting the word rhyme right,
is there a whole row of new rhymes,
is there a new rhyme for death?
and another one, Rainer, above it?
nowhere to go. language is all learned up.
a whole row of meanings and consonances
anew."
August 6, 2020
Dienās, kad lasu Rilki, domāju aptuveni 50% mazāk hujņas.
Read
July 28, 2011Did you really not know till now that joy is something terrible of which one is not afraid? One goes right through a terror to its very end: and that is just joy. A terror, of which one does not know even the first letter. A terror that one trusts.
-from "The Eleventh Dream" of "From the Dream-Book"
I repeat: I find it quite comprehensible that those who have to depend entirely upon themselves, upon their own life's usefulness and bearableness, should feel a certain relief, if there is induced in them a spiritual nausea which enables them to rid themselves piece-wise of the misunderstandings and indigestible experiences of their childhood. But I? Am I not, indeed, born to form angels, things, animals, if need be, monsters, precisely in connexion with such experiences, which were beyond experiencing, were too big, too premature, too horrible?
-from "Memory"
It was she herself [Nature] who showed him, as it were, the places about which he knew more than could be seen. By beginning with these and producing from many confused details a great simplification, he did what Christ did for the people when, with a sublime parable, He cleansed of their guilt those who came questioning Him blindly. He carried out one of Nature's purposes. He completed something which was helpless to develop of itself, he revealed hidden relationships, as the evening of a misty day reveals the mountains rolling their great undulations into the far distance.
Full of the living burden of his great knowledge, he looked into the faces of those about him like one who knows the future. This gives to his portraits their extraordinarily clear definiteness, but also that prophetic greatness which, in the statues of Victor Hugo and of Balzac, rises to an indescribable perfection. To create a likeness meant for him to seek eternity in some given face, that part of eternity by which the face participated in the great life of eternal things.
-from "The Rodin-Book (1)"
The fact that there existed aesthetic opinion, which believed itself capable of understanding beauty, has misled you and has produced artists who considered their vocation to be the creating of beauty. And it has not yet become superfluous to repeat that beauty cannot be "made." No one has ever made beauty. One can only create kindly our sublime conditions for that which sometimes dwells amongst us, an altar and fruits and a flame. The other is not in our power. And the thing itself which goes forth indestructible from human hands is like Socrates' Eros, is a daemon, is something between a god and a man, not in itself beautiful, but expressing pure love of and pure longing for beauty.
. . . Directed by his urge towards the realization of purposes far beyond him, he [the artist] only knows that there are certain conditions under which beauty may consent to come to the things he makes. And his vocation is to learn to know those conditions and to acquire the power of producing them.
But whoever studies these conditions thoroughly learns that they do not pass beyond the surface and nowhere penetrate within; that all that one can do is to produce a definitely self-contained surface which is in no part accidental, a surface which, like that of natural objects, is surrounded by the atmosphere from which it receives its shadows and its lights, simply this surface, nothing else.
-from "The Rodin-Book (2)"
Consider the labour entailed when the goal was to gain the mastery of all surfaces; for ono one thing is like another. When the artists did not merely aim at knowing the body in general, the face, the hand (these things do not exist); but all bodies, all faces, all hands. What a task is this! And how simple and serious it is; devoid of fascination or promise; entirely unpretentious.
It implies a craft, but, as it seems, a craft for one who is more than mortal, so immense is it, so endless and without limit and so dependent upon a never-ceasing apprenticeship. And where was to be found a patience which should be equal to such a labour?
-ibid
Now he begins one thing, completes another, modifies another, as if responding to their call as he passes through their midst and sees their need of him. He forgets none of them; those in the background bide their time and are in no hurry. Neither in a garden does everything grow at the same time. Blossoms are found beside fruit, and here and there a tree is only in leaf. Have I not said that it is an essential characteristic of this mighty genius to have as much time as Nature and to produce like her?
-ibid
-from "The Eleventh Dream" of "From the Dream-Book"
I repeat: I find it quite comprehensible that those who have to depend entirely upon themselves, upon their own life's usefulness and bearableness, should feel a certain relief, if there is induced in them a spiritual nausea which enables them to rid themselves piece-wise of the misunderstandings and indigestible experiences of their childhood. But I? Am I not, indeed, born to form angels, things, animals, if need be, monsters, precisely in connexion with such experiences, which were beyond experiencing, were too big, too premature, too horrible?
-from "Memory"
It was she herself [Nature] who showed him, as it were, the places about which he knew more than could be seen. By beginning with these and producing from many confused details a great simplification, he did what Christ did for the people when, with a sublime parable, He cleansed of their guilt those who came questioning Him blindly. He carried out one of Nature's purposes. He completed something which was helpless to develop of itself, he revealed hidden relationships, as the evening of a misty day reveals the mountains rolling their great undulations into the far distance.
Full of the living burden of his great knowledge, he looked into the faces of those about him like one who knows the future. This gives to his portraits their extraordinarily clear definiteness, but also that prophetic greatness which, in the statues of Victor Hugo and of Balzac, rises to an indescribable perfection. To create a likeness meant for him to seek eternity in some given face, that part of eternity by which the face participated in the great life of eternal things.
-from "The Rodin-Book (1)"
The fact that there existed aesthetic opinion, which believed itself capable of understanding beauty, has misled you and has produced artists who considered their vocation to be the creating of beauty. And it has not yet become superfluous to repeat that beauty cannot be "made." No one has ever made beauty. One can only create kindly our sublime conditions for that which sometimes dwells amongst us, an altar and fruits and a flame. The other is not in our power. And the thing itself which goes forth indestructible from human hands is like Socrates' Eros, is a daemon, is something between a god and a man, not in itself beautiful, but expressing pure love of and pure longing for beauty.
. . . Directed by his urge towards the realization of purposes far beyond him, he [the artist] only knows that there are certain conditions under which beauty may consent to come to the things he makes. And his vocation is to learn to know those conditions and to acquire the power of producing them.
But whoever studies these conditions thoroughly learns that they do not pass beyond the surface and nowhere penetrate within; that all that one can do is to produce a definitely self-contained surface which is in no part accidental, a surface which, like that of natural objects, is surrounded by the atmosphere from which it receives its shadows and its lights, simply this surface, nothing else.
-from "The Rodin-Book (2)"
Consider the labour entailed when the goal was to gain the mastery of all surfaces; for ono one thing is like another. When the artists did not merely aim at knowing the body in general, the face, the hand (these things do not exist); but all bodies, all faces, all hands. What a task is this! And how simple and serious it is; devoid of fascination or promise; entirely unpretentious.
It implies a craft, but, as it seems, a craft for one who is more than mortal, so immense is it, so endless and without limit and so dependent upon a never-ceasing apprenticeship. And where was to be found a patience which should be equal to such a labour?
-ibid
Now he begins one thing, completes another, modifies another, as if responding to their call as he passes through their midst and sees their need of him. He forgets none of them; those in the background bide their time and are in no hurry. Neither in a garden does everything grow at the same time. Blossoms are found beside fruit, and here and there a tree is only in leaf. Have I not said that it is an essential characteristic of this mighty genius to have as much time as Nature and to produce like her?
-ibid
August 2, 2025
2.5-3 stars. ok so i technically have like 20pgs left but am going to call it done because the last two chapters (the second-to-last being the one i just finished) are just rilke waxing poetic about rodin, which i love for him but not for me. otherwise lots of very interesting bits and bobs of prose, some beautiful phrasings throughout, although i did not always Gaf about the subject matter
April 11, 2022
Meh. Didn't keep my attention. I skimmed. Not like his other works.
July 13, 2023
Thank u Rilke for ur awesome thoughts
May 18, 2025
(3,5/5)
May 6, 2025
A delight.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews