Here's a delicate Rilke poem someone sent me & a simple translation I made to help you follow the German, as much as possible respecting line & phrasing; read this like Heidegger set to music:
This sounds quite Romantic, so you might be excused for thinking it’s a love poem. A young man speaking this way to a young woman would likely be thought a lover… The poem, however, is split in two halves, one about the speaker, one about the spoken to—it might as well be poet & audience. It’s a poem about two ways of being human, that is, of thinking about will & neediness—being a mortal, finite being with infinite or indefinite desires or possibilities. To be oneself might mean to want everything, & therefore in a sense to be everything: The whole cosmos is in the soul, you could say, or else we would not be aware of it; or perhaps the whole cosmos is as erotically charged as we are—is there a cosmic drama playing out, to which we are especially attuned, through poetry? Being human, however, might mean something else, a mutuality or reciprocity among human beings that makes the odd even, that smooths out or polishes the rough or unequal, which might mean being satisfied, so to speak, with nothing, that is, with forgetting about the cosmos & our privileged place in it.
The halves of the poem seem to have the same structure, same number of lines, & each seems to involve an opposition that might be the same as the opposition between the two halves. In the first half, there is an opposition between the poet & the many. The poet speaks using the first person singular pronoun in the first stanza, which stands in for a being we do not know—perhaps he discloses himself through speech. The first stanza is accodingly beautiful, one rhyme embracing another & giving a kind of conclusion, on the word spiel, which perhaps the poem as a whole possesses, but not the other parts. This poetic formality suggests wholeness & the stanza is about wholeness, & what it means to us. To be whole is to want a lot or everything. About everything, the poet says it means the dark of falling & rising with scintillations of light. The whole is much darker than it is light, but there is light, it is associated with rising rather than falling; perhaps he is describing the night sky, perhaps this is the cosmic drama, if dark & light & ups & downs make sense together. To want a lot might mean, only the good parts; to want it all might mean understanding the good can only be had together with the bad. The motion suggests chaos or at least confusion, an instability that requires daring of one, to face danger; but light is also associated with playfulness; dark depth & the surface where light plays belong together, so it might be water instead that the image suggests. The motion of the stanza itself is from shorter sentences to longer, from ending at the line end to spilling over that boundary, from shorter to longer words, from pronouns to nouns that depict appearances or beings with complicated adjectives, from a stilted prose style to rather heroic meter. It requires putting two together. It seems it begins with man & ends with the world—but the poem as a whole returns to man. In the first stanza, describing oneself as a willing or desiring being merely suggests man’s mortality. Poetic beauty perhaps goes too far & suggests time is merely a cyclical alternation of light & dark, as day is made of night & day.
But this is not the only option for a human being & perhaps to understand it, one needs to contrast this with something else. However beautiful, the first stanza might not be persuasive, might not make what it describes sufficiently attractive. The poem indicates this in two ways: First, it begins with “You see,“ which aims as much to make a case as to state a fact—to persuade, not merely to give an image. The contrast between the poet & the many is then perhaps exemplary, meant to educate. The other indication has to do with a German pun. In the first stanza, the word perhaps (vielleicht) is stressed by being introduced near the middle of an odd construction: “Ich will viel. Viel-leicht will ich.” It’s almost symmetrical, in a mirror, palindromic. Viel means much, a lot; vielleicht means maybe, & accordingly, points to being & to nothing; leicht means light, not in the sense of light, which is licht, which also appears in the first stanza. Then a version of each word appears in the second stanza: Much, viel, turns into viele, many, i.e. the many. This silently suggests something the poet who wants much does not want. Leicht also appears as adjective for judgment, Gerichts, meaning the opposite of heavy or difficult. What the many do is easy, in a strange sense—in wanting nothing, they somehow come to feel princely, because their judgment gives them a feeling our poet does not attain, although he knows what it is. The many are braggarts, I suspect is Rilke’s point: They think they know what they don’t, they think their judgment is true, precisely because it’s easy: They believe in the obivous, we might say. That’s what it means to be a prince, Fürst, which comes from first in German as in Latin, a happy etymological coincidence: For things to be what they seem, so that there are no depths or deceptions, & it becomes the easiest thing to rule the world. On this assumption, nothing is missing & therefore nothing is to be willed. The will disguises itself as merely judging appearances to be real. The ordinary man, of whom there are so many, is secretly a prince desiring rule over the world—but the prince is also secretly an ordinary man: He is no better able to suspect there is depth to being human because there is depth to the world.
Now we start again, with an opposition, with the only adversative in the poem. Nothing was said of sentiment in the first stanza; in the second, sentiment was mentioned in general as a noun & in a derogatory way, as smooth or slick, lacking uncertainty—the use of aliteration there also makes it sound pat, & disappointing; in the third, the sentiment is specifically joy or gladness & it is a verb (freuen). The poet, done describing himself through opposition to the many, describes his audience, whom he had addressed from the beginning, in the second person singular, nameless, but intimate, as when one reads a book. It becomes obivous, however, that the second half is strangely the reverse of the first: It does not move from the better to the worse, but the other way around, it starts with a kind of criticism & the conclusion is an impassioned plea for the discovery of life, or oneself. It’s also different because it only speaks of & to this addressee. But these two couplets about joy might not belong together—originally, they were presented as two different stanzas. They are similar metrically & almost rhyme, so I mistakenly put them together for the sake of symmetry, whereas the rhyme scheme suggests that the poem as a whole falls into three parts: The opening quatrain & then two quintains, so that the opposition here is between the many & the addressee, who is said to take pleasure in the faces that serve & thirst. This might mean the working classes, politically. But it might also mean others who, instead of looking content, look needy. The repetition of the pronoun each, jedes, from the first stanza suggests a connection between poet & his audience—a very strange word to put together with gladness or will, since it speaks of individuality in an indefinite way: It cannot quite be love of a definite thing or a specific human being. It’s obviously more human to recognize neediness than not, but it says nothing about one’s own neediness.
The last part of the poem hinges on the gerät-verrät strife: Utensil or tool v. revealing or betrayal. We may say, use v. uselessness, understanding that both imply some kind of knowledge. Previosuly, it was not clear why one should rejoice in seeing human neediness, but now it seems to be because one can satisfy it. To be oneself, in this sense, is to be what others need. Again, the indefinite pronoun recalls the first stanza, but here, aller, all, refers to people not to cosmic beings or experiences. I suspect this is a comparison between the poet & his audience. Whoever is being addressed here seems to need to be needed; this reveals something complex in human nature, of which we the audience are not aware, although as audience we have more depth than the many. To need to be needed is to be superior to others whom one can help, but dependant on them who can only use one. This is the ugly thought in the poem—using someone as a tool, which may have been implied in seeing those who serve & thirst… Perhaps the political equivalent of the poet’s experience is noticing human neediness & satisfying it. The eccentric poetic advice, however, is the opposite of need & use (which in German are brauchen & gebrauchen): To hide is to reveal, which is a different account of neediness & satisfaction: This poem is written so that it cannot be used like a tool, since it does not easily disclose its uses, but perhaps to understand it is a satisfaction of a different kind. The end of the poem seems to recall the beginning, over against the middle, where the use of words like many, judgment, & prince suggested the theme was politics. At the end, the theme is life, corresponding to the pursuit of everything at the beginning. But here, mortality gives an urgency to the poetic plea that only by diving into one’s own depths can one discover life, because in the depths there are generative powers, opposed to life-draining neediness. Diving in the deep recalls the falling in the dark in the beginning, but something like self-knowledge is involved now rather than the cosmos. Another new note is the calm or quiet of such an experience, which emphasizes its solitary, private, or subjective character. There is a suggestion in the poem that the speaker is a man, given the cosmic daring, & the addressee is a woman, given the caring mood & the suggestion of birth in becoming (werden). It could be a love song.
Of course, Rainer Maria Rilke was a sentimental fool whose heart opened up to left-wing politics in the 1920s, with all the mad Communist friends you can imagine at the very moment when any decent order in Germany was collapsing—after a mad war, a mad anarchy. You might think Romanticism requires us to believe that a poet who doesn’t encourage political catastrophe isn’t being authentic… Rilke had bad parents; a bad mother; he loathed the military Prussians, since he was compelled to go to a military academy; he lived through the catastrophe that ended Europe; but he could never free himself from all that. I can’t say much here about the connection between his poetic insight & his failure to understand politics…