Rilke wrote his own epitaph sometime before October 27, 1925 (i.e., about fifteen months before his death), and requested that it be inscribed on his gravestone. This was done and the original headstone, now being restored, will again soon be placed above his grave, on the wall of the church just outside and above the small town of Raron (orignially Rarogne), in the Rhône River valley near Sierre in the canton of Valais in southwest Switzerland.* The epitaph on this stone is given here, along with my translation:
Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel
Lidern.
Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire,
To be no one’s sleep under so many
Lids.
In addition to the usual problems of translation, a special difficulty with my English version of this poem is that “Lidern” in German suggests a pun with “Liedern,” “songs,” a point that will become significant later in my discussion.
The poem is about death, as befits an epitaph. And yet death is not mentioned. Rather, the poem speaks throughout of a rose, that great old poetic symbol. But the rose addressed by the first word of the poem is not Dante’s rose, or even one of the great rose windows of medieval cathedrals, about which Rilke himself wrote a lovely poem. Still less is it Robert Burns’ rose, or William Blake’s, or Gertrude Stein’s, or Robert Frost’s. But perhaps Rilke’s rose is not that distant—the rose a lover gives his beloved is also the rose of death, for, as Rilke says, lovers, “being full of life,… are full of death”; and elsewhere, “So deep is death implanted in the nature of love that… it nowhere contradicts love.” The traditional lover’s rose, however, rarely makes this connection evident, which is one distinction between it and Rilke’s rose.
For, from the beginning, Rilke’s rose was a deeper figure, a more primal reality, moving toward the unity of life and death. In a poem written at the age of twenty (and included in Advent [1898]), Rilke makes some traditional correspondences, even some rather sentimentally romantic ones, between roses and love: e.g., “I am braiding tired roses / in your hair” [“ich dir müde Rosen flechte / ins Haar”]. But even here there is a difference. “Tired roses” would suggest a fin de siècle sensibility were it not for the later direction of the poem, where the roses almost become a crown of “dark thorns” [“dunkle Dornen”] and the poet asks, “Do you feel the roses dying on your brow?” [“Fühlst du die Rosen auf der Stirne sterben?”]. Even to this point, there is little to distinguish the sentiment. But the poem closes with the declaration, “And we are roses’-heirs” [“Und wir sind Rosenerben”], and with that a new dimension is opened up. The links between love and death and love and rose are fairly traditional, but this final line points to a deeper insight—though it points only. A quarter century of exploration down that more difficult path would follow, some few signposts of which can be seen in a number of the poems on roses, other flowers, blossoming, and growth included in this volume (see, e.g., pp. 53, 65, 81, 85, 97).
The rose invoked in Rilke’s epitaph was discovered only far down that path, however. This begins to become apparent in the next phrase of the poem: “oh pure contradiction.” Again, if one makes the traditional association, one would think the poet is speaking of that standard contradiction between the beauty of the rose and the thorns which protect that beauty. But no, the contradiction is a pure one, that is, it resides in the bloom itself, not between the blossom and the stem. The contradiction is within the very heart of the blossoming rose itself. It is of the essence of the rose.
The next word begins to speak of the nature of that contradiction. And yet that word is a strange and unexpected one, and is unusually punctuated: “desire,” concluding the line with a stop by means of a comma. This word, with its placement, with its being set off by commas, not only suggests an identity; that is, rose = pure contradiction = desire. But much more is also being suggested here: rose, which can be more carefully understood as pure contradiction, which can be further perceived as desire. And still further, the position of the word “desire” points not only back to the pure contradiction and the rose but forward to the next line as well. But not unambiguously forward; one might even say not uncontradictorily forward—for there is the comma, the last punctuation until the final period. This suggests that the rest of the poem still further descriptively specifies the nature of desire-contradiction-rose.
The word “desire” itself does some work on its own. It suggests one of the major concerns of this volume: love. Now we can see why the traditional associations between love and rose are only tangentially related to this rose. For desire, as a form of or pointer to love, is not usually thought of as involving a contradiction. And yet this desire is so linked. But again, the nature of the contradiction remains unclear. Still less is it clear at this point what desire has to do with an epitaph, with death.
So one moves to the final lines of the poem. “To be” emphasizes what was already hinted at, that the essence of the rose is being spoken. It is the being, not merely the appearance, of the rose, and indeed of pure contradiction and of desire, that is being presented here. It is the depth, not merely the surface. Or, rather, as we shall see, it is the being of the rose as it appears; it is the depth visible on the surface. And at that depth one discovers “no one’s sleep.” At last one hears a word one might expect in an epitaph. Sleep is an ordinary, even sentimentally trite euphemism for death. But this sleep has nothing in common with such sentiment. It is not a dead, faded rose. The rose is in full bloom and the sleep is the dying sleep which is the living rose itself.
As always, trite and traditional associations get in one’s way. It is easy to say that death comes to all at the end. It is a bit more difficult to hear that one begins to die the minute one is born. Still more difficult is to see that life always goes toward death and that dying is an intimate and lively part of living. Most difficult of all is the effort of “affirmation of life-AND-death as one,” to quote Rilke. “Our effort,” he said, “can only go toward postulating the unity of life and death, so that it may gradually prove itself to us.” This is that most difficult task Rilke has characteristically taken upon himself. Death is not an event tacked onto one’s life, constituting the end of that life. It is rather the ever-present “other side of life,” as Rilke so often declared. In his epitaph, he is attempting to portray—indeed, to make present—the reality of this frequent declaration. Thus, the sleep belongs most intimately to the blossoming rose. This is part of the contradiction.
Another is that it is “no one’s sleep.” Death is the other side of life, not just of my life. In death, as in life, one participates in—indeed, touches—domains far beyond that of the personal, the individual. Which is not to suggest the impersonal, or even the transpersonal as such. The sleep is no one’s, yet it belongs intimately to the rose. The domain is simultaneously life and the other side of life. And this is not merely a fact. One must grow toward…‥ this desire, to be, no one’s sleep. So there is a special link between desire and sleep, love and death. But it constitutes a difficulty. It requires an effort. It is something one must grow toward and achieve. The achievement occurs, however, only in the growing, the living. In fact, desiring to be no one’s sleep is growing, is living. This is the affirmation of life-and-death. But that “no one” still puzzles. Perhaps the final words will help.
But they present still another contradiction. This difficult effort to achieve—indeed, to become—the desire to be no one’s sleep is at the same time the most natural and most intimate thing of all. For it is a sleep “under so many / Lids.” These concluding words appear enigmatic until one remembers the focus of the poem. The rose is a mystery. Soft velvet petals, each curling over and gesturing other petals, which in turn protect still others, which finally curve around…‥ nothing. Rilke had long been fascinated by that circling nothing, that mysterious silence—so full and so resonant—at the heart of a rose. In his poem “The Rose Window” [“Die Fensterrose”], from New Poems, to which I referred above, his gaze is transfixed by the returning stare of the window: “the glance which, as though caught by a whirlpool’s / circling, swims a little while” [“den Blick, der, wie von eines Wirbels Kreis / ergriffen, eine kleine Weile schwimmt”]. In another, most important rose poem from the same volume, “The Bowl of Roses” [“Die Rosenschale”], this curling-into-nothing essence of the rose is made explicit:
And this: that one opens like a lid,
and lying under there nothing but eyelids,
closed, as if they, tenfold sleeping,
had to muffle an inner power of seeing.
[Und dies: daß eins sich aufschlägt wie ein Lid,
und drunter liegen lauter Augenlider,
geschlossene, als ob sie, zehnfach schlafend,
zu dämpfen hätten eines Innern Sehkraft.]
Here too, as in the epitaph, the petals of a rose are shown to be eyelids, covering a resonant silence, an alert sleep. But this is of the very nature of a rose—indeed, of the sheer appearance of the rose. (Sic transit Kant.) The petals actually do curve over into each other. And there really is nothing under all those petals, a nothing which is destroyed when the botanist examines the rose. Thus, the very “objective” nature of a rose is the concrete, and at the same time mysterious, figure of precisely what Rilke wants his gravestone to speak. Or, rather, Rilke has so pondered the rose, has so let it be, that it has revealed its very essence to him. This contradictory little flower:—awake and yet asleep, seeing and yet with eyelids closed, living and dying.
Yet that…‥ space, there is no other word—that space within the rose is not empty. That nothing is not merely no thing. It sees. It speaks. It has—or rather, is—an inner eyesight, an inner power or force or strength of seeing. It resonates and vibrates, like those other Rilkean figures—the space where the water of a fountain has ceased to rise but has not yet begun to fall, and the same space of the flight of a child’s ball thrown into the air. So with the sleep of a rose: it is not some-thing, some object, but it is not an empty nothing either. Rilke had a beautiful word for this—”Weltinnenraum,” “world-inner-space”. It is most often used to speak that essential space within the heart of a human being. But the very word itself, world-inner-space, suggests a link between that space and the sleep at the heart of the rose, the shimmering space above the jet of a fountain. In a letter, Rilke speaks of this as the “space untouched as the inside of a rose, an angelic space in which one keeps still.” And in Sonnets to Orpheus (II, 6), he even calls this space in the rose a “body of nothing but radiance” [“Leib aus nichts als Glanz”].
The sleep is no one’s. It is the plenitude of the nothing of both the world-sleep in the center of the rose and the vibrant innerness that dwells in the being of man. Still another poem from New Poems has the very title “Rose-Innerness” [“Das Rosen-Innere”], and begins by asking, “Where for this inner is / an outer?” [“Wo ist zu diesem Innen / ein Außen?”]. The epitaph does more than answer this question. It presents the union of inner and outer, sleeping and waking, nothing and being (that ancient philosophical contradiction), yes, and of life and death. And the union of what is already joined is accomplished through the motive power of desire, the power which is desire. Yet a contradiction remains, for the inner and outer are not identical—the space is gone the minute one peels away the petals. The sleep is invisible. It is no one’s. Nonetheless, around it is the rose fashioned. And the desire which is the pure contradiction and the rose is not a desire for something merely, but is a desiring being. The desire which is the life of the rose is the contradiction of gesturing, of being, this sleep.
So this is Rilke’s rose. And, as he said in the first of the Duino Elegies, “Indeed it is strange… / not to give roses, and other properly promising things / the significance of a human future” [“Freilich ist es seltsam… / Rosen, und andern eigens versprechenden Dingen / nicht die Bedeutung, menschlicher Zukunft zu geben”]. Strange indeed. Rilke’s rose does have the significance of a human future. Because he took upon himself the task of seeing the rose. And yet, at the same time, dying is now, says the rose.
All of this is presented, is made present, in Rilke’s epitaph. It is not spoken about. It is not even portrayed or described. It is set before us. And it is placed on Rilke’s grave. So we come to the final dimension of the poem. It is the epitaph of a poet—indeed, of one whose last long sequence of poems was to the singing god, Orpheus. And this too is hinted at in the last word of the epitaph, so strangely placed as though for emphasis and reflection: “Lidern” = “lids,” suggesting, as I mentioned earlier, “Liedern” = “songs.” Thus the epitaph is Rilke’s, the man, the poet. Above all, it is the epitaph for the poet’s work, his poems, his singing. But the poet is not Orpheus. He is rather the messenger who speaks the words of Orpheus. For Orpheus himself is the rose. As Rilke sang in Sonnets to Orpheus (I, 5):
Erect no memorial stone. Just let the rose
bloom each year on his behalf.
For it is Orpheus.
[Errichtet keinen Denkstein. Laßt die Rose
nur jedes Jahr zu seinen Gunsten blühn.
Denn Orpheus ists.]
Orpheus—the singing god who goes to the realm of the dead for love—is the rose. Or the rose is the series of petals, lids, songs, which, from desire, is no one’s sleep—which is Orpheus. And the final contradiction is that once the journey is made, once the rose is dead, all that remains are the songs, the words, “an earned word, pure” [“ein erworbenes Wort, reines” (Duino Elegies, IX)]. All that remains is the poem, the figure. “But let us rejoice a while now / to believe the figure. That’s enough.” [“Doch uns freue eine Weile nun, / der Figur zu glauben. Das genügt.” (Sonnets to Orpheus, I, 11)].
“Then,” said Malte, “quite at the end, one might perhaps be able to write ten lines that were good.” In his own epitaph, in scarcely more than ten words, Rilke wrote his one poem, the one poem that each poet seeks, a poem which achieves the “one task set clearly” before Rilke, as he himself expressed it: “To confirm confidence toward death out of the deepest delights and glories of life: to make death, who never was a stranger, more distinct and palpable again as the silent knowing participant in everything alive.”
* This gravestone is not to be confused with another, placed later on the ground of the grave itself by Rilke’s daughter, which has a large, simple cross on it. This later stone has become the focus of some controversy. Rilke’s aversion to traditional Christianity is well known (the best formal prose statement of his most mature explicit religious views is his brilliant and beautiful essay, “The Young Workman’s Letter,” written during the great giving, February, 1922). Thus, the cross on the newer gravestone is rather inappropriate, a point of view taken by Rilke’s grandson, as related to me by the present occupant of Muzot, who went on to explain that the grandson had told her he wanted it removed. She made it charmingly clear that she agreed with Rilke’s grandson, as, I might add, do I.