Today is Saturday, and I am attending a wedding, which is a cause for joy. According to statistics, 70% of weddings are held on Saturdays these days, but in the Orthodox Church Sunday is the preferred day. Sunday is The Lord’s Day since the Resurrection, and the day for celebration and feasting, while Saturday is the day of rest, when we remember those who have fallen asleep in death and rest in their graves. Here is another poem that ties the remembrance of death to the season, and to the One who mitigates our sorrow over it.
AUTUMN
The leaves are falling, falling as from far off, as though far gardens withered in the skies; they are falling with denying gestures.
And in the nights the heavy earth is falling from all the stars down into loneliness.
We are all falling. This hand falls. And look at others; it is in them all.
And yet there is One who holds this falling endlessly gently in his hands.
Come let us watch the sun go down and walk in twilight through the orchard’s green. Does it not seem as if we had for long collected, saved and harbored within us old memories? To find releases and seek new hopes, remembering half-forgotten joys, mingled with darkness coming from within, as we randomly voice our thoughts aloud wandering beneath these harvest-laden trees reminiscent of Durer woodcuts, branches which, bent under the fully ripened fruit, wait patiently, trying to outlast, to serve another season’s hundred days of toil, straining, uncomplaining, by not breaking but succeeding, even though the burden should at times seem almost past endurance. Not to falter! Not to be found wanting! Thus must it be, when willingly you strive throughout a long and uncomplaining life, committed to one goal: to give yourself! And silently to grow and to bear fruit.
This poem about Queen Esther of the Old Testament I find fascinating, in the way it portrays the enervating terror Rilke imagines the saint experiencing, as she forces an audience with the king without an invitation. It recalls the truth we all have heard, that courage doesn’t mean you aren’t afraid, but that you do what you must in spite of fear.
Maybe she didn’t know what she would say, exactly, but she knew that she had to do something, to intervene on behalf of her people, the Jews. (You can read the whole story in the book of Esther in the Bible.) The translator guesses that in the poem, what Esther conceives at the touch of her king’s scepter “is, presumably, the plan to save the Jews of Persia from Haman’s plot.”
For seven days her maids had combed the ash of her grief, as well as the whole cache of woeful recollections, from her hair, and had borne it and bathed it in sunshine,
Queen Esther
sustained it and nurtured it with fine spices day after day; but then and there
the time had come when, uninvited, with no more respite than the dead, she finally entered the palace door, draped upon her women, to see Him — that one at whose bidding and whim one dies if one ever dare come near.
He shone so that she felt his brilliance in the rubies she wore, which seemed aflame; like a jar she was filled up with his presence, and quickly she was full to the brim,
before she had reached the third chamber’s end she overflowed with the great king’s might, and it seemed that the walls of malachite flooded her in green. She did not intend
this long walk with her every gemstone growing heavier as the king shone, growing cold with fear. She kept walking.
And as she at last approached that one sitting high on the tourmaline throne, looming above her like an actual thing,
she was caught by her near-at-hand women, who bore their fainting mistress to a chair. He touched her with the tip of his scepter; and without thought she conceived it within.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, from Rilke: New Poems Translated by Joseph Cadora
In this telling, the jewels play a big part, in the way they weigh her down; they express something about her relationship to the king, who would have been the giver of them. He was the reason for the events that led to her unique standing as one who had been elevated from being a simple Hebrew girl to the status of royalty. In that role in which she now finds herself, she feels the heaviness of her responsibility. I wonder if Rilke was inspired by this painting by Nicolas Poussin:
Nicolas Poussin, Esther Before Ahasuerus
Joseph Cadora translated all the poems that are included in Rilke: New Poems, the collection in which I found this one. He includes a short commentary on each poem in the anthology, which he says are “mostly a result of reading the poet’s letters, several biographies, and three other works of Rilke’s …” He also writes that “translating New Poems has been a labor of love, and thus, no labor at all.”
Already my eyes touch the sunlit hill, far ahead of the road I have just begun. So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; we see its light, even from a distance-and it changes us, even if we do not reach it, into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are; a gesture seems to wave us on, answering our own wave… but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
Gladsome Lights 