Rilke wrote “Requiem for a Friend” in memory of a young painter friend of his, Paula Modersohn Becker, who died at the age of thirty-one shortly after giving birth. Although her name is never mentioned, it is apparent that she is the subject of the poem.

The speaker of the poem addresses the woman, who, unlike other dead figures—friends and figures from his poems—does not rest in peace but returns to haunt him. He believes that she comes with some request of him, the nature of which he tries to ascertain. He offers to travel to a distant land where she has never been, but which is spiritually part of her. There, for her sake, he will see and learn as much as possible. About a third of the way into this long poem, Rilke introduces the first of a series of significant facts regarding Paula: She was a painter whose insight, skill, and objectivity he admired.

Much personal detail is condensed in this section. In the speaker’s opinion, among the best of Paula’s works are a number of still lifes with fruit. Yet she also painted many admirable pictures of the women and children of Worpswede. In these paintings each face is uniquely itself, as distant and distinct as a piece of fruit or a watchful animal. The phrase “you balanced their weight with colors” introduces into the poem an important facet of Rilke and Paula’s relationship. It was Paula who first made Rilke aware of the artist Paul Cézanne, and by weaving ideas about Cézanne into his discussion of her art, Rilke is both acknowledging a debt to her and praising her own work.

The section in which Paula steps naked before her mirror is a reference to her nude self-portraits, particularly to one of her final ones, in which she stands posed only in an amber necklace, gazing at the viewer with an expression as detached as the fruits in her paintings. Her gaze is “without possession,” an echo of Rilke’s conception of love; also, it is full of “true poverty,” an echo of the virtue espoused in the figure of Saint Francis in Rilke’s collection Das Stundenbuch (1905; Poems from The Book of Hours, 1941). These key Rilkean phrases are applied, however, in a new context. With respect to the notion of schauen (looking), the artist is asked to be so detached that he or she possesses and desires nothing, but only sees and portrays. In Paula’s gaze, Rilke finds the highest degree of such creative renunciation. That is, in her own eyes she had become a pure thing, an object among objects.

Next, the speaker reveals another crucial fact about Paula’s life, and he gradually realizes that it is the key to her current presence in his life. He says, “Let us lament together that someone/ took you out of your mirror.” As an artist, she had been in the process of transforming all of her powers into seeing and creating, but then, chance had forced her back into the world, where she gradually succumbed to its biological demands when she became pregnant. The words that Rilke uses to describe this transformation are brutal and culminate in the image of Paula digging up the unripe seeds of her own death and eating them before they are able to blossom into fruit. He further describes how she did violence to herself by diverting her blood toward the new life within her, while trying to persuade herself that her actions were not permanent or irrevocable. After the birth of her child, Paula steps in front of...