and it never sees what is behind itself. The limitless as a whole can also be called "God" in a loose way of speaking. So in this elegy Rilke says:
the free animal
has its perishing constantly behind itself,
and in front of itself God, and when it moves it moves
in eternity, just as wells do.
This all sounds very strange and yet is only a poetic form of the popular biological metaphysics of the end of the nineteenth century. There, and in fact ever since Descartes, man's representing is called a consciousness of objects, one that is conscious of itself and is reflected onto itself. And so the comportment of the animal is unselfconscious and in that sense is an unconscious pressing and driving of the instincts out into a direction not "objectively" determined.
The priority of the unconscious over consciousness corresponds to the priority of the free animal over the imprisoned essence of man. The spirit of Schopenhauer's philosophy, mediated by Nietzsche and the doctrines of psychoanalysis, looms behind this poetry. Although Nietzsche's metaphysics with regard to the doctrine of the will to power remains outside the compass of Rilke's poetry, there still holds sway the one decisive common element: the essence of man as conceived on the basis of the essence of the animal. Here it is poetized, there thought. From a purely metaphysical viewpoint, i.e., with regard to the interpretation of beings as rational or irrational, the domain of Rilke's basic poetic expenence is not at all distinct from the basic position of Nietzsche's thinking. Both are as remote as possible from the essence of truth as ἀλήθεια, just as was the metaphysics of the modern and medieval periods. Yet modern metaphysics, in unity with medievalChristian metaphysics, reposes on the same ground, namely the Roman transformation of the metaphysics of Plato and Aristotle, and so it is easy to see in Rilke's poetry the last offshoot of modern metaphysics, in the sense of a secularized Christianity, and to show that the secularized is precisely only an epiphenomenon of the original Christian phenomenon. Such an interpretation makes Rilke's poetry appear to be some sort of derailed Christianity, badly in need of succor, and such apologetics risks flying in the face of the expressed word and will of the poet.
Now, we could reply that we are not interested in a Christian apologetic exploitation of the poetry of Rilke. We also reject any attempt to apply to poetry the measuring rod of a "philosophy." We adhere only to the poetical-artistic word. This is certainly an authentic attitude and one that does justice to the poet. But it leaves one question unasked,