Poem Of The Week: The Courtesan By Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

The Courtesan

The sun of Venice in my hair’s preparing
a gold where lustrously shall culminate
all alchemy. My brows, which emulate
her bridges, you can contemplate

over the silent perilousness repairing
of eyes which some communion secretly
unites with her canals, so that the sea
rises and ebbs and changes in them. He

who once has seen me falls to envying
my dog, because, in moments of distraction,
this hand no fieriness incinerates,

scathless, bejewelled, there recuperates. –
And many a hopeful youth of high extraction
will not survive my mouth’s envenoming.

A propensity for innerlichkeit, for intensity, informs and shapes Czech poet Rilke’s achingly beautiful sonnet. Striking a perfect balance between inner and outer worlds, rendering the two near indivisible in an eroding Venetian landscape whose suggestion of seductive glory sustains in metonymic harness with the luminous allure of the courtesan, the narrator’s donning of the mantle of the first-person gives hyperbolic focus to the portrayal.

The paramour’s envisioning of self is aggrandised in a series of shimmering images whose seamless representation dissolves armoreal history, culture and character in an alchemical solution, to create a single unified figure. The space alchemised is one of faded power, wherein the lustre of human vigour remains refulgent in despite, in anthropomorphised ‘communion’ with the flickering reflections of the architecture, the canals and the sea espied in the eyes of the courtesan.

The point of dissolution is exquisitely drawn, and invested with real aesthetic energy in this translation by J. B. Leishman; the tortuous use of verbs, especially in the opening quatrain, strains a sense of effort, of enforced will, to breaking point, giving notice of a refusal to submit to the closing waters, of a resolute striving for identity.

And lest we were in any doubt, the recumbent posture of the city-state, and the prostitute whose ‘trade’ is a persuasive metaphor for its commercial excesses, is only a temporary indisposition: the sting remains, as barbed and flick-knife ready as the Venetian Arsenal. The ‘recuperation’ is illusory: in this good-humoured poem whose mock-heroic textures make of it a near-satire, the final lines act as a reminder that embers may still flash and spark:

‘And many a hopeful youth of high extraction
will not survive my mouth’s envenoming’.

‘The Courtesan’ is taken from Penguin Modern European Poets: Rilke – Selected Poems, published by Penguin Books (1964)