Entrance

“Entrance,” an early Rilke poem, contains some of the imagery and symbols that he favored throughout his poetic career. During the same period in which he wrote “Entrance,” he also wrote the untitled poem that begins “I love the dark hours of my being,” which appeared in The Book of Hours (Das Stundenbuch) in 1905 (translation by Robert Bly in Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1981, p. 19). In those “dark hours,” his “senses drop into the deep” and an expansive sense of the infinite nature of life opens up for him. Another poem from the same collection begins, “You darkness, that I come from” and goes on to state that the darkness contains everything and makes the poet feel that “a great energy / is moving near me.” He concludes, “I have faith in nights” (Bly, p. 21). Those lines from both poems could serve almost as a gloss on “Entrance,” with its emphasis on stepping into the darkness; the poet sets out the conditions in which his being is most expanded and complete and in which poetry can arise within him.

Some years later, in January 1914, Rilke stared out at the vastness of the night through the window of his room in Paris, and he felt that the night befriended him: “Your breath passed over me. Your smile, spanning vast / solemnities, entered me” (“The Great Night,” translated by Edward Snow in The Poetry of Rilke, 2011, p. 519). In “The Solitary,” which appeared in the same collection as “Entrance,” Rilke hints at the notion that he emphasizes in “Entrance”: the necessity of going beyond the familiar. In order to convey this idea, in this poem he likens himself not to someone who enters into the pregnant and unknown darkness, but to a traveler to distant lands who returns to mingle with others who know only the familiar life:

I’m like one who’s traveled foreign oceans

among those so eternally at home;

the full days stand rote at their tables:

for me the distant roils with dream (translated by Snow, p. 73).

The other central symbol in “Entrance,” the tree, also appears elsewhere in Rilke’s work. When he wanted to explain to the young poet who wrote to him for advice, he chose the image of a tree to explain what it meant to be an artist: “not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow” (Letters to a Young Poet, translated by Charlie Louth, p. 14).

Much later, in the culminating work of his maturity, the Sonnets to Orpheus (1923), the very first sonnet begins with a tree image: “A tree arose. O pure transcendence!” (translated by Edward Snow, p. 351). The tree is a symbol for the singing of Orpheus, the godlike figure from Greek mythology. The line might equally be applied as a gloss to “Entrance.” The “huge, black tree” rises up into the heavens as a symbol of the poet’s ability to transcend the familiar, mundane world. Rilke’s figure of Orpheus, created two decades later, does the same thing.