A Rilke Poem: About the Poverty of the Body

Rainer Maria Rilke's body was weak throughout his life. As a child he was often sick. A difficult childhood and home life did not help his physical strength.

In adulthood Rilke moved throughout Europe often and lived something of a vagabond's life. Late in life he was often a patient at a sanitarium because of bad health. Already weak, his body seemed to have played out. He died at the age of 51.

This poem comes from the final months of his life during one of his sanitarium stays. It goes to the way we often neglect the body until we come to some physical situation in which our bodies no longer function as we would like them to.

Rilke's demeanor toward his failing health and fragile body in this poem reminds me of how Francis of Assisi nicknamed his own body, "Brother Ass."

I wonder . . . in what ways are we invited to befriend our bodies, to recognize their limitations and the poverty of our human condition? We are, after all, made of flesh and not stone. All the health initiatives, diets and miracle drugs in the world cannot stall forever the inevitable deterioration of our bodies. We fight aging, we fight disease, we fight loss of appearance. It is the Western way, the contemporary way to deal with any poverty or deterioration.

Personally, I think we're frightened of admitting our own poverty, confessing that we are anything less that on top or on the up-and-up. In fact, it's a sham and a huge falsehood, but it is part of the cultural illusion under which many of us live.

I hear Rilke, here at the end of his life, advocating for a gentler, more friendly stance toward ourselves, reconciling the divisions we've created between body and soul, bringing the various aspects of our being into a congruent whole.

This is his poem:

Brother body is poor . . . : then we'll have to be rich for him.
Often he was the rich one: so may he be pardoned
the meanness of his worst moments.
If he then acts as though he scarcely still knows us,
let us gently remind him of everything shared.

Granted, we are not one, but a solitary two:
our consciousness and he;
but how much we owe each other
past conceiving,
the way it is with friends! and one learns in illness:
friendship is hard!


(in Uncollected Poems: Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Edward Snow, p. 239)