Reflections on Rainer Maria Rilke – On Hearing Of A Death

We lack all knowledge of this parting. Death
does not deal with us. We have no reason
to show death admiration, love or hate;
his mask of feigned tragic lament gives us

a false impression. The world’s stage is still
filled with roles which we play. While we worry
that our performances may not please,
death also performs, although to no applause.

But as you left us, there broke upon this stage
a glimpse of reality, shown through the slight
opening through which you disappeared: green,
evergreen, bathed in sunlight, actual woods.

We keep on playing, still anxious, our difficult roles
declaiming, accompanied by matching gestures
as required. But your presence so suddenly
removed from our midst and from our play, at times

overcomes us like a sense of that other
reality: yours, that we are so overwhelmed
and play our actual lives instead of the performance,
forgetting altogether the applause.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Albert Ernest Flemming

This poem has really struck me this last few days. The images of ourselves, our egos, playing out roles like an actor playing to an audience. How we adjust our actions to create an effect on the world, yet this ego which is constantly adjusting and ‘acting’ doesn’t truly exist.

Onto the stage comes death

And then, onto the stage, comes death, who truly cuts through all this acting – a dose of ‘reality’, if you will. How deeply the knife of death cuts, and strips away all the acting and pretence. It seems as though death has a reality which this ego does not, and so the actor of ego leaves the stage, at least temporarily. Death appears with the passing on of a loved one, their physical presence missed, though their ‘presence’ continues. How extraordinary that our actor drops his mask, ego drops away, and we ‘get real’, still ‘acting’ yet no longer ‘acting’, if you see what I mean?

And yet, when we look deeply, death has no more reality than the ego does. Both seem to appear, yet have no actual substance.

and yet, this illusory death has the effect of stripping away the unnecessary, and revealing the essential, ‘playing our actual lives, instead of the performance, forgetting the applause’.

How extraordinary, this seeming loss and gain …

But as you left us, there broke upon this stage
a glimpse of reality, shown through the slight
opening through which you disappeared: green,
evergreen, bathed in sunlight, actual woods.