Most contemporary American poets I've talked to interpret the poem as culminating in an ethical promise—that is, in the command to reunder-stand or reanimate one's life under that gaze, the gaze of fulfilled spirit in abbreviated body, its life extending beyond the limits of corporeal outline. But there is a bleaker view to be considered. One can understand the last line's “must” in a more threatening light—more a foreshadowing of necessity than an opportunity for will. Then it seems to require of us what we cannot choose or would not choose, insisting on fatality not freedom. In this reading, the “change” is not in life but of it: you must die, in other words, and thus change your life. This message would be the memento from the god (who looks like mere matter) that you are yourself only matter that looks, for a while, like a god. This bleaker reading, though less palatable to a solution-loving, heaven-craving, optimistic cultural taste, rather resembles the Nietzschean disciplines and severities of the Rilke who chose to record really horrifying realities in the object-studies of 1907 and 1908. Look at poems like “The Stylite” and “Corpse-Washing” in the New Poems, and you'll see how fiercely stripped of comfort he has trained his eye to be. Or take a poem like “The Beggars,” to understand how thorough-going is Rilke's intention to study—not to avert his gaze from—what might otherwise repel us, looking the object into some kind of subject-hood.
The Beggars
You didn't know what the heap
was made of. A foreigner found
beggars in it. They sell
the hollows from their hands.
They show the one who's journeyed here
their mouths full of muck,
and he may (he can afford it)
see how their leprosy eats.
In their weirdly devastated
eyes, his foreign face starts melting;
and they exult in his downfall
and spit when he speaks.
The poem is merciless in its description of the encounter between what we might take to be a (well-fed?) tourist and a huddle of beggars whose flesh itself is eaten away by disease. The brilliant interpenetration of conditions—the one who can eat, the one who is eaten; the one who can pay to “see how their leprosy eats,” the one whose poverty is all he has on hand to sell; the mouth that speaks, matched (or challenged—Rilke keeps it perfecdy undecidable) by the mouth that spits— all of this reiterates the savage vacancy in the premises of flesh. A nothing with holes in it—that is the view of the human body. The dichotomy suggested between foreigner and natives is complicated by the lepers’ “native” human estrangement: ostracized in all societies, their privilege as “natives” soon dissolves into their status as the ostracized; so each (self) in the poem is marked by otherness, with no non-other that could stand his own ground. “Natives” and foreigner enter into a kind of moral exchange, in which the former sing for their supper (that is, they beg: they open their mouths and the eaten-away mouth becomes, itself, the claim on the benefactor's mercy) and he pays for the trouble and insult they represent, the trouble and insult carnal suffering must enact on the human body. If their eyes leak, then he melts in their eyes; the melting is both a figure for his pity, and the hard evidence of their condition. If they spit, it is perhaps the only speaking available to a torn mouth; but he can't be sure they don't disdain him too, who stoops to distinguish himself from them, whose dropped coin can only redescribe the distance between them, materializing downwardness. The distaste is plainly recorded. Rilke doesn't flinch from the crudest possibility: that the gesture we'd most love to read as pity's boon and virtue's gift might also repoison the relationship; that the giver's gesture might only reinscribe his altitude; that neither party might act in generosity. The one won't give until he sees how low they are, the others wish of him a downfall (not only in coin but in his own come-down).
The poem zeroes in on relationships (starting with the odd and never-again-mentioned pronoun whose very presence, at the outset, suggests an absent “I” who'd so address a “you.”) The heap becomes people, but only when the foreigner comes by; the hands have something to sell: holes or hollows, the space where something should be. The bodies of the beggars are a patchwork of paucities—first with no life in them (the heap), then with hollows for hands, then with mouths full—but of muck (their disease eats them, and the muck may be the rot flesh itself falls into: here the line between the familiar and the alien is again transgressed, just as disturbingly as it was when the heap first turned out to be human). The benefactor falls into their eyes and in their eyes his face too gets distorted; the last line's alliterative sputtering (“and spit when he speaks” / “und speien, wenn er spricht”) makes the beggar and the bestower resemble each other, so speech is only a spitting, or spitting is only a speaking.Still, at some level we reserve a suspicion the exchange may be perversely conservative of their difference, whether or not to speak patronizingly was his fortune, or to spit without malice their misfortune.
There is a twist of opposition-in-identity at work here as elsewhere in Rilke. At every level this poem equally creates nothing-out-of-some-thing, and something-out-of-nothing. One feels the exchanges at issue in opposition and resemblance, presence and absence, subject turned object—and the essentially Rilkean uncontainability of being, whether in the truncated torso of stone or the oozing face of leprosy. And there is always the challenge to art itself in these constructions; for the question arises whether the speaking imitates or provokes the spitting, whether the artist or the god puts the spirit in the stone, so that what would otherwise be a “curt and deformed” mannikin becomes as unfathomable and spirited as starlight and beastsheen. Rilke's Eranna sings to Sappho, the singer: “O you…hurler! / Like a spear among other things / I lay among my kin. Your music / launched me far. I don't know where I am.” The animating and destabilizing of object in event is the very motion of poetry. Subversive of grammatical analysis, it finds its life in the object qua subject, through poetic passage.
Loss of definition (in from outside, self from other), the sense of overthrown outline, of Being full of what exceeds it—these effects permeate the poem “Eastern Aubade.”
Is this bed we're on not like a sea coast,
just a strip of coast on which we're stranded?
Nothing is certain except your high breasts,
which mounted dizzily beyond my feeling.
For this night, in which so much cried out,
in which beasts call and tear at one another,
does its strangeness not dismay us? And yet:
what's slowly starting up outside (they call it day) —
do we understand it any better?
We would have to lie as deeply intertwined
as flower petals around the stamen:
for the uncontained is everywhere,
and it gathers force and plunges toward us.
But while we're pressed against each other,
to keep from seeing how it closes in,
it may flare out of you, out of me:
for our souls live on treason.
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