Rilke's Venice

A Travel Companion
By Birgit Haustedt. Translated by Stephen Brown

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) criss-crossed Europe; he visited Russia and sailed on the Nile. And over and over again, he went to Venice: St Mark’s Square and the Lido, the Doge’s Palace and the Grand Canal were his intimate friends.

He visited the city ten times; the first was a weekend in March 1897, the last, 13 July 1920. Venise, as he called her amorously, enthralled and provoked him: ‘For a long time I have been unable even to glance casually at a magazine or book without reading the word Venice; wherever I look, it appears before my eyes at the last moment.’
Rilke didn’t travel simply to recuperate, or as a hobby, or for a break from the everyday. Travel was a passion for him, a way of life – and work too, part of his profession as a poet. Rilke’s travelling served a single purpose: he was always seeking impulses, stimuli, ideas for his writing. It was never an easy task. Rilke’s poems did not come about just from sitting on St Mark’s Square, sensing the atmosphere and then putting it on paper.

‘Poems are not, as people think, feelings (one has those quickly enough), – they are practical experiences. For a single poem one must see many cities, people and things. One must be able to think back to journeys in unfamiliar regions, to days in quiet, subdued rooms and mornings by the sea, to the sea in general, seas, to travelling by night, which murmur along.’

Rilke loved to walk. He often walked alone. On other occasions, Princess Marie von Thurn and Taxis-Hohenloe, his hostess in Venice, accompanied him. … Together the princess and the poet visited churches, art exhibitions and cafés. Rilke paid attention to everything on his walks; the least conspicuous things did not escape him. He was unable to walk past a funeral inscription without happily reading it out. Sometimes he recited his own poems – only in ‘worthy locations’, naturally. On all his journeys he always carried his notebook with him, ‘in the pocket of his black satin waistcoat, buttoned up to the neck – for a time, the only eccentricity he allowed himself.’