A few months ago at Cloudscome’s suggestion, I made some Rainer Maria Rilke a summer reading goal. I’ve been acquainting myself with this poet in small bites. In “Blank Joy” (whole poem is here), the speaker begins with an acknowledgment that certain longings can shape us even more than satisfactions:

She who did not come, wasn’t she determined
nonetheless to organize and decorate my heart?

The conclusion is hymnlike:

Lovely joy left blank, perhaps you are
the center of all my labors and my loves.
If I’ve wept for you so much, it’s because
I preferred you among so many outlined joys.

I like this poem, but the more I’ve thought about it, the less confident I feel about its meaning. Is it despairing, or affirming? I can see both sides, actually.

On the affirming side, one thing that comes to mind is how often the empty spaces are as defining as the filled ones within the total “outline” – in visual art, poetry or story, an expression on a face, a relationship, a life. It’s an affirming way of seeing the world: even nothing becomes a positive quantity when it’s looked at this way.

This way of seeing the poem seems to go along with Rilke’s exhortation in the 4th of his Letters to a Young Poet  to “have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves… Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer…” By this reasoning, maybe the speaker of “Blank Joy” will live his way into “Full Joy.”

What do you think?

Poetry Friday is at Becky’s Book Reviews today. More Rilke poems here. And for a good laugh on the subject of thinking too much instead of just enjoying the poem (sigh), here’s a link to Billy Collins’ “Workshop.”