Black Cat

Rilke was an independent spirit, supremely dedicated to the cultivation of his own art. He did not associate himself with any particular literary movement or with any trends in the literature of the period. Scholars sometimes link him with the movement known as modernism, which broke with earlier traditions such as realism and romanticism, but if this is so it would only apply to his later work, written after World War I (1914-18), when modernism began. It is therefore more fruitful to regard Rilke as forging his own path, so “Black Cat” is best understood in terms of the development of his own work. His early work, such as the Book of Hours (1905), explores deep levels of feeling within himself, especially in connection with his relations with God, although Rilke’s god was never the conventional god of Christianity. In other words, the early Rilke was a subjective poet. However, this changed radically when he began working for the sculptor Rodin, who suggested that he look more fully and intensely at the external world and develop poetry that was objective rather than subjective. American poet Robert Bly describes this evolution of Rilke’s work in his short essay “The Object Poem,” which appears in his poetry anthology News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness (1980). Bly observed that according to the German Romantic poet Novalis, writing in 1800, two stages were necessary in the development of a poet. Bly quotes Novalis:

The first step is introspection—exclusive contemplation of the self. But whoever stops there goes only half way. The second step must be genuine observation outward—spontaneous, sober observation of the external world (Novalis. “The Object Poem.” News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness, edited by Robert Bly, Counterpoint, 1980, pp. 209–55).

Bly describes the first stage, which Rilke had already explored, as “introspective” and “narcissistic.” Poets who remain at that stage cannot count their work as mature; they must develop an acute power of seeing and observing what is external to themselves. It was this rigid self-discipline that led Rilke to write the object or “thing” poems.

Rilke himself offered the following explanation of his creative process in a letter dated February 5, 1923, to a friend (“une amie”) who had commented on what she saw as the impersonal nature of New Poems:

You see, in order to say what happens to me, I needed not so much an instrument of feeling as I did clay: involuntarily I undertook to make use of so-called lyric poetry to shape, not feelings, but things I had felt; the whole event of life had to find place in that shaping, independently of the suffering or pleasure it had at first brought me. That shaping would have been valueless if it had not gone as far as the trans-shaping of every passing detail, it was necessary to come through to the essence (Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke 1910-1926, translated by Jane Bannard Greene and M. D. Herter Norton, Norton, 1972, p. 322).

To “say what happens to [him],” Rilke looked so intensely that, as in “Black Cat,” he seems almost to become the object or creature he is describing.