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| Rainer Maria Rilke by Leonid Pasternak |
"He who opts for resistance will not receive world." ~ Rainer Maria Rilke, Nocturnal Walk, Capri, April 1908
Reading Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry while traveling in Italy has led me to reflect on the poet and his connection to Southern Italy.
Rilke arrived in Capri in December 1906, after a brief stay in Naples, seeking the solitude necessary for his work. He settled into the Casina delle Rose, a small house in the gardens of Villa Discopoli near Via Tragara. He stayed there until the following spring, then returned to the island in 1908. The poems, prose, observations, and letters from his time in Capri and Naples reveal a poet intensely attentive to the world around him.
Rilke possessed the rare ability to look upon physical things and sense something beyond their outward form. For him, beauty was seldom merely beautiful; it carried within it the presence of transience, mystery, and death.
Il Bel Paese invites much the same contemplation. Here beauty and mortality continually inhabit the same landscape. Reading him, more than a century later, I see that landscape much the same way.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, October 7th, Feast of Our Lady of Victory and the Most Holy Rosary
Rilke arrived in Capri in December 1906, after a brief stay in Naples, seeking the solitude necessary for his work. He settled into the Casina delle Rose, a small house in the gardens of Villa Discopoli near Via Tragara. He stayed there until the following spring, then returned to the island in 1908. The poems, prose, observations, and letters from his time in Capri and Naples reveal a poet intensely attentive to the world around him.
Rilke possessed the rare ability to look upon physical things and sense something beyond their outward form. For him, beauty was seldom merely beautiful; it carried within it the presence of transience, mystery, and death.
Il Bel Paese invites much the same contemplation. Here beauty and mortality continually inhabit the same landscape. Reading him, more than a century later, I see that landscape much the same way.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, October 7th, Feast of Our Lady of Victory and the Most Holy Rosary
