Rainer Maria Rilke’s Dark Ecology

Abstract

Rainer Maria Rilke’s significance for a modern eco-poetics has attracted ever-increasing interest over the past two decades, with sophisticated ontological, phenomenological, and even ethological approaches to his animal poems, as well as such late poetic figures as ‘das Offene’ in Duineser Elegien (1923). However, many of these readings have worked from the persistent premise of a mystical — Romantically inflected or even monistic — conception of nature, grounded in an idealized (re-)union of subject and object and inner and outer spaces. By contrast, this article suggests that we can learn far more from the points of mismatch, irreconcilability, and alienation to be found in the ‘thing poetics’ of Rilke’s so-called ‘middle’ period (1902–1910). Arguing in dialogue with Timothy Morton’s call for a ‘dark ecology’ and working from Rilke’s own theoretical reflections in his Worpswede monograph (1903), I trace out the convoluted entwinements of subject and object, mind and matter, and nature and artifice across both parts of Neue Gedichte (1907 and 1908), and in Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910). Morton calls for a form of ecological thought that might learn to ‘love’ the ‘non-identical’: in other words, properly and truly to recognize the ‘irreducible otherness’ within our myriad environments. My essay considers what that theoretical love might look like in the poetic practice of one of the great German-language modernists. 1 1 I would like to thank Rüdiger Görner, Christa Jansohn, and Friedhelm Marx for their comments on an earlier version of this essay.