[In the following essay, Schoolfield surveys assorted nineteenth and twentieth century poetic interpretations of Hadrian's relationship with the youth Antinous.]

I

The Emperor Hadrian, who is the speaker of Rilke's “Klage um Antinous,” has enjoyed considerable popularity among poets, not least because he belongs to their guild: “Fuit enim poematum et litterarum nimium studiosissimus.” One of his own poems, from the tiny corpus of imperial verse accepted as authentic,¹ has been frequently anthologized and as frequently translated. The famous poem, of course, is Hadrian's “address to his soul,” the “animula vagula blandula,” the companion and guest of the body, the soul, which now is about to go off to some unknown place, all wan and numb and naked, “pallidula rigida nudula,” unable, as of old, to jest, “nec ut soles dabis jocos.” The translators have been many, some of them distinguished, all of them longer-winded than was the dying emperor: Ronsard (“Amelette Ronsardelette, / Mignonnelette, doucelette”), Prior (“Poor little pretty fluttering thing”), Herder (“Ach Seelchen, armes Seelchen!”), Byron (“Oh gentle, fleeting, wav'ring sprite”), and, in distant Finland, Frans Michael Franzén (“Själ lilla! / Stilla! Fladdrerska, / Pladdrerska. / Än en minut, / Flämtande, / Skämtande, / Njut!”). The poem has been paraphrased, too. Jakob Bidermann had his actor Philemon, in the seventeenth-century Jesuit martyr-play, sing a parody on it before his assumption of a Christian role and a Christian martyrdom.² Turning the pagan master of the world into a pious communicant, Pope threw out the diminutives, expanded the five short lines into three six-line strophes, and ended with a climax that would become familiar to all of us:

O Grave, where is thy victory?
O Death, where is thy sting?

And Richard Le Gallienne, changing Pope's title, A Dying Christian to His Soul to the—for the 1890s—more topical The Décadent to His Soul, did not remove himself as far from Pope's Christian standpoint as the new title would make us think:

… the soul wept with hollow hectic face,
Captive in that lupanar of a man.
And I who passed by heard and wept for both,—
The man was once an apple-cheek dear lad,
The soul was once an angel up in heaven.

II

Apart from being a poet, Hadrian had a second sort of reputation that also attracted literary attention: his affection for beauty. He loved handsome things, and among these handsome things was the Bithynian boy, Antinous, whom he made his favorite during one of those incessant imperial journeyings of his: accompanying his master to Egypt, the boy was drowned while the imperial barge was sailing up the Nile. The loss of Antinous caused Hadrian exquisite pain. According to the Vita Hadriani of Aelius Spartianus, the emperor wept for him like a woman: “quem muliebriter flevit.” Spartianus, who appears to have flourished toward the end of the third century, regarded these events of 130 a.d. with some distaste—that is, if any emotion at all can be detected in his dull accountings. “According to some,” Spartianus says, Antinous killed himself “out of devotion to Hadrian,” and, “according to others, on that account which both his beauty and Hadrian's excessive sensuality [‘nimia voluptas Hadriani’] suggest. However this may be, the Greeks deified him at Hadrian's request.”

The other historian to whom we owe our main knowledge of Hadrian's reign, Dio Cassius, stood a good deal closer to Hadrian's time than did Aelius Spartianus; Hadrian died in 138, and Dio Cassius was born in 150—in Bithynia, by the way, the homeland of the sorely lamented favorite. In book 69 (or, rather, Xiphilinus' surviving epitome of it) Dio Cassius tells how Antinous dies: “either by falling into the Nile, as Hadrian writes in his autobiography [which has been lost], or, as the truth is, by being offered in sacrifice.” The latter phrase is less terrifying than it sounds; Antinous had “voluntarily undertaken to die (it being necessary that a life should be surrendered freely for the accomplishment of the ends Hadrian had in view).” (Another chronicler, the fourth-century Aurelius Victor, puts the cause of the sacrifice more clearly: “When Hadrian wished his life lengthened, but the mages declared that another must sacrifice himself in his place, all the others refused, but Antinous offered to die.”) The lost youth was handsomely rewarded for his sacrifice by his bereaved master; Hadrian had a city built—Antinoë or Antinoöpolis—at the spot where Antinous had so devotedly done away with himself; he set up statues, or rather sacred images, of the boy “practically all over the world,” and “finally, he declared that he had seen a star which he took to be that of Antinous, and gladly lent an ear to the fictitious tales woven by his associates to the effect that the star had really come into being from the spirit of Antinous and had then appeared for the first time. … On this account, then, he became the object of some ridicule.”

But not just ridicule: the Antinous cult flourished, poets wrote verse in Antinous' praise, verse now, to our good fortune, mostly lost; and, as Pausanias (himself a contemporary of the dark events on the Nile) writes in his description of the art treasures of the ancient world, “I have not seen Antinous alive, but I have admired his portraits and his statues.” It was an admiration that would be shared, understandably enough, by future connoisseurs of ancient art and fair boys: Winckelmann describes some of the Antinous statues he had seen in the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (XII, 1, 17). On the other hand, Antinous and his cult, with its “Antinous games,” provided water on the scandalized mill of the Christian fathers. The words of one, Prudentius, may stand for the indignant arguments of many: “What shall I say of Antinous now placed in a celestial seat, / Antinous, the delight [“delicias”] of a divine prince, / Antinous despoiled of a masculine fate in an imperial embrace.” The relationship between Hadrian and his young friend was culpable first of all because emperor and favorite were of the same sex, and then because Hadrian had deified his lover—a savior-youth, having sacrificed himself for the sake of another and having been placed among the stars, could make even triumphant Christianity uncomfortable.³ The very thought made Tertullian rage: “Quo decorior Ganymedes aut carior suo amatori? … Passim scorta ascendunt,” he wrote in Ad nationes. “Everywhere, the whores are going up to heaven.” It was from this Christian tradition of hatred for Antinous that the Jesuit Bidermann took some details of his play Philemon, mentioned in connection with Hadrian's poem above; Bidermann locates the action in Antinoë, the city of paganism at its worst.

III

The tale of Hadrian and Antinous experienced a new popularity during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1851, before going off to Rome, the young Ferdinand Gregorovius had been encouraged by his teacher Wilhelm Drumann to publish a little book about the life and times of Hadrian. In 1883, Gregorovius, now world-famous, decided to issue a revised version of his book, in part, he says in his introduction, because no one else had written a scholarly work about this “merkwürdigen Kaiser,” in part because new material, mainly in the form of inscriptions, had come to light during the last thirty years. Yet there was also publisher's wisdom behind the republication; Hadrian, cum Antinoo, had become a popular item in the world of fiction. In 1881, the Egyptologist and historical novelist, Georg Ebers (“dieser liebevolle Gelehrte,” as the young Rilke once called him) published still another of his successful historical fictions, this one called Der Kaiser (in two volumes): the book dealt with Hadrian and closed with the death of Antinous. The relationship between master and favorite, it should be added (Ebers was not the man to fly directly in convention's face), is depicted in what may be called a “respectable” light; the couple engages in lengthy conversations and naught else. The suicide of Antinous is brought about by a number of causes: a Christian girl, upon whom Antinous' eye has fallen with normal (if well-controlled) emotions, has been slain after her refusal to worship the emperor's graven image; Antinous is likewise upset because Hadrian entertains plans of adopting him and thus making him a successor to the imperial throne, a post for which he—“der nicht von heute auf morgen zu denken vermochte”—has small qualifications; and finally (the story of the self-sacrifice) Antinous means to protect his master from a horrible fate predicted by an Egyptian prophetess. In short, Antinous is a deeply disturbed youth: “Schmerz, Unruhe, Unglück starrten ihn an, wohin er auch schaute.” A solution, or an escape, lies close at hand: “Da lag der Nil, da war ein Kahn,” and, after some powerful oarstrokes have put Antinous in midstream, he slips over the side and goes gurgling to the bottom. Learning of the youth's death, Hadrian refuses to see anyone, not even his wife Sabine, who has come along for the Nile excursion; he vents his emotions in a somewhat complicated monologue. First, in order to calm any fears on the gentle reader's part, Ebers injects a flat contradiction of Spartianus' “quem muliebriter flevit,” and then takes care to have Hadrian make it clear that he loved Antinous as a father would: “Könnte ich nur weinen wie die Weiber, oder wie andere Väter, denen der Tod ihre Söhne entreißt; das wäre meine beste Arznei.” Having thus made his bow in the direction of nineteenth-century moral convention, Hadrian is free to behave like a pagan emperor, and he does, threatening his retinue (“Ihr Armen werdet es nun schlecht haben, denn die Sonne meines Lebens hat ihren Glanz verloren”), and then telling the whole of humanity that it will have to partake in his laments: “Die ganze Menschheit soll mit mir klagen,” because it has lost, in “der treue Geselle” (a phrase somewhat out of place: another sop to the century?), an example of “die Schönheit der Götter,” and of “übermenschliche, göttliche Treue.”⁴

Ebers is not the only scholar-author who found Antinous attractive. At the beginning of the 1880s, Professor Adolf Hausrath of the University of Heidelberg fell prey to an eye-ailment that forced him to spend three months in a darkened room. During this time, he composed a novel, called Antinous, in his mind; released from confinement, he put it down on paper, and published it in 1881, using the pseudonym George Taylor. It was a measured critical success, in both its original German and the English translation (1882); as for Hausrath, he went on to other glories and became rector of the university in 1882. The book of Hausrath-Taylor, coming out the same year as Der Kaiser, readily bears comparison with the better-known work: it is much shorter and comes considerably closer to frankness about the relationship between the emperor and the boy. The friendship was, in Hausrath's view, a seduction, the story, to quote the English translation, of “how a healthy nature was ruined by companionship with a diseased one.” Thus the expression of melancholy, so often seen in the representations of Antinous,⁵ is accounted for. The motives of Antinous, who ties his own hands in order to prevent himself from swimming, are mixed, as in Der Kaiser; but here the mixture is subtler and more believable. He is oppressed by a feeling of guilt at the affair with Hadrian; he has found Christian associates whose faith may have rubbed off on him, for all his opposition to it; he is directly unhappy because the girls laugh at him as “Hadrian's handsome peacock”; he is convinced that if Hadrian dies he will be cast out of the imperial household; and he thinks, finally, that he can prolong the life of Hadrian, to whom he—despite all—is devoted. Still more interesting than the emotional confusion of Antinous, however, is the portrait of Hadrian: an egoist, something of a bully, something of an opportunist, who seizes upon the death of Antinous as a means of controlling “the millions of souls entrusted” to his care. He tells the Christian Phlegon, “When I see how Antinous' image appeals to the heart, I believe that I have found the right means. In a century, Antinous will be a god like Mithras, while no one will speak of your crucified Jew.” Hadrian, to be sure, has a moment of insight, in the midst of his somewhat gruesome statesmanship, when he remarks, “My love has brought a curse on everyone. My own Person was my god, and now I am left alone with myself.”

For at least two German authors of the turn of the century, Antinous' homosexuality need not be muted, or ignored, in order that the Bithynian youth might become a figure of essential goodness, richly devoted to a demanding master. In Die Bücher der Hirten und Preisgedichte (1895), Stefan George entitled a poem, addressed to the young Belgian Edmond Rassenfosse, “An Antinous”; in it, he thanked “Antinous” for the latter's well-meant attempts to console the bard in his sadness at having to leave Rassenfosse behind in Brussels. Then, in the Fünfte Folge of Blätter für die Kunst (1900-1901), George's disciple, Friedrich Gundolf, published Antinous: Dramatisches Gedicht in drei Teilen; we must assume that the publication had the master's approval.⁶ In Gundolf's Antinous—which, for the rest, makes us glad that Gundolf forsook George's circle and creative writing for creative literary history—Hadrian, burdened with care, is charmed by the flute-playing youth whom pirates have carried away from Bithynia. After having ascertained that Antinous is uninterested in “der reiz der frauen”—“Zum reigen trieb die breite lust die anderen / Mir blieb die flöte”—Hadrian invites the flutist to forget that the careworn gentleman addressing him is an emperor, and Antinous does his level best to oblige:

Ich habe begriffen was uns beiden geschah
Ich küsse das siegel auf deine verlangende seele
Ich fühle dein siegel auf meinem brennenden auge
Laß mich in Dir vergehn! dein bin ich. nimm mich hin!

After an interlude comprised of an andante amoroso, Hadrian decides in the third and concluding part that Antinous does not love him for himself alone. “Zermalmt doch nimmer entsagend,” Antinous decides to throw himself into the Nile, trusting that his act will restore Hadrian's faith in him, and that he, indeed, will become a part of Hadrian's somewhat nebulous religion:

Empfangt mich ihr heiligen wasser und werdet schwer
Von meinem schmerz! vor meinem kaiser heilt ihr mich
Zum elemente werd ich das er gläubig ehrt.

There is, then, a sympathetic literary attitude toward Antinous, which tries to find the cause, or causes, of the melancholy expression that he was customarily given in antique statuary. Having called attention, in an essay from 1874, to Rafael's effort to “Christianize” Antinous in the Jonah-fresco of the Chigi chapel,⁷ the Swedish author Victor Rydberg, in a poem, conjectured that Antinous' melancholy resulted from the deified boy's contemplation of the “mysteries of being”:

Hvad ser han då, som fängslar så hans syn?
Hvad bådar under kransen vemodsskyn?
O, om hans sorgset blida anlet är
en spegel för det varandes mystèr!(8)

On the other hand, five years later, the Dane, Herman Bang, in his first novel, Haabløse Slægter, saw Antinous not as a handsomer and not necessarily soteriological version of the sorrowing Christ, but rather as a pathetic human being. The hero of Bang's novel, young William Høg, has become the friend and adept of Bernhard Hoff, an elegant and apparently blasé man of letters. On the mantel in Hoff's living room there are three busts, of Venus, Niobe, and Antinous; the last is given a full interpretation by Hoff: “the bust is that of a poor child, given more to bear than he was able, an early sorrow, an all too early experience, a great secret or something of the sort. No matter what it was—his shoulders could not bear its weight, and so he closed his mouth upon his own outcries, and let the waters of the Nile and Acheron come between the world and himself!”⁹ Subsequently, the Swedish admirer of Bang, Ola Hansson, wrote, in Tidens kvinnor (1891), about the two aspects of love, the one “physical, full of blood,” the other milder and gentler, a “moonlit Antinous-face.” The heroine of Hansson's novella “Gallblomma” (“Gall Flower”) is revolted by the first (copulation) and yearns to find the second, to her mind a mixture of spirituality and what Hansson calls “epidermal sensuality,” a sensuality of touch and no more.¹⁰

Opposed to this “good” Antinous of German and Scandinavian authors, an Antinous always self-sacrificing, always gentle, sometimes nearly divine, sometimes pathetically human, there appears, in other literatures of the fin-de-siècle, an Antinous who stands for a perverse sexual allure or even cruelty: indeed, he can become a topical figure, reduced from a portrait to a reference. This Antinous is the seducer or the seducer's talisman, not the seduced; Hadrian either vanishes or becomes Antinous' victim. In The Romantic Agony,¹¹ Mario Praz has cataloged a good many of the Antinouses of the French authors of the décadence, or of its forerunners: Barbey d'Aurevilly's Major Ydow in “À un dîner d'athées” in Les Diaboliques (1874), wreaking unspeakable sexual vengeance upon his unfaithful wife; Verlaine's “Hercule à vingt ans, Antinous à trente” in “Extrêmes-onctions” (1890), slain by a girl as he forces her to commit an unnatural act; Rachilde's (Marguerite Eymery's) Monsieur Vénus (1889), a woman who whips herself into a frenzy of lust (for young men whose “maleness” is less pronounced than hers) by keeping a bust of Antinous in her boudoir; the Princess d'Este in Sar Péladan's Le Vice suprême (1884), who likes boys reminiscent of “l'affranchi d'Hadrien”; the main figure of Jean Lorrain's (Paul Duval's) Monsieur de Phocas (1901), who, inspired by the Antinouses of the Louvre and Naples's Museo Nazionale, makes an erotomaniac search for human beings with eyes like those that, he imagines, these statues should possess (“Si ce buste m'appartenait, je ferais incruster des émeraudes dans ses yeux”). Amusingly, the authors of French décadence are in a position much like that of the Christian fathers; they imply that they are shocked at the very rottenness of the youth, or at the rottenness that his images (or living reproductions) arouse in their viewer. Also, they are more diplomatic in sexual matters than might have been expected, for they attempt to keep the love in which Antinous is involved “heterosexual,” meanwhile never abandoning the suggestion of perversion.¹² Only Jean Lorrain is frank about the homosexuality of Antinous, as is apparent not only in Monsieur de Phocas, but also in Le Vice errant (1902), where two traveling Englishmen, Lord Feredith and Sir Algernon Filde, own a private yacht called Edward III: we are told that the ship might have been called the Cydnus, after Hadrian's Nile barge, since Algernon himself is the author of a book called Hadrien sur le Cydnus. Before issuing these novels, Lorrain had already included a poem about Antinous in the series on “Les éphèbes” in his collection, L'ombre ardente (1897),¹³ a poem that says that, after “siècles méconnus,” the boy—or rather his “handsome, transparent feet,” which Hadrian massages with his “mains avares”—will walk in triumph anew: “Et font revivre, hélas! mille ans après ta mort, / l'ère auguste des dieux et des amours bizarres.”¹⁴ Lorrain's Lord Feredith had been suggested by Lord Alfred Douglas, and his Algernon Filde, it goes almost without saying, by Oscar Wilde.¹⁵

Wilde, of course, had himself not let slip the opportunity of using the Antinous reference as a code for the beauty that is evil and destroys. As the painter Basil Hallward tries to confess his love to Dorian Gray, and to tell the handsome youth that he has painted his portrait, he says, in somewhat ominous praise of Dorian's spiritual lineage: “Crowned with heavy lotus blossoms you had sat on the prow of Adrian's barge, gazing across the green turbid Nile.” Poor Basil does not heed the warning signal he himself has sent, or has not read enough of recent French literature to know how dangerous loving an Antinous may be; he becomes one of Dorian's victims.¹⁶ In Wilde's literary opinion, Antinous was, in fact, alluring enough to move inscrutability's very statue; in Wilde's poem, “The Sphinx,” the stone creature is addressed:

You heard from Adrian's golden barge the laughter of Antinous
And lapped the stream and fed your drouth and watched with hot and hungry stare
The ivory body of that rare young slave with his pomegranate mouth!

The rare young slave of this French-English line is quite a different sort, it is plain, from the pensive melancholiacs of the German-Scandinavian tradition.¹⁷

IV

When Rilke wrote his Klage um Antinous, then, the name of the imperial favorite meant various things to various readers: the beautiful boy long appreciated by readers of Winckelmann, the sad self-prober and, perhaps, savior, the often dangerous object—or perpetrator—of “amours bizarres.” What Rilke intended to say with his title, and, more important, with the text subjoined to it, provides one of the countless riddles of Rilke-scholarship—or, if the term will be allowed, of Rilke-philology.

It is a riddle that no one has made a serious effort to solve. The most extensive discussion of the poem is to be found in Hans Berendt's Rilkes Neue Gedichte (1957), a discussion that, despite certain insights, to which we shall return later on, offers still another example of Berendt's obstinate wrong-headedness.¹⁸ In her excellent book on Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil, Brigitte L. Bradley brings up the poem in passing.¹⁹ (Two other recent reflections on the Neue Gedichte do not mention it at all.)²⁰ It might be expected that some words on the poem could be found in the several considerations of “Rilke und die Antike”: but Harry Mielert,²¹ who wrote first on this altogether interesting topic, does not mention Antinous, nor does Zinn,²² in his fine and detailed treatment of the theme, nor do Werner Kohlschmidt²³ and Katherina Kippenberg.²⁴ The suspicion crosses our minds: perhaps the poem does not fit under the rubric of “antiquity” at all—evidently it does not for these scholars, of whom at least two were trained classicists. Perhaps the very topic smacked too much of decay, of that Roman decay that, we know, the decadents (permanent or temporary) of the nineteenth century, and beyond, found so attractive: remember Gautier's famous musings on the gaminess of the Latin of the later Empire, “la langue marbrée déjà des verdeurs de la décomposition et comme faisandée,” Des Esseintes' quite unclassical passions in Latin literature (of which we get a sweetened echo in Le Gallienne's Book-Bills of Narcissus), even the fascination which Heliogabalus had for Poe, Jean Lombard, Stefan George, Louis Couperus.²⁵ A discussion of the Klage um Antinous does turn up, in passing, in a monograph devoted to Rilke's views of a sometime outpost of empire; in Rilkes ägyptische Gesichte, Alfred Herman includes the poem because of its Egyptian locale, offering a somewhat condescending summary of what is taken—perhaps rightly—to be the poem's main thought: “[die Klage] wendet die Sache so, daß schuldhafte Ursache für die Entrückung des Geliebten die mangelnde Liebeskraft des Kaisers gewesen sei.”²⁶ In truth, Hermann is mainly interested in making an impressive religious-historical point in connection with the poem's second line: that Rilke knew the story, told in the Westcar papyrus, of a magician who bent back the waters of the Nile at the behest of King Snofru, in order that a piece of jewelry, lost in the depths by a rowing-girl, could be found. To those who admire Rilke's inventiveness, it seems not unlikely that the image of seizing the waters was Rilke's own. To be sure, it can readily be shown that the poet may have known the story from Gressmann-Ungnad-Ranke's Altorientalische Bilder und Texte zum alten Testament, but the book appeared in 1909, a year after the publication of the second part of the Neue Gedichte.

A first question to be asked about the Klage um Antinous concerns the date of its composition. Berendt gives the date 1903-04, on the grounds that Rilke probably saw the famous Antinous-relief in Winckelmann's Villa Albani during his Roman winter. Here, Berendt leaves two facts out of account: 1) that the directly datable material in the second part of Neue Gedichte—the vast majority of the poems, in other words—all comes from 1907 or 1908; 2) that the Rilke of the middle period did not customarily compose directly after “inspiration”—a time span of some months often came between impetus (if the impetus can be identified) and production. Ernst Zinn's approximate dating of the poem (made, we must guess, on the basis of notebooks in the Rilke-archive) is a better one than Berendt's: Zinn says “Herbst 1907, Paris, oder Frühling, 1908, Capri.”²⁷ Thus, the Klage was written either after Rilke's first stay on Capri (from December 1906 to May 1907) or during his second one (from the end of February to the middle of May 1908). If we are to believe, with Berendt, that the Klage's composition was prompted by the contemplation of a piece of antique art—and certainly there are plenty of examples of this sort of thing in the Neue Gedichte—then a dating in connection with Rilke's South Italian days has much to be said for it.

The traveler to Capri has to approach the island, unless he is a yachtowner, like the Krupps, by way of Naples, and Naples was a city Rilke enjoyed—and in which he found certain art-collections of great appeal to him. He had gone there first, with Clara, in June of 1904, just before leaving Italy for Scandinavia. “Neapel war viel,” he told Lou Andreas-Salomé from Castle Borgeby;²⁸ too much, indeed, to cram into the four days he was able to stay. The focus of his attention must have been the Museo Nazionale; at least, the Museum is what he mentioned to Clara when, alone, he passed through Naples again in late November 1906, on his way to shelter in the Villa Discopoli of Alice Faehndrich: “War heute endlich im Museum. Habe vieles wiedergesehen … Kleine Fragmente, einzelne Bronzen, Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes; sehr viel Bestätigendes, Hilfreiches …”²⁹ His passion for the Museum did not abate. When Clara stopped off to see him on her way to Egypt, a month or so later, it was included in the Naples tour once more. Going into town that May, on his way back to Paris, he—aided by his hostesses—gave the Museum a farewell look;³⁰ and, a year later, again departing after his second Capri winter, he told Manon zu Solms-Laubach, one of the younger and lovelier Discopoli friends, that, “Ich trenne mich wieder so schwer … soll jeden Tag weiter und komme doch immer wieder ins Museum, zu den antiken Bildern vor allem, die von Jahr zu Jahr immer stärker, eigener, einziger auf mich wirken.”³¹

The Museo Nazionale enjoyed a special reputation, in the literature of decadence, because of one of its treasures, or one of its collections. In Lorrain's Le Vice errant, Wladimir Noronsoff knows the places to appeal to his traveling English exquisites, Lord Feredith and Sir Algernon: “Le Musée de Naples, les fouilles et les fresques de Pompeii, voilá ce qu'il faut à ces Anglais.” The Pompeii reference will be readily understood by us all, but what about the National Museum? A passage from a German novel, Prinz Kuckuck (1906-1907) of Otto Julius Bierbaum, will help. In its third part, “Der Hofmeister,” the young and handsome hero, Henry Felix, goes to Naples in the doubtful companionship of his mentor, the homosexual Karl, elsewhere described in the novel as “weibisch und schleimig.” Karl has had bad luck in the past; following wealthy Henry to London, he joined the Club of the Green Carnation, where most of the boys who provided the entertainment were a good-hearted and devoted sort, living up to the best British traditions of service. But Karl fell into the clutches of a by now familiar topical figure: Fred, the circusboy, “sein Antinous,” who turned out to be the sole blackmailer amongst all the club's artistic staff. Naples revives Karl's spirits: “Das Museo Nazionale machte seine Einbildungskraft von gewaltigen Vorstellungen strotzen.” What attracts British travelers and German tutors is, we fear, the nude male statuary of the collection—the Sleeping Satyr, the Drunken Faun, and, above all, the Naples-Antinous, the statue of the emperor's favorite, which has become such a crowd-pleaser that the corridor where it stands has been named for it.³²

The drift of our argument should not be misunderstood: Rilke did not visit the Museum for the reasons attributed to fiction's late-born decadents. His interest, as can be ascertained from his letters, lay primarily with the reliefs, the antique gravestones, and the antique paintings. Nevertheless, he cannot very well have avoided taking the Antinous statue, and its remarkable vogue, into his cognizance. It could be argued, by those who are students of Rilke's creative practices, that the statue's very popularity would have been a deterrent to his poetic impulse. And it could be rejoined that the contemporary popularity of an artistic work, or a figure in art's annals, did not drive Rilke away, if he believed that the popularity rested on a misconception, or a misunderstanding: witness the apostrophes to Beethoven and Ibsen in Malte Laurids Brigge, or the alternate, Tolstoy-ending to that novel; witness, in Neue Gedichte, “San Marco” and “L'Ange du Méridien.” Getting ahead of ourselves, we might say that Rilke may have felt that the peculiar popularity of Antinous needed a corrective. It may be important in this connection that Capri, which Rilke disliked at first (“Dieser Ort hat sein Gepräge durch recht übel ausgeübte Begeisterung bekommen”),³³ had a reputation of its own for decadent erotic practices,³⁴ thanks not least to the efforts of Friedrich Alfred Krupp to behave like the Tiberius described by Suetonius. If we give credence to Leopold von Schlözer, who—a short-run Eckermann—set down a series of conversations he had with Rilke during the first Capri winter and spring, a leading topic of Rilke's talk was a parallel study of Roman and contemporary degeneration³⁵—in short, he mused on a favorite theme of decadent literature.

Still another factor, perhaps preparatory to the composition of the Antinous poem, should also be listed. During the Capri spring, Rilke was reading—and reading aloud to his hostesses—the lecture of Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Der Dichter und diese Zeit,” published in the Neue Rundschau for March 1907. On 21 March 1907, Rilke thanked the author for having written it: “Ich hatte mich in den letzten Tagen immer wieder mit Ihrem Vortrag … beschäftigt.”³⁶ Hofmannsthal defines the poet, it will be remembered, as a kind of secular saint, a Johannes Calybita—a beggar who dwells beneath the stairs of his own house, in the dark, unknown, unnoticed, but open to all things: “Er ist da und wechselt lautlos seine Stelle und ist nichts als Auge und Ohr und nimmt seine Farbe von den Dingen, auf denen er ruht”—the observer, no, the hidden comrade, the soundless brother of all things. These words must have struck home to Rilke who, in the Neue Gedichte, was making the attempt to include the largest scale of subjects in his new collection, an attempt, that, after publication, cost him some of his readership and earned him hard words, even though politely couched, from previous admirers of his art. To Jakob Uexküll, Rilke made the well-known defense of the “Häßlichkeit oder Verworfenheit” of some of his subjects: he has learned, he says, “die Kunst nicht für eine Auswahl aus der Welt zu halten, sondern für deren restlose Verwandlung ins Herrliche hinein.”³⁷ This openness, being preached by Hofmannsthal and practiced by Rilke, was in contradiction to the priestly exclusivity of a third poet and colleague—the third man would not have liked the word “colleague”—on the German Parnassus, Stefan George, who had had small personal contact with Rilke and (in retrospect) still less regard for him. As for Rilke himself, he may have wondered what George would think of the lecture by Hofmannsthal, if George deigned to read it; in it, George is expressly praised, and yet much of it can be read as a direct criticism of George.³⁸ And Rilke shortly got another reason to have George on his mind. In May 1907, Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski (a precursor of the scholars who, in the 1920s, pestered Rilke with questions about “influences”) wrote to Capri, asking Rilke about George's impact on his work. For his trouble Oppeln-Bronikowski got a curt and testy answer, in which Rilke said that he admired George's poems, that he had met George nine years before, and that he did not believe the “influence of works of art” could be measured.³⁹ Considering the courtesy and circumspection of Rilke's usual epistolary tone, it was a letter friendly neither to Oppeln-Bronikowski nor to George.

Here we come upon a matter that has been brought up once before by Eudo C. Mason in his essay on Rilke and George, first published in the Korff-Festschrift in 1957.⁴⁰ Mason's remarks, though brief, are almost the only useful statement made by scholarship about the Klage um Antinous. He suggests that the poem might be “so etwas wie eine bewußte Auseinandersetzung mit dem Maximin-Kult.” Such would be possible, Mason reasons, if Rilke had been acquainted with the privately printed Maximin: Ein Gedenkbuch and the privately printed edition of Der Siebente Ring, both from 1907; otherwise, the poem is a comment on the Maximincult, “as it were a priori, in an uncanny fashion.” According to Salis (Mason mentions the passage), Rilke told him during the Swiss years that he could not understand Der Siebente Ring, that it was evidently written for the adepts of the cult alone; Baladine wrote to Mason in 1957 that Rilke had shown her a copy of the Maximin: Ein Gedenkbuch at Muzot in 1921, remarking, in a mysterious tone, that the boy had died “den Opfertod.” Still more circumstantial and external evidence could have been introduced in support of Professor Mason's proposal. For one thing, Rilke's brief period of direct interest in George's work came in 1897, when George's poem to “Antinous” was available to every reader of Blätter für die Kunst, in which Gundolf's Antinous appeared three years later. For another thing, Rilke need not have read the Maximin-book and Der Siebente Ring in order to have found out something about the story of George and Maximilian Kronberger: the Austrian had keen ears for literary gossip, and he had been in Munich (where the Maximin drama had recently taken place) in late November 1906, on the eve of his departure for Naples and Capri, and again in February 1908, as he started out for his second springtime in the south of Italy. Next, if Rilke did get his hands on the Gedenkbuch, then he read a sentence in its foreword that was particularly suggestive of the Hadrian-Antinous story: “Gemäß einem frühen vertrag den er geschlossen wurde er auf einen andren stern gehoben,” a phrase that makes us think both of Antinous' appearance as a star in Dio Cassius' account, and of the climax of Rilke's poem, in lines 9-10. The conclusion of the foreword likewise recalls the Antinous-cult established by Hadrian and foreshadowed the demands that George would make upon the members of his circle—demands that they believe in the “divinity” of Maximin: “Wir können nun gierig nach leidenschaftlichen verehrungen in unsren weiheräumen seine säule aufstellen uns vor ihm niederwerfen und ihm huldigen.” (It goes almost without saying that the “Opfertod” mentioned by Rilke in 1921 affords still another parallel to the Hadrian-Antinous story: Professor Mason remarks that Rilke may have heard such rumors from members of the Alfred Schuler-Ludwig Klages group during World War I in Munich.)

An argument of some significance that could be advanced against Mason's conjecture is that Rilke seems not to have used his works for literary polemics; his oeuvre contains nothing, evidently, like Thomas Mann's Gerhart Hauptmann portrait in Pieter Peeperkorn, or the possible Ludwig Derleth portrait in Daniel zur Höhe. Such portraiture, to be sure, lies closer at hand for a novelist than a lyricist, whose best weapon in this line may be the parody—and Rilke was not a parodist. Yet a rejoinder could be made to this objection: in March 1907, Ellen Key—by this time, Rilke had grown quite tired of her and the hopelessly amorphous optimism she espoused—came up to Naples from Syracuse, intending to pay a visit to Rilke on Capri. At the same time, she was the guest of the Duke of Cajanello, the widower of Charlotte Leffler, a Swedish woman's-rights authoress to whom she had once devoted a baddish book. The upshot of this unwelcome visit⁴¹ (and of Rilke's failing affection for “die gute Ellen”) was the Schulin episode in Malte Laurids Brigge, with the setting taken from an experience Rilke had had in Sweden in November 1904, but including, in its very characters, a not altogether flattering portrait of “die Allerweltstante” Ellen (as Wjera Schulin) and of the subjects of two of her works, Charlotte Leffler (who becomes the oldest Schulin sister, “die an einen Marchese in Neapel verheiratet gewesen war, von dem sie sich nun langsam unter vielen Prozessen schied”), and Charlotte's friend, the mathematician, physicist, and novelist Sonja Kovalevsky, who becomes the Schulin-sister called Zoé, “von der es hieß, daß es nichts gab, von dem sie nichts wußte.” (In his Capri letters from this time, Rilke mentions both Charlotte Leffler and Sonja Kovalevsky.) If, in 1907 or 1908, Rilke could make literary fun of his old friend, Ellen Key, in a hidden manner, why could he not—a little less discreetly—criticize Stefan George, a man who, Rilke knew, entertained a low opinion of him?

V

Yet the question remains: if the Klage um Antinous is a comment upon George and Maximin, what sort of comment is it? And is the comment the single intention of the poem? Does it intend to make an observation about the topical figure of Antinous as well, recently so very popular in European letters? Does it belong to either of the two “Antinous-traditions” mentioned above? Here, at last, it is time to turn our attention to the text of Rilke's contribution to the literature on the emperor and his favorite:

“KLAGE UM ANTINOUS”

Keiner begriff mir von euch den bithynischen Knaben
(daß ihr den Strom anfaßtet und von ihm hübt …).
Ich verwöhnte ihn zwar. Und dennoch: wir haben
ihn nur mit Schwere erfüllt und für immer getrübt.
Wer vermag denn zu lieben? Wer kann es?—Noch keiner.
Und so hab ich unendliches Weh getan—.
Nun ist er am Nil der stillenden Götter einer,
und ich weiß kaum welcher und kann ihm nicht nahn.
Und ihr warfet ihn noch, Wahnsinnige, bis in die Sterne,
damit ich euch rufe und dränge: meint ihr den?
Was ist er nicht einfach ein Toter. Er wäre es gerne.
Und vielleicht wäre ihm nichts geschehn.

Looking at the poem on the printed page, we may be struck, initially, by a simple physical fact: its lines are longer than those of the other poems in Neue Gedichte. In the Zinn edition, the typesetter has had to put the left-hand margin very close to the edge of the page, and, even so, has been forced to drop the last word of line 5, preceded by a bracket, down to the empty space left at the end of line 6. The lines are long because, in contrast to the other poems in Neue Gedichte (which stick close to iambic or trochaic patterns), they contain dactyls (“Keiner begriff mir von euch den bithynischen Knaben”) or “false spondees” and dactyls (“Ich verwöhnte ihn zwar. Und dennoch: wir haben …”), or dactyls again (“ihn nur mit Schwere erfüllt und für immer getrübt”). Also, the longer lines (within the poem) come first in their pairs, in the cases of ll. 1-2, 5-6, 9-10, 11-12; with 14 syllables as opposed to 11, 13 to 11, 15 to 12, and 15 to 9. In the case of ll. 7-8, the second line emerges as the longer in the line of print, but, in fact, again has the fewer sylables: line 7 has 13 syllables, line 8 only 11. Only in ll. 3-4 of the first strophe is the second line of the pair longer, by one syllable: 1.3 has 12, 1.4 has 13. We wonder what Rilke is up to: it appears that he is playing a metrical trick on the reader, creating a predecessor to the “imitation hexameters” of the Duino Elegies. Without lacing himself into a tight metrical corset (as, for example, his fellow Austrians did, Ferdinand von Saar in the Wiener Elegien [1893], and Hofmannsthal in such poems as “Unendliche Zeit” and “Südliche Mondnacht”), he tries to give the impression of writing elegiac couplets, distichs, long lines alternating with slightly shorter ones. The clearly marked caesuras contribute to the creation of the effect of the elegiac couplet; we are lured into believing that we read dactylic hexameters and “dactylic pentameters” (two-part lines, each half of which contains two dactyls—or, in the first half, spondees—followed by a long syllable), although every line in the poem, with the exception of the last, is a true pentameter.⁴² (Lines 8 and 10 can, straining, be read as hexameters.) In other words, Rilke affects to employ the kind of verse-form that Hadrian—nota bene, the poet Hadrian—would have used, had he written a lament for the lost youth. At the same time, Rilke has, as it were, left his metrical hands quite free for other purposes, perhaps of a dramatic nature; once upon a time, as a Privatist in Prague, Rilke had tried to write elegiacs, and knew how constraining they were:

Schauderst du, teueres Kind, gar wohl vor der düsteren Schwelle,
die auch dein lieblicher Fuß einstens so willig betritt?

The imitation distichs of Klage um Antinous are a device to be compared with another elementary but effective trick Rilke plays on the reader at the end of Sappho an Alkaios, again with the intent of creating a kind of “antique verisimilitude.” There the poem—as though found incomplete in a papyrus—breaks off after two lines of the final strophe.

Otherwise, in the language of the poem, we may detect a few quasi-antique elements, but only a few. One is the ethical dative—or dative of feeling, as some grammars more accurately call it—in the first line: “Keiner begriff mir von euch den bithynischen Knaben.” It has a “classical” sound to those who once laboriously memorized such grammatical patterns as “Quid mihi Celsus agit?” Likewise, the second line has the “utinam” plus optative-subjunctive forms we learned: “utinam ne natus essem.” It is noteworthy that these reminiscences of the basics of Latin grammar (a language in which Rilke's training had been late and hasty) come near the beginning of the poem, an indication that they may be used in order to create a certain “antique” linguistic mood. The curious verb form at the end of the second line: “daß ihr den Strom anfaßtet und von ihm hübt,” is attributable to the same end. Here, it is surely not an attempt at dialect coloring (in the 1790s, Adelung had stamped the form as “oberdeutsch”), but rather a bit of intentional old-fashionedness: Goethe, Schiller, Stolberg, Uhland employed it, and, in Rilke's own day, it was taken out of the poet's supply-box by Otto Julius Bierbaum for those poems in Irrgarten der Liebe to which he wished to give a quaint or stilted tone.⁴³ But at the same time, in addition to their apparent Latinizing and their antique verb, the opening lines tell much about their speaker, who is self-centered, self-righteous, scolding, and clearly not an easy man to work for.

The form of Hadrian's lament is descended from a mixed lyric-dramatic genre that the young Rilke had once cultivated under a high-sounding name, “the psychodrama”; the English and American poetic tradition calls it, more simply, the dramatic monologue, a favorite nineteenth-century form, in which the poet, without having to construct a whole drama, writes the great verbal aria in which the hero, often inadvertently, tells much about what is going on inside him, and, at the same time, populates the stage with the other imaginary characters of the imaginary play. Rilke's Hadrian of 1907-08 possesses a good many of the same verbal habits as his Murillo, in the psychodrama by that name, of 1895: aposiopesis, rhetorical question, the brachylogy of abrupt and breathless sentences; yet Hadrian owns a virtue given neither to Murillo nor to Browning's Mr. Sludge the Medium: he is brief. The dramatic monologue has become remarkably compressed, put into the shape of a short elegy—or is threnody a better word?

Surely, the cast is not small. Although Hadrian is the only speaker, we know that he is surrounded by a group of scared courtiers and mages, trembling (the emperor browbeats them even as Philipp in Verdi's Don Carlo browbeats his chorus), but still ready to take the main chance: to get back the emperor's favor in any way they can; and both emperor and retinue are aware of a second leading actor in the drama, now missing from the stage, like Ibsen's Fru Rosmer. Antinous is gone, but present. Similarly, there is a compression of time in the poem. The body of Antinous lies in the muddy depths, but the courtiers have already enrolled him among the gods, and named a constellation after him, events that, according to historical accounts, stretched over several days. Yet, for all its abbreviation of characters and events, the poem, syntactically, seems not to be tightly made, a point that bothered Berendt, who speaks of disjecta membra. Certainly, the poem's lack of straightforward development, and of clearly discernible connections between lines, seems not to be “classical,” a reason, perhaps, for Rilke's care to set up the signposts of antiquity mentioned above. The mind and tongue of Hadrian, as he berates his counsellors on board the Cygnus, do not advance reasonably from point to point; they careen from notion to notion. For this reason, threnody might seem a better appellation than elegy, where the speaker has had time to think the loss over. Hadrian's breathlessness, and disorganization, are to be found in the great threnodies of Herakles in Euripides' play, after he has murdered wife and children, and in Seneca's imitation; but, in the classical threnodies just adduced, the chaotic aria of woe is only a part of the drama. In Rilke, the brief poem is both threnody and drama, expressing wild grief, and telling of the past, telling of the future.

Hadrian begins his threnody by shoving the blame for what has happened off onto the courtiers: “Keiner begriff mir von euch den bithynischen Knaben.” At the same time, he willy-nilly lets the cat out of the bag about the real source of the tragedy by his “dative of feeling,” discussed above, and the rather impersonal and condescending way he refers to the dead boy—“den bithynischen Knaben.” (May we guess that he uses the very phrase about Antinous that the courtiers were wont to use behind the emperor's back?) Then, in an aside (are the parentheses to indicate his awareness of the impossibility of his demand? is it said under his breath? or are they there to guide the reader through the swervings of Hadrian's thought from the live Antinous to the dead one?), Hadrian asks for the adynaton, something that cannot be done, only to break the idea off quickly. The practical Roman, even in his grief, knows enough not to spin the impossible wish out too far, and besides, its expression has served a purpose. The courtiers have been told what he thinks of them: you have caused all the trouble, and now you must repair it—but you cannot. Then, however, a first drop of self-cognition seeps into his outward-directed fury: “Ich verwöhnte ihn zwar,” but the burden is too much to bear; someone else has to share the blame with him, and the handy courtiers, once again, are there: “Und dennoch: wir haben.” Hadrian's argument and implications may be paraphrased thus: I spoiled him, you spoiled him to please me; in doing so, and in seducing him (in the broader sense of that verb), we made him heavy, literally, muddied him, sent him to the bottom.

In the fourth line, with its “mit Schwere erfüllt” and “für immer getrübt,” Berendt (who puts the matter so discreetly that the thrust of his suggestion is obscured) believes he has discovered a personal lament by Rilke about a chapter in his life that the poet often discussed in general terms, rarely in specific ones: the nature of the ill treatment he received in military school.⁴⁴ Some circumstantial evidence supports Berendt's proposal, whether we agree with it or not. Rilke never broached the matter of homosexuality in his letters, not even those to Lou, although he is frank enough about other delicate themes in the erotic sphere. The account that Musil gives, in Törless, of conditions at Mährisch-Weißkirchen, a school that the novelist attended some ten years after Rilke fled from it, tells us what we need to know about practices that must have been common. Certainly, the violence of Rilke's reaction to the polite inquiry by his old teacher Sedlakowitz, with the poet's striking (but quite unspecific) reiteration of how he had been “geistig und körperlich mißhandelt,” cannot be dismissed as sheer exaggeration, or an attempt to maintain one of his life's leading legends.⁴⁵ Still another factor to be noted in this puzzle (and a puzzle it will probably remain, for lack of real evidence) is the sudden and almost inexplicable enthusiasm that Rilke expressed—near the end of his life, when he was trying to make some sense of all that had gone before—for the works of Hans Blüher on Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft, works that deal, among other things, with the brutal homosexuality practiced in preparatory and military schools.⁴⁶ In truth, we know all too little about this most secret part of Rilke's personality for us to make a connection—let alone an identification—between Rilke's Antinous and the poet himself, as Berendt seems to do; it may, or may not, be the case that the story of Antinous' ancient fate (and of Maximin's contemporary one) touched an old and awful wound in Rilke, a wound dealt him when, as a boy, he went through a hell he likened in the Sedlakowitz letter to what Dostoyevsky, a young man and a little better able to defend himself, had endured in a Siberian prison camp. (It may be worth noting that Rilke repeated the image, and the verbiage, of the fourth line in an obscure poem from Aus dem Nachlaß des Grafen C. W.: “Ach, was bin ich kaum geübter / zu begreifen, was es meint,— / hat mich ein im Tod getrübter / Knabe nahe angeweint?”; the poem in question was written in November 1920, the letter to Sedlakowitz on the ninth of the next month.) Autobiographical considerations aside, what we must do with the fourth line on a textual level is to admire the very wealth of its overtones and implications: the story of the drowning in the Nile, into whose mud the boy—“weighted” with the seductive affection of older men—sinks; the hint, again in “Schwere,” of that “Schwermut” that all observers have detected in the countenance of the Antinous statues (Gundolf catches it as his Antinous tells the Nile's waters to become “schwer” from his pain); and, finally, the permanence of what has happened. A life misused so badly is a life misused “für immer”: in the case of Antinous the misuse has gone on beyond death, to be recorded in the melancholy statues, and, caricatured, in the topos of decadence.

Having taken the blame, partially, the emperor—come down for the nonce off his imperial high horse—tries to find the excuse, to make the apologia for himself. The fifth line is often quoted out of context, in the course of discussions of that well-known Rilkean theme of the difficulties of loving, and, in particular, of the perils of possessive love. In Hadrian's case, loving has become particularly and cruelly possessive, not only because of the homosexual nature of the affair, which, as it were, robbed Antinous of his gender; but because Hadrian, as emperor, could smother his beloved in endless and overwhelming signs of his love, and, quite literally, allow his favorite no other life than what he had as a bearer of Hadrian's passion. (It is a credit to Hausrath-Taylor's forgotten novel that, in his Antinous, he anticipates what Rilke says.) Alive, Antinous had no existence save with Caesar, and dead, he continues in the same subjugation, enrolled among the gods, made the object of a cult, but all at Hadrian's behest, Hadrian's creature forever: “Und so hab ich unendliches Weh getan.” Seeing what he has done, Hadrian is more pathetic, and more sympathetic, than ever he has been before in the poem. (These lines, by the way, will call to mind some other famous expressions about the difficulty of loving by writers a little older than Rilke, and usually classified among the decadents: Oscar Wilde's “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” and Herman Bang's “Vi lider og bereder Lidelser—mere véd vi ikke” [“We suffer and cause suffering—we do not know more”] from Det hvide Hus, a novel that Rilke much admired. The sentiment lay in the literary air.)

The enrollment of Antinous among the gods, whether it has taken place officially as yet or not, is one of the results of Hadrian's imperial affection. The city on the Nile named after him, the temples of the Antinous cult: all this will come along shortly; but Antinous has already become one of those pacifying gods (and we may think here of the political import of the Antinous cult, a pacifier, like so much else in the welter of religions of the empire). Nonetheless, Antinous can no longer pacify the man who made him a god. Rendered an institution for all, he is out of the reach of the bereaved man. The ruler of the world is shut out, and complains about it: “und ich weiß kaum welcher und kann ihm nicht nahn.” The repetition of the first-person pronoun, coming close after the confession of guilt just above (“Und so hab ich unendliches Weh getan”), sounds quite plaintive in the last line of the strophe: “und ich weiß kaum welcher.” Hadrian is so much in doubt that his very syntax becomes doubtful: is “welcher” a partitive plural genitive, or a nominative singular with verb unexpressed? In creating this grammatical amphiboly, Rilke knew very well what he was doing.

The complaint is the coupling to the next stage of Hadrian's threnody: having belatedly looked into himself, accused himself, excused himself, he returns (as thoughts circle in times of bereavement) to the place where he had started: the blame again goes onto the members of the retinue, called insulting names this time. Having failed to perform the one task, of bringing Antinous back to life from the depth of the Nile, they have performed another in its stead:

Und ihr warfet ihn noch, Wahnsinnige, bis in die Sterne,
damit ich euch rufe und dränge: meint ihr den?

The courtiers cast the dead boy to his place among the stars in an effort to please their master and to obtain more control over him: they have the special, if specious, knowledge that Hadrian does not, just as we suspect that they will use the cult itself, about which Hadrian knows so little (the amphiboly of “welcher” again) in order to insinuate themselves into his favor. He will need them, he realizes, to bolster his own faith in the new cult (and here we might guess that Rilke thinks of the rather ludicrous demands George made upon his followers as he instructed them to believe in the divine Maximin). Hadrian's disgust at what has happened, and at what is to come, is too much for him to bear; he turns into himself, and the poem ends with remarks which seem not to make any sense at all, or to make sense only to their speaker. “Was ist er nicht einfach ein Toter”: what does it mean? We are worried about the meaning of “Was” and the absence of a question mark; Berendt repunctuates the sentence for us: “Was, ist er nicht einfach ein Toter?” But the line does not need a mark of interrogation at its end, for it is a statement, and the initial was is not an outcry nor an interrogative word, but an intensifier, of the kind Rilke uses elsewhere in the Neue Gedichte, in “Die Liebende”:

Was bin ich unter diese
Unendlichkeit gelegt,
duftend wie eine Wiese,
hin und her bewegt.

and in the Sonette an Orpheus (II,2):

Was haben Augen einst ins umrußte
lange Verglühn der Kamine geschaut:
Blicke des Lebens, für immer verlorne.

These are not questions; in the former instance, the “was” is neither expletive, again, nor substitute for “warum,” in the latter not an interrogative pronoun. In all three cases it emphasizes what follows: “How simply he is a dead person,” perhaps, not “Why isn't he just one dead?”, as J. B. Leishman translates.⁴⁷ Hadrian has come to the insight, the final one, that Antinous is simply a dead being, as, in life, he was simply a human being; both there and here, Hadrian has betrayed him, misused him, “für immer getrübt.” The last two sentences of the poem, the falling-away after the statement of the insight, are homely, colloquial, altogether unimperial, even to the syncope in the final word: “Er wäre es gerne. / Und vielleicht wäre ihm nichts geschehn.” They are contradictions, of course, and impossibilities: the earlier adynata, the impossibilities of resurrection and deification, are supplanted by the very human and impossible desire of Hadrian to make wrong things right. The last line is built on omissions—the omission of an unhappy man whose thoughts have become ever more stuttering, ever more incomplete. Hadrian says: Antinous would like to be what he in fact is, simply a dead person, and what now, after his bogus transfiguration, he cannot be. And then, if he were simply a dead person, he would, just as simply, have been a simple live person, too, one whom Hadrian—the man, not the emperor—would have treated as such. “Und vielleicht wäre ihm nichts geschehn” is a line that can be read to mean: “if he were regarded only as an ordinary dead person, then he would not have had these misuses befall him after death” (J. A. Symonds refers to the “gimcrack quality of the new god”); but it is better taken in an expanded sense, as the bitterest self-accusation and statement of tragic paradox: “if I could only have left him as an ordinary human being, a boy in Bithynia, then nothing at all would have befallen him.” Yet here, we come back to an impossibility again, the last one in the poem: for Hadrian was, after all, the Emperor of Rome, who had gone to Bithynia, where he found Antinous, the boy whose beauty (meeting the emperor's power and weakness) then led to wretched death and silly cultic transformation. If the essence of tragedy is inevitability, this is a tragedy.

The poem can and should be read with an eye to its literary-historical aspects: its title must surely have caught the eye—and aroused certain expectations—on the part of the reader who was familiar with the literature of decadence, and the topos of the vicious Antinous. Rilke's poem, in effect, rehumanizes the figure after two decades of sensational literary abuse. Thus it belongs to the “sympathetic” German-Scandinavian current, and is, probably, that current's best-known representative. As for the problem of George's connection with the poem, it should be obvious by this time that Rilke's Hadrian has several Georgian characteristics, but possesses greater self-knowledge and greater compassion. Indeed, the poem could be read as a sermon to George: after his “Georgian” behavior, Hadrian's final reactions show a sensitivity of which the “Meister” has proved himself to be quite incapable. But, beyond these factors, one more must be remembered: the poem's quality as a handsomely made work of art—how much is said and implied, and how skillfully, within a very small space.⁴⁸ It is the kind of transformation of the sordid into the splendid that Rilke mentions in his apologia to Jakob Uexküll.

Notes

1. Paul Bourget, in “Un césar voyageur,” Études et portraits (Paris, 1888), p. 319, detects “un style mièvre et contourné de décadence” in Hadrian's Latin. Hadrian, for the rest, is particularly the Roman emperor of decadence for Bourget; cf. his theory of decadence in “Charles Baudelaire,” Essais de psychologie contemporaine (Paris, 1883), p. 17. For Bourget, of course, decadence is not a pejorative term; Hadrian represents “un plus riche trésor d'acquisition humaine” than does “un chef germain du II^e siècle.” (See also Raymond Pouilliart, “Paul Bourget et l'esprit de décadence,” Les lettres romanes (Paris, 1951), pp. 199-223, esp. 208-11.)

2. Philemon I:4: “Ades bona, ô bona cithara, / Suavicula, blandula, tinnula, / In ventre sunt jejunia, / O, affer, affer pabula, / Improbulâ, querulâ, durulâ, / Siti cremantur guttura, / Ades bona, ô bona cithara, / Philemoni fer pocula.”

3. J. A. Symonds, “Antinous,” Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece (London, 1874), II: 220: “A parody dangerous to the pure form of Christ.”

4. In America, with the blank-verse tragedy Antinous (1891), the poetess Abbie Carter Goodloe followed the same respectable line, but added a dash of romantic interest. Hadrian's wife, Sabina, falls in love with Antinous, who rejects her advances. She confesses her guilt to Hadrian and then kills herself, eventually to be followed into death by Antinous, whose suicide results, it appears, from filial embarrassment. Goodloe's Hadrian is both fatherly and elderly; having heard Sabina's confession, he remarks to Antinous: “A rude day this has been, Antinous! / Such shocks become too much for mine old age.”

5. As Herder says, discussing the “Genien der Jünglingschaft,” Sämtliche Werke (Leipzig, 1877-1913), XVIII, 347, “Die Antinous haben freilich einen düstern Zug, wie sie auch, ihrem Urbilde nach, haben sollten.”

6. Probably because it showed the disciple ready to make any sacrifice for the master, and because of its “Georgian” language. Neither George nor Gundolf scholarship has attempted to analyze the nuances—biographical, autobiographical, and artistic—of the little play.

7. Viktor Rydberg, “Antinous,” Skrifter (Stockholm, 1896-99), IX: 213-34; p. 232: Rafael's intention was to “christianize Antinous, to make his beauty holy, and to give the self-sacrificing youth a place in the reverence of those persons who adore the mystery of self-renunciation and the mystery of eternal life, won by self-renunciation.”

8. Ibid., p. 233: “What does he see there, which thus captures his vision? / What does the melancholy cloud beneath the wreath portend? / Oh, [I wonder] if his sadly serene countenance is / a mirror of the mysteries of being?”

9. Herman Bang, Haabløse Slægter (Copenhagen, 1965), pp. 243-44. Hoff, for the rest, has been called a “modern edition of a Heliogabalus manqué” by one of his several detractors (p. 221)—a phrase reminiscent of Barbey d'Aurevilly's description of the poet of Les fleurs du mal as “un Héliogabale artificiel.”

10. Ola Hansson, Samlade skrifter (Stockholm, 1917-22), V, 18. The collection was published in German by S. Fischer as Alltagsfrauen; because of its daring nature, it could not find a Swedish publisher until 1914. In her repressed eroticism, Hansson's “Stella” comes the closest to perversity of all the “ideal” figures associated with Antinous.

11. Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, 2d ed. (London, 1951), pp. 314 ff.

12. Gabriele d'Annunzio used Antinous “heterosexually” to tell one of his early mistresses, Barbara Leoni, what he thought of her charms. Describing a statue of Antinous that he kept in his workroom, he wrote: “L'Antinoo ha la tua bocca, pura ma triste, voluttuosa ma con non so che di amaro, ardente ma crudele. Io mi alzo, per un desiderio folle e puerile; e vado a baciare l'Antinoo in bocca.” (Lettere a Barbara Leoni [Milano, 1957], p. 52: May 1888).

13. A notice in the magazine of Anatole Baju, Le Décadent (15 November 1888), had already called for poetry about Bathyllus, Antinous, Alexis, the famous youths of antiquity, “les spatalocinèdes,” the “exciters to wantonness.” Cf. A. E. Carter, The Idea of Decadence in French Literature (Toronto, 1958), p. 110.

14. Antinous comes as the last in Lorrain's series of eight youths, the others being Ganymede, Alexis, Narcissus, Hylas, Bacchus, Bathyllus, and Athys. Lorrain's “hélas!” in the penultimate line laments the thousand years of scorn Antinous has endured, not the renaissance of the “ère auguste.”

15. Praz, pondering Lorrain's substitution of “Filde” for “Wilde,” says in The Romantic Agony, p. 433: “Lorrain's favorite system seems to be to change slightly certain well-known names by altering the initial letter, without bothering about the linguistic absurdity that results.” However, an argument could be made for a learned cunning in Lorrain's hermetic naval nomenclature: Edward III combines the name of one homosexual monarch (England's Edward II) with the number of another (France's Henri III)—after all, Lord Feredith and Sir Algernon have Nice as their main escale. Also, Lorrain substitutes Cydnus for Cygnus (“The Swan,” the name tradition has assigned to Hadrian's Nile vessel) because, we assume, of the special erotic connotations of the former name: it was up the river Cydnus in Cilicia that Cleopatra sailed to seduce Antony (according to Plutarch, in Dryden's translation: “She herself lay all alone under a canopy of cloth of gold, dressed as Venus in a picture, and beautiful young boys, like painted Cupids, stood on each side to fan her”). The river's name was then transferred to the barge itself.

16. Four years before the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Lionel Johnson—who, for the rest, had introduced Douglas to Wilde—wrote a dramatic monologue, “Julian at Eleusis,” in which the doomed aesthete and emperor worships Antinous instead of Christ: “Wondrous Antinous! Oh, fairer thou / Than the dim beauty of Christ crucified / … Beneath the vast night in old Egypt thou / Gavest thyself for Hadrian: neither foul, / Nor any slave's death, was thy death; for Nile / Took thee. Then in the heavens burned one more star, / And earth reddened with unknown lily flowers, / O consecrate and fair! for joy of thee!”

17. A systematic study of the figures of Hadrian and Antinous, and of Antinous as a topos, in the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries would be a rewarding task for a comparatist; the above survey pretends to be neither exhaustive nor nuanced. The scholar who undertook the job might find an early example of the evil Antinous as simple topos in the “Danse macabre” (Tableaux parisiens) of Les fleurs du mal: “Fiers mignons, malgré l'art des poudres et du rouge, / Vous sentez tous la mort! O squelettes musqués, / Antinoüs flétris, dandys à face glabre,” and, under the same rubric, he would want to follow down the several leads given for French narrative prose by Praz and for verse by Carter. He would find an interesting blending of the “good” and “evil” Antinouses, seen full length, in the novel (Antinous, 1903) of the Finnish neo-romantic, Volter Kilpi (1874-1939). Finally, his task would be complicated by the use of Antinous as a simple signal-word for male beauty, as in the case of the altogether heterosexual and quite middle-aged Italian lover of the singer, Ottilie Pauws, in Louis Couperus's Van oude menschen, de dingen die vorbijgaan (1906)—a surprisingly unresonant employment of “Antinous” on the part of an author whose works are, otherwise, a treasure trove of decadent topoi tellingly placed. The whole Antinous-craze in letters may be seen as simply one aspect of the later nineteenth century's fascination with what the catch of Esmé Amarinth (Oscar Wilde) in Robert Hichen's The Green Carnation calls (to the tune of “Three blind mice”), “Rose-white youth, / Passionate, pale. / Ah! there's nothing in life so finely frail / As rose-white youth.” Yet the proposed systematic study should certainly not neglect Hadrian, Bourget's admirably decadent emperor, enormously powerful yet vulnerable, because of his refinement, the nature of his passion, and his age: if the period liked youthful love objects, it also liked lovers well on in years.

18. Hans Berendt, Rainer Maria Rilkes Neue Gedichte (Bonn, 1957), pp. 202-5.

19. Brigitte L. Bradley, Rainer Maria Rilkes Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil: Entwicklungsstufen seiner Pariser Lyrik (Bern and München, 1976): she connects it with the “Klage um Jonathan,” calling attention to the “Doppelmotiv von Liebe und Tod” and “der homoerotische Aspekt” (pp. 50, 51).

20. Wolfgang Müller, Rainer Maria Rilkes ‘Neue Gedichte’: Vielfältigkeit eines Gedichttypus (Meisenheim am Glan, 1971), and Hartmut Engelhardt, Der Versuch wirklich zu sein: Zu Rilkes sachlichem Sagen (Frankfurt a.M., 1973).

21. Harry Mielert, “Rilke und die Antike,” Die Antike, XVI (1940), 51-62.

22. Ernst Zinn, “Rainer Maria Rilke und die Antike,” Antike und Abendland, III (1949), 201-50.

23. Werner Kohlschmidt, “Rilke und die Antike,” in Kohlschmidt, Rilke-Interpretationen (Lahr, 1948), pp. 37-38.

24. Katharina Kippenberg, “Verhältnis zur Antike,” in Kippenberg, Rainer Maria Rilke: Ein Beitrag (Wiesbaden, 1948), pp. 298-304.

25. In Four Beasts in One: The Homo-Cameleopard (translated by Baudelaire in the Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires), L'Agonie (1888), Algabal (1892), and De berg van licht (1905-6): a study of the Heliogabalus in literature, from de Sade past Poe and Gautier to the turn of the century, would be as rewarding as a monograph on Hadrian and Antinous, although the findings might show less variety in the treatment of the boy-emperor's figure.

26. Alfred Hermann, Rilkes ägyptische Gesichte: Ein Versuch wechselseitiger Erhellung von Dichtung und Altkultur (Freiburg-München, [1955]). (Reprinted from Symposion IV [1955], 371-461.) See in particular p. 394 (p. 28).

27. Sämtliche Werke, I (Wiesbaden, 1955), p. 865.

28. Rainer Maria Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Briefwechsel (Zürich-Wiesbaden, 1952), p. 179 (3 July 1904).

29. To Clara: Briefe 1906-1907 (Leipzig, 1930), p. 107; Briefe 1904-1907 (Leipzig, 1939), p. 197 (2 December 1906).

30. To Clara: Briefe 1906-1907, p. 278; Briefe 1904-1907, p. 334 (21 June 1907).

31. Quoted in Helmut Wocke, Rilke und Italien (Giessen, 1940), p. 53.

32. Francisco de la Maza, Antinoo: El último dios del mundo clásico (Mexico, 1966), p. 212, calls the statue “la plenitud de Antinoo,” and takes his predecessor, the Norwegian Lorentz Henrik Dietrichson, (Antinous [Kristiania, 1884]), in the study of statues of Antinous to task for having dared to vitiate the Naples statue's force by calling it “Antinous-Adonis.”

33. To Elisabeth and Karl von der Heydt: Briefe 1906-1907, p. 118, Briefe 1904-1907, p. 209.

34. When Bierbaum's wretched Karl grows tired of the “Roman baths” of Naples, he sails over to Capri, there to refresh himself in an affair with a fisherman, aptly named Tiberio. (He then hires Tiberio to murder Henry in the Blue Grotto, but the planned assassination turns into mutual seduction—at least, this is Henry's version of how he escaped.)

35. Leopold von Schlözer, Rainer Maria Rilke auf Capri: Gespräche (Dresden, 1931), esp. pp. 25-30.

36. Briefe 1906-1907, p. 231; Briefe 1904-1907, pp. 294-95 (21 March 1907).

37. Briefe 1897-1914 (Wiesbaden, 1950), p. 263 (19 August 1909).

38. For example, Hofmannsthal says of “poets of the time”: “das unscheinbarste Dasein, die dürftigste Situation wird ihren immer schärferen Sinnen seelenhaft; wo nur aus fast Wesenlosem die schwächste Flamme eines eigenen Daseins, eines besonderen Leidens schlägt, sind sie nahe.”

39. Briefe 1906-1907, pp. 255-56, Briefe 1904-1907, pp. 316-17 (29 May 1907: Rilke replied from a hotel in Rome).

40. Eudo C. Mason, “Rilke und Stefan George” in Gestaltung und Umgestaltung: Festschrift Hermann August Korff (Leipzig, 1957), pp. 248-78, reprinted in Eudo C. Mason, Exzentrische Bahnen: Studien zum Dichterbewußtsein der Neuzeit (Göttingen, 1963), pp. 208-49; reprinted, but with the final section (including the discussion of “Klage um Antinous”) omitted, in Käte Hamburger, Rilke in neuer Sicht (Stuttgart, 1971), pp. 9-37.

41. For an account of it, see G. C. Schoolfield, “Rilke, Gorki, and Others: A Biographical Diversion,” in Karl S. Weimar, ed., Views and Reviews of Modern German Literature: Festschrift for Adolf D. Klarmann (München, 1974), pp. 105-20.

42. In the third of her observations on the poems, Bradley says: “Die ungewöhnliche Sprachführung in ‘Klage um Antinous’ hängt übrigens mit einem Metrum zusammen, das zwar fünfhebig ist, im Takt aber an den Hexameter anklingt.” Bradley, Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil, p. 52.

43. Bierbaum, however, employs only the indicative, “hub.” Rilke had some fondness for the subjunctive form, using it in still another poem of the Neue Gedichte, “Josuas Landtag” (“als hübe sich der Lärm von dreißig Schlachten / in einem Mund”), in the “Requiem for Wolf Graf von Kalckreuth” (“daß du ihn hübest”), in the “Improvisationen aus dem Capreser Winter” (“und hübe es hinaus aus mir”), in the “Skizze zu einem Sankt Georg” (“Während, silberner über dem silbernen Tier, / unberührt von der Kühle und Trübe, / sich der Helm, vergittert und spiegelnd, hübe”), in a sketch from Capri, dated 1907 (“Wie wenn ich jeden Morgen mich erhübe”), in the “Gedichte für Lulu Albert-Lasard, X” (“und er hübe sie in seine Hände”), and in the poem for Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, “Valangin” (“war er manchmal so bewegt, als hüb er selbst ein namenloses Gesicht”). It is interesting that of these appearances of the form, all save two are clustered in the years 1906-1908, and three (in the “Improvisationen,” the “Skizze,” and the nameless sketch) are from 1907, the year of the composition of “Klage um Antinous.” Rilke not only liked the antique effect (which he employs in the “Klage” and “Sankt Georg,” where the rhyme words, “getrübt” and “trübe,” have the same stem), but, evidently, the very sound. (I am indebted to Professor Ulrich Goldsmith, who is preparing a much-needed word index of Rilke's lyrics, for all the instances above save that in “Josuas Landtag”; I am likewise indebted to Ms. Liselotte Davis and Professor Hermann J. Weigand for having approached Professor Goldsmith on my behalf.)

44. Berendt, Rilkes Neue Gedichte, pp. 203-4.

45. It was, to be sure, first printed in an “official” partial biography by a member of the family, Carl Sieber, René Rilke (Leipzig, 1932), pp. 161-68.

46. See the letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé of 21 February 1919 (Briefwechsel, p. 412) and the letter to Katharina Kippenberg of 24 February 1919 (Briefwechsel [Wiesbaden, 1954], p. 333).

47. New Poems (London, 1964), p. 171. The French translation by Jacques Legrand (Rainer Maria Rilke, Oeuvres 2: Poésie, ed. Paul de Man [Paris, 1972], p. 231) says: “Que n'est-il donc le simple mort qu'il eût tant aimé être.”

48. Even the immediately following poems in Neue Gedichte, “Der Tod der Geliebten” and “Klage um Jonatan,” provide a contribution to the meaning of “Klage um Antinous,” as it does to theirs. Certainly, the very title of the second poem requires the reader to make a comparison between David, the passionate and straightforward friend of Jonathan, and Hadrian, the overbearing and culpable lover of Antinous.