How to Keep Silent?

There was a poem used to love so much I kept it on my wall, reciting it daily, always on the tip of my mind:

Let your beauty manifest itself without talking or calculation.
You are silent.
It says for you: I am.
And comes in meaning thousandfold, comes at long last over everyone.

The poem comes from Rainer Marie Rilke – the only poet I’ve ever loved, though I cannot say I ever tried to love poetry, as I find it difficult to read for pure enjoyment. Rilke inspired my devotion because he evoked characters, images, and worlds in a few lines. He could create the things I loved most about novels, only he offered tiny vignettes that enticed you into immersion.

This poem has haunted me since it first introduced itself. I can’t shake the puzzle from my mind. Today it bubbled up after reading this blog post, “There are lines of poetry so powerful, so soul shaping that one must carry them in one's memory…” My poem (I think I've earned that) haunts me precisely because I wonder why I was so drawn to it. Why does it resonate, and from where does the attachment grasp?

Does she mimic the future me I've imagined: strong, flawless, graceful, a pleasure to be around? A fable. And yet, she's there. An example. A painful reminder that because someone gave her form, she is real.

I was never the protagonist of this poem.

I'm convinced Rilke drew a woman in his sights when he wrote this. Coaxing her not to speak, why? What a luxury to keep silent! A problem I'd be lucky to have. As evidenced by the words before you, I cannot be quiet. I'm haunted, not only by poetry, but by everything that slips in my sight and psyche. I must name the things that parade past me, good or bad.

But this woman. She can keep quiet. Not out of submission, but out of a triumph surpassing her former trials, I imagine. "...at long last..." I play-act. Like an actress muttering her lines in the green room, I rehearse the woman I intend to be, just not yet.

Then I read another article that struck me. The Pains of Memory by Theodore Dalrymple via Arts & Letters Daily. He reveals the stories of two women who had endured grave traumas, yet chose silence as their coping mechanism. One woman decided to reveal her pains later, the other, died with her secrets. Reading the article, I felt ashamed of my constant need to deliver harangue via the internet. My petty fears, my childish anguish. I suffer, yes, but my suffering is not appeased knowing others suffer more.

Dalrymple knowingly catches this tendency, "We are enjoined, when we suffer or feel unhappy (which are not necessarily quite the same thing, of course), to consider those who are yet worse off than ourselves. This is supposed to relieve and console us, but it rarely does. The most that it achieves is to make us feel guilty that we are so miserable over comparative trifles when others have so many worse travails than ours; and this in turn makes us feel more wretched than ever."

Perhaps this poem is meant for me. It matches my obsessions with a possible solution: silence. And I'll continue to ignore it. And it will continue to haunt me.