The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory

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Rilke and Eliot: The Articulation of the Mystic

Experience

Elsie Weigand

To cite this article: Elsie Weigand (1955) Rilke and Eliot: The Articulation of the Mystic
Experience, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 30:3, 198-210, DOI:
10.1080/19306962.1955.11786801

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19306962.1955.11786801

Published online: 30 Nov 2016.

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RILKE AND ELIOT: THE ARTICULATION OF THE
MYSTIC EXPERIENCE
A DISCUSSION CENTERING ON THE EIGHTH DUINO ELEGY AND
BURNT NORTON

By Elsie Weigand

I
T rs the characteristic of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies1 and of
T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets2 that their language is not only a medium,
but a component of their meaning. The communication of their
thought depends less upon articulation than upon the establishment of
empathy; discursive language, the use of the word as passive conductor for
the idea, has been abandoned for an idiom of indirection, forcing the
reader to infer the poet's meaning, and, therefore, to participate in its
formulation. Through this involvement in the process of expression, the
reader is drawn into the emotional and intellectual situation which it is the
purpose of the poet to describe. The meaning of the poem, therefore, is
realized in the reader's reaction. In their earlier work, both Rilke and
Eliot worked towards the active involvement of the reader in the poem­
Rilke, in the Ding-gedichte's assimilation of poet and reader into the
poem's subject, and Eliot, in his extensive use of literary allusions depend­
ing for their point on the context of established knowledge in the reader's
mind. Here, as Rilke no longer directly explores the Ding, so Eliot no longer
directly incorporates the quotation. The medium has developed in a
parallel to the increasing integration of the materials of thought.
Dealing as they do with nuances rather than direct relationships, both
poets employ a method that is essentially metaphoric; and in each the
metaphor derives from yet another method of indirection, a mythology.
In the Eliot of the Quartets, the mythology takes its meaning from two
established traditions, the Christian and the Hindu. Now a convinced
Anglo-Catholic, Eliot has excerpted elements of mysticism from Church
tradition, and combined them with related facets of the Brahmanic and
Buddhist traditions. The mythology which Eliot has fashioned from these
and certain subjective elements is undoubtedly personal to him, but it is,
in a larger sense, common to all men, since it is based on records of thought
compiled over centuries. Rilke, however, found all of the already-formu­
lated systems inadequate to the intuitions which seemed to well within him.
His overwhelming problem was to find a framework of expression which
would not contain, but release his thought. He therefore composed a
1 Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies: The German Text, With an English Translation,
Introduction, and Commentary by J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender (New York,
1939).
1 T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, in The Complete Poems and Plays (New York, 1952).
 RILKE AND ELIOT 199

mythology which, while it may have been partially inspired by his re­
actions to the writing of other men, is so intensely personal as to depend for
its meaning on his own thought alone.
'Perhaps because it is, in a strange way, an Ur-Mythologie, a mythology
basic and newly-born, Rilke's "system" makes use of quasi-allegorical
figures. There are legitimately definable categories in which certain figures
correspond to certain idea-clusters: the Heroes to Being, the Young Lovers
to untried perfection, and, of course, the Angels to space, infinity, and
ahuman perfection. Rilke's mythology, complex as it is, corresponds in
form to the mythologies of the primitives; they personified forces, and he,
ideas, but the personification itself is distantly analogous. Conversely,
Eliot, who does work within several bodies of myth, makes no use of myth­
figures. For him the figures and their ideas are already established. He has
but to refer to the yew tree to draw upon all the meaning of the Buddhist
canon, or to Krishna to borrow the Bghavad-Gita's elaboration of sub­
mission and duty; and he need make no direct reference at all to the figures
of Christianity, for they are so well established that the most subtle allusion
to any of their attributes incorporates the whole of their tradition.
Appropriately enough, their mutual structure of metaphor on myth is
representative of a curious correspondence between Rilke and Eliot. De­
spite the ultimate antithesis of their thought, the two poets build from a
basis that is essentially the same, a basis not, indeed, exclusive to them, but
central to modern man's consideration of himself in relation to the universe.
That basis is the dilemma of man, with his intuition of space, confined
within the dimension of time. In both poets, "space" has the connotation
of "eternity"; it is a realm in which the limitations of temporality are
irrelevant.
The figures of Rilke's mythology are intimately connected with this
problem of space, or eternity, and time. The Angels are, in one of their
roles, the very embodiment of abstract space; they are completely realized
Being, and, as such, an atemporal infinite. Their chief opponent, the arch­
affirmer of man, is the Hero, who verges on the realization of his being
despite the framework of time:

... Dauem
ficht ihn nicht an. Sein Aufgang ist Dasein ...
(Die Sechst,e El.egie, p. 54)

But he is still bound by time. His very characteristic of action demon­

strates his confinement within the realm of continuity. He may perform
what the Existentialists would call an engagement with being, devoting
himself exclusively to a given action of a given movement, but because of
his human condition he must choose to act-and choice is a tacit recog­
nition of the dimension of time, in which an action is spread out from its
cause to its effect.
200 THE GERMANIC REVIEW

...Aber
das uns finster verschweigt, das plotzlich begeisterte Schicksal
singt ihn hinein in den Sturm sein aufrauschenden Welt.

War er nicht Held, schon in dir, o Mutter, begann nicht

dort schon, in dir, seine herrische Auswahl?
Tausende brauten im SchooB und wollten er sein,
aber sieh: er ergriff und lie fl aus, wahlte und konnte.
Und wenn er Saulen zerstieB, so wars, da er ausbrach
aus der Welt deines Leibs in die engere Welt, wo er weiter
wahlte und konnte ...
(Ibid., p. 56)
The Hero is mighty, but he is still in time. It is the final decision of the
El,egies, despite their powerful push towards space and eternity, to remain
within time, like the Hero; the poet (who, to the reader at least, comes to
represent man) is most efficacious when he works within time to reconcile it
with space:
Preise dem Engel die Welt, nicht die unsagliche, ihm
kannst du nicht grofltun mit herrlich Erfiihltem; im Weltall,
wo er fiihlender fiihlt, hist du ein Neuling. Drum zeig
ihm das Einfache, das, von Geschlecht zu Geschlechtern gestaltet,
als ein Unsriges lebt neben der Hand und im Blick.
Sag ihm die Dinge ...
(Die Neunt,e Elegie, pp. 74, 76)
Ultimately there is little transcendence in Rilke; there is, perhaps, trans­
figuration, but it derives from man's incorporation of the earth's being into
his. The space which Rilke opens to man is reached not by abandonment
of the realm of time, but by infinite expansion of it.
Eliot also would have man work within time, but only because time is
the medium which God has ordained for him. Burnt Norton is an attempt to
communicate the sensation of a vision into the true, the spatial, nature of
time: real time is a vast coincidence within the unity-of-all-being which
constitutes God. But
... human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
(Burnt Norton, p. 118)
There is, Eliot hints, a reason for our inability to prolong our compre­
hension; we could not continue our appointed existences if we recognized
fully the vastness of reality. God's plan therefore includes the merciful
deception of time as we reckon it.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
 RILKE AND ELIOT 201

By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,

Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.
(Ibid., pp. 119, 120)
Sequential time is man's medium of operation, his instrument for relating
things into a secondary order. The illumination in the rose-garden took him
out of time, but must be placed-in its event, if not in its essenc�within
the framework of time, in order to remain with him as an assurance that
his temporal striving contributes to an extra-temporal design. Like his
metaphor-system, Eliot's interpretation of the time-space relationship
ultimately leads back to the Hindu and the Christian, his Oriental detesta­
tion of the "wheel of existence" giving way to his Christian conviction that
time, if not linear, is at least not so circular that it does not admit of progress
for the soul.
Here and there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
(East Coker, p. 129)

The root contrast between Eliot and Rilke, of course, is that one pro­
ceeds from a theistic hypothesis and the other does not. Therefore the use
of time is submission in the one:

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
(Ibid., p. 128)

and aggression in the other:

202 THE GERMANIC REVIEW

Saulen, Pylone, der Sphinx, das strebende Stemmen,

grau aus vergehender Stadt oder aus fremder, des Doms.
War es nicht Wunder? 0 staune, Engel, denn wir sinds,
wir, o du Gro6er, erzahls, da6 wir solches vermochten,
mein Atem
reicht fur die Ruhmung nicht aus. So haben wir dennoch
nicht die Raume versaumt, diese gewiihrenden, diese
unseren Raume.
(Die Siebeme El,egie, p. 62)

But both Eliot's trying and Rilke's using of "our spaces" are but another
way of saying "time."
Time, then, emerges as a major affirmation made by both poets. It is,
however, an affirmation made by indirection. Both poets turn back to an
acceptance of time as their only alternative to the unattainable dimension
of space, and it is therefore to space that most of their attention is directed.
For both of them, the most significant moments in life are those wherein
life, temporal life, is suspended, and the human being apprehends eternity
in his sensation of space. It is in their articulation of such moments that
both men achieve the highest realization of their individual poetic genius,
and the close approximation to what Eliot would term the "objective
correlative" of mystic experience.
Perhaps the most striking instances of their kinship in impact, if not in
specific intent, occur in parallel passages from Burnt Norwn and the
Eighth Elegy. Both poems deal specifically with man, trapped in time, un­
able for long to conceive space. Rilke's conception of time is never so clear
as Eliot's, and his tendency to personify remains a contrast to Eliot; but
the intellectualized emotional experience with which he deals-and the
language technique he uses for its description-are closely akin to Eliot's.
This is not at all a question of "influences"; the formative impulses in
Eliot's work are from the Romance languages, not German. It is rather a
much more important relationship: it is indicative of the universality of
the modern dilemma, and of the possible universality of the thought­
patterns by which men attempt to cope with that dilemma.
The Elegy begins with an exposition of man's inability to comprehend,
with the insight Rilke attributes to the "creature world," the all-embracing
nature of space and eternity:
Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur
das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind
wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt
als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang.
Was drau6en ist, wir wissens aus des Tiers
Antlitz allein; denn schon das fruhe Kind
wenden wir um und zwingens, da6 es ruckwarts
Gestaltung sehe, nicht das Offne, das
 RILKE AND ELIOT 203

im Tiergesicht so tief ist. Frei von Tod.

Ihn sehen wir allein; das freie Tier
hat seinen Untergang stets hinter sich
und vor sich Gott, und wenn es geht, so gehts
in Ewigkeit, so wie die Brunnen gehen.
(Die Achte Elegie, p. 66)

And Eliot, following the vision of eternity and the resignation to time
already quoted, goes on to describe the subservience to time which is the
self-betrayal of men without spiritual vision.
Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light; neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.
(Burnt Norion, p. 120)

Rilke's "Kreatur" is a personification of a kind of sight analogous to

Eliot's moment of perception in the rose-garden; it sees with Eliot's
"plenitude" the innocent and instantaneous vision of sunlight, of space out
of time. But Eliot's men, like Rilke's grown-ups, are so preoccupied by the
minutiae of time that they will not turn their eyes forward to reality.
Rilke's people also seek refuge from madness in the "distraction" of
modeling their lives blindly on what has gone before: they direct each
succeeding generation

... da/3 es riickwii.rts

Gestaltung sehe, nicht das Offne ...
 THE GERMANIC REVIEW

And beneath the deception we see only death, Eliot's "cold wind," which
intrudes upon us as something fearful because we do not understand it.
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time ...
Death as a negative is only the product of man's clouded vision:
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs ...
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air ...

Denn nah am Tod sieht man den Tod nicht mehr

und starrt hinaus, vielleicht mit groBem Tierblick.
(Die Achte Elegie, p. 68)
To Eliot, death is an instrument of final purification, to Rilke, another
aspect of the breadth of existence; but to both it represents a cessation of
time and entry into space which man in his ignorance will not acknowledge.
Although they do not agree on its metaphysical significance, Rilke and
Eliot see the suspension of being in almost identical images. At this level of
speculation, language must be stretched beyond the limits of discourse into
a communication of sensation rather than thought. In his use of language
for the description of the ineffable, each reaches an apex in his own achieve­
ment as an artist. Yet each is illuminated by reference to the other. Rilke,
with less formal doctrine to incorporate than Eliot, chooses the method of
ultra-compression:
Wir haben nie, nicht einen einzigen Tag,
den reinen Raum vor uns, in den die Blumen
unendlich aufgehn. linmer ist es Welt
und niemals Nirgends ohne Nicht:
das Reine, Uniiberwachte, das man atmet und
unendlich wei/3 und nicht begehrt ...
(Ibid., p. 66)
Eliot elaborates. The first of the following two passages is in Part II of
Burnt Norton, where it contributes to an extended effort to reduce the
mystic experience to words.The second occurs in Part III as an admonition
following the already-quoted expression of revulsion from the modem
"place of disaffection."
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor flesh-
less;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor
towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
 RILKE AND ELIOT 205

I can only say there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
(P. 119)

Descend lower, descend only

Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world.
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.
(Pp. 120, 121)
Rilke describes the vision by its absence, Eliot, by its occurrence as a
rememberable part of human experience. Eliot's purpose is didactic as well
as poetic; he apostrophizes himself, and incidentally his society, to go back
to the vision, for removal of oneself from movement leads to an intuition of
the efficacy of movement. This is a heavy burden of practical significance
as an appendage to a description of the insight, which is in itself totally apart
from any frame in which the practical has meaning. Eliot's procedure here
is to turn the Hindu philosophy of yoga to Christian ends. The two "ways"
to which he refers are the Way of Knowledge, the mystic's way, which he
attempts to follow at this point in the poem, and the Way of Devotion,
the way outlined by Krishna for the warrior caste, the way of dedicated
action in the physical world. To the two oriental concepts, Eliot adds the
Christian note of the way of the world itself, which continues independently
of human action, and depicts the three ways as reconciled by participation
in the impulse of God's will.
So explicit an exposition is not Rilke's concern. Like fully realized love,
the vision is its own highest object; there is in Rilke no obligation to the
omnipotent Unknown. Eliot speaks as a modern who has moulded his
insights into relevance with ancient answers, but Rilke speaks as a modern
who, with all the sophistication of his language and his thought-processes,
still asks the primeval questions.

Der Schopfung immer zugewendet, sehn

wir nur auf ihr die Spiegelung des Frein,
von uns verdunkelt. Oder dall ein Tier,
ein stummes, aufschaut, ruhig durch uns durch.
Dieses heillt Schicksal: gegenliber sein
und nichts als das und immer gegenliber.
(Die Achte Elegie, p. 68)
206 THE GERMANIC REVIEW

There can be no lasting transcendence when man does not know what he
transcends to, nor why he must return from that transcendence. Man is
forever separate from the meaning of the life in which he is involved.
He is, to be sure, necessary; for only through him can life-the Spring
of the First Elegy-take on meaningful form. But the essence of this
function remains opposition. In order so to augment life man must be apart
from it; he is, as it were, the wall against which life beats itself into shape.
Despite the intellectuality of his poetic procedure, Rilke seems here to
voice a reaction much older than thought, the emotion of primordial man
when he first saw the world was separate from him.
Each poet, then, locates his vision in reference to a different cosmos. But
the circumstances of the vision itself are dealt with in almost the
same terms.
Wir haben nie, nicht einen einzigen Tag,
den reinen Raum vor uns ...
. ..iinmer ist es Welt ...

At the still point of the turning world ...

And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered ...
I can only say there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
Eliot's description is the positive statement of Rilke's longing. Rilke de­
pends upon the dynamic life of the phrase "den reinen Raum" to com­
municate everything Eliot has articulated in his series of fused antitheses.
Both poets, in these two passages, conceive of space in terms of differenti­
ation from time. Eliot, of course, does so overtly. Rilke, however, incor­
porates his awareness of time into the juxtaposition of the ideas "Tag"
and "Raum." This "Tag," this "Welt," Eliot's "turning world"-these
are man-measured time, a dimension in which space, eternity, is un­
containable.
The nature of that space, ascertained by religious experience in Eliot and
an almost primitive intuition in Rilke, is the same for both poets. Perfect
space is the state in which the absence of being is being's fulfillment, not
its denial. Its conception is in negatives transliterated into a higher positive.

World not world, but that which is not world.

. . .Nirgends ohne Nicht.

The "not-world" envelops Eliot's entire consciousness, replacing the

myriad tangibles of the physical world with the Nirvana-like "otherness,"
which is both nothing and everything. Rilke too projects a "Nirgends,"
as opposed to this "Welt" in which adults are imprisoned, and the "Nir-
 RILKE AND ELIOT 207

gends" would be without denial of any kind. It would not negate being,
because it would be being's ultimate realization; and in it, the time-bound
prohibition to true vision would at last be lifted.
That vision, in Rilke as in Eliot, is sometimes vouchsafed to earthly
creatures. Rilke is much more specific than Eliot in designating those
creatures: they are the young lovers and the children, who see the truth in
fleeting flashes, and the animals, who live with it before them. It is char­
acteristic of Eliot's more intellectualized world-view that the possessors of
the vision in his poetic structure are almost abstracts. He too mentions
children, and refers, in a context quite different from Rilke's, to the role of
desire as a stimulus and an impediment in the progress towards true sight.
But these allusions are couched in terms of detachment.When Rilke writes,
of the child's fleeting encounters with space:
...Als Kind
verliert sich eins im Stilln an dies und wird
geriittelt ...
(Ibid., p. 66)

the words are personal, almost reproachful. But when, referring to that
"first world" in the rose-garden which is his own Eden-like setting for the
vision, Eliot evokes the presence of children, he uses them as an impersonal
image:
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden, excitedly, containing laughter.
(Burnt Norton, p. 122)

These are not, like Rilke's very real dreamer, children of flesh and blood.
They are more Blake's wraith-like figures, disporting in a state of complete
detachment from being. Eliot's children have the cruelty of a perfect in­
nocence that has never been human.In the same way, when Eliot deals with
love, he does so from a vantage point infinitely removed from that of
Rilke, who writes from within his involvement with humanness:

Liebende, ware nicht der andre, der

die Sicht verstellt, sind nab daran und staunen ...
Wie aus Versehn ist ihnen aufgetan
hinter dem andern ... Aber Uber ihn
kommt keiner fort, und wieder wird ihm Welt.
(Die Achte Elegie, p. 68)

As is often the case with Rilke, beneath the difficulty of the language is an
idea, or rather an intuition, of simplicity. The outgoing passion for another
being carries the sight beyond its accustomed confines within the seer, and
therefore to a point where time ceases, for the moment, to have relevance,
and space becomes conceivable.But the passion, however it transcends the
208 THE GERMANIC REVIEW

being of its origin, is bound by the being of its object. So the cage is once
more lowered, and the flight confined. For Eliot, this particular cage is one
he has long since escaped. The Quartets are written in the character of the
ascetic who has intensified his concept of love to mystic dimensions. The
"love" which concerns Eliot is a religious experience, almost removed from
the realm of emotion. It is Christian in its role as an attribute of a God who
bestows upon man the desire for the striving towards Him, and Brahmanic
in its role as the passive mover in man's effort to perfect himself without
desiring anything, even perfection, for his subjective self. Because of the
esoteric philosophies upon which he draws, Eliot's meaning is often as
intricate as his language:
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
(Burnt Norton, p. 122)

The desire which concerns Eliot here is less physical than spiritual "lust";
but the patterns his thought takes are close to Rilke's. "Being" is release
into space, and "un-being," the humanness which is the very "form of
limitation" which cuts off the view of Rilke's lovers. But Eliot does not
personify his ideas, even allegorically; the subject of the sensations he
depicts is an abstract, who is Eliot, or his reader, or Everyman.
In those moments when it acknowledges temporal relationships, the main
impulse of the Four Quartets is forward. The release towards which Eliot is
pushing is completion rather than insulation. His religious commitment
could not countenance the longing Rilke attributes even to the beasts, the
longing for the womb's combination of perfect security and perfect space in
its removal from the world, wherein time prevails and space is not:

Hier ist a.lies Abstand

und dort wars Atem.
(Die Achte Elegie, Zoe. cit.)

These words are the articulate expression of an emotion which, though

"discovered" by modern psychiatry, has presumably been inherent in man
since his beginnings. Eliot too has reflected it, if less specifically, in his
Odyssey of religious progress, "Ash Wednesday." In the Four Quartets,
however, that phase of the religious decision is no longer at issue. Having
committed himself to the use of the life experience, Eliot expresses his
revulsion from it in terms of transcendence rather than avoidance. Here, as
in the use of myth-figures, Rilke's poetry is a modern vehicle for ancient
 RILKE AND ELIOT 209

universals of emotion before a problematic cosmos. Eliot's is a modem

application of certain of the propositions which man, in the progress of
submerging his emotion in thought, has applied to that cosmos.
Rilke and Eliot quite clearly differ in the use to which they put their
minds. Yet in their language, and in their reactions to the vision as apart
from its significance, they reveal that their minds are closely attuned­
perhaps less to each other than to some broad impulse in the thought of
their time. Man to both of them is a spectator, but one who forms that
which he observes. Yet he cannot, by his own power, see beyond the
fabrication.

Und wir: Zuschauer, immer, iiberall,

dem allen zugewandt und nie hinaus!
Uns iiberfiillts.Wir ordnens. Es zerfiillt.
Wir ordnens wieder und zerfallen selbst.
(lbi.d., p. 70)

Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the comer. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
(Burnt Norion, pp. 117, 118)

Rilke, almost Hindu-like, would have man merge with the essence of
things, enlarge himself by being so much a part of things that he sees not
only through but from them; Eliot, for whom the pool "was filled ...
with sunlight," would have man keep himself alert for the vision which
descends upon him as a manifestation of God's grace. But, as in Rilke,
"Wir ordnens": the roses, the echoes, which are the thoughts of men
210 THE GERMANIC REVIEW

throughout the centuries, all "accept" us in order to establish their own

identities.
But the vision which God may grant to Eliot's man is as abruptly
terminated by obscurity as are the fleeting insights Rilke's man wrests from
temporality. For Eliot too, reality is something which has been in his ex­
perience, and may again be, but rarely is.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
(Ibid.)

Wer hat uns also umgedreht, dafl wir,

was wir auch tun, in jener Haltung sind
von einem, welcher fortgeht? Wie er auf
dem letzten Hugel, der ihm ganz sein Tai
noch einmal zeigt, sich wendet, anhalt, weilt-,
so leben wir und nehmen immer Abschied.
(Die Achte Elegie, Zoe. cit.)
Whether as part of God's unfathomable purpose or of the enigma of a
universe whose meaning is forever closed to us, we are never permitted to
remain in Eden.
Rilke is driven from the vision by some nebulous negativity, whose
melancholy effect is reflected in the down-flowing heaviness of this final
strophe. Eliot, in contrast, is driven from his "garden" by a positive force,
whose long-range benevolence is embodied in the lightness of the bird's
apostrophe. The contexts of the vision are as different in expression as in
thought. Yet the method of that expression, its conformity to the burden of
meaning it conveys, is here, as always, essentially the same. In both poets
the choice of words, in rhythmic pattern as in connotation, possesses and is
possessed by the meaning. In one instance only, the meaning, like the
method, is for both poets almost the same:
World not world, but that which is not world.

. . . Nirgends ohne Nicht.

The ineffable has been so felt, perhaps, throughout human experience;

but rarely has human language been fashioned so nearly adequate to its
expression. The behavior of the language is identical with that of the idea
itself: it rises through the layers of conventional denotation to burst into a
new and arational significance. It is the peculiar relationship of these two
poets that they proceed from the same insights to different interpretations,
yet they work in different languages to the same effect.
Philadelphia, Pa.