René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke, better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was born in Prague, then-capital of Bohemia. And like a proper bohemian, the poet’s life was rife with restlessness, sensitivity, and persistent travel.
An only child, Rilke’s youth was cast under the shadow of his elder sister’s death in infancy, and his wealthy, unstable mother was prone to adorning her son in lacy dresses, her “plaything, like a big doll.” His first girlfriend went on to study psychoanalysis under Freud and would probe the Modernist’s psyche for years to come.
Works like “The Panther” express the tense urgency among a new, globalist Europe: “For him there are a thousand bars and behind those bars no world.” Likewise, “The Beggars” reveals a particular bent of pathos and discomfiture throughout Rilke’s oeuvre, where stark revulsion and dejection scarred his wanderer’s soul:
[The beggars] show the sightseer
their mouths full of filth,
and let him (he can afford it) peer
at the mange eating away at them.
In their twisted vision
his stranger’s face is skewed;
they are pleased with their accession,
and when he speaks they spew.
After decades roaming across Europe—he lived in Linz, Munich, St. Petersburg, Paris, Málaga, and Trieste, among other places—Rilke at long last found a home in Veyras, Switzerland. There, his work coalesced into its most placid and mystic. And there he died, consumed by leukamiac sores, the author of his own rose-lined tomb’s epigraph. Still, I prefer to remember the poet on the move. Unsettled and plumbing German’s depths for some notion of where those endless roads of bohemianism led. From “Day in Autumn”:
Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,
and, along the city’s avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.
-David Fishkind