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Nameless Shame. Von Salis has few such events to record: A visit to an abandoned chapel to put flowers on the altar or "a feast of reconciliation" (i.e., a chat) with a tardy postman are typical adventures. By common standards, Rilke did not "live" at all. The events of his life took place within his poetry.
In Rilke, says Critic Hans Egon Hol-thusen, "we see the conquest of an originally Christian soul by an anti-Christian consciousness." In one short poem Rilke presents Christ's imagined prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane:
I am alone with all men's grief
Which I essayed to heal through Thee
And Thou art not.
O nameless shame . . .
Then they recounted that an angel came.
Why an angel?
It was night that came
And played indifferently with the leaves.
But Rilke's hard-edged cynicism is not to be equated with the currently fashionable syndrome of despair. He believed in no hereafter, but he accepted death as a just price for the gift of life. He is the voice of all whose worship goes to no Creator but to Creation itself. When he came to write his will, Rilke included a lyrical conundrum in which life and death became one in the symbol of the rose, whose loveliness contains nothing.
Rose, of pure contradiction, delight
in being no one's sleep under so many lids.
The complexity of his thought, and art are more clear in the German, where Lider (eyelids) also suggest Lieder (songs).
The paradox followed Rilke in a final irony. Picking such a rose in his garden, he pricked his finger. The puncture did not heal, and from this small clue his doctor discovered that Rilke had leukemia in a rare, painful and eventually disfiguring form. "Life is a glory," were among his last words.