Truth Wrought Words
GA 40
Foreword by Marie Steiner
1Marie Steiner-von Sivers (1867-1948), the second wife of Rudolf Steiner, worked on the renewal of the performing arts and the editing and publishing of Rudolf Steiner's literary estate. She was born to an aristocratic family in Russia, so was well-educated at home and at major universities, where she studied theater and recitation. She was fluent in Russian, German, English, French, and Italian.Rudolf Steiner only wrote poetry for very special occasions. The demands of the surrounding world and his commitment to serve it did not give him time to do so. The little we have of this shows us how great his work in this area would have been if he had been allowed to devote himself to it. Note also that it is future-oriented, and therefore little understood in the present. A strange circumstance will make this seem understandable to us. Where today can a poet be found who in a single collection of lyrics brings forth the little noun the I? This astonishing fact stands before us as we finish the collection. One of the poems unveils what he means by the I: the collected consciousness of the world of mankind, its ancient roots, and Christianity as its ultimate goal. It is by nature spiritual and destiny-laden, for hidden within the sound itself the letters of the I indicate the Son of God, ICH = Jesu Christi.
Rudolf Steiner never used the name of his God in vain. His own human I was for him merely a work in progress. It was therefore completely natural for him not to remain within the boundaries of the personal I. He spoke of himself only when there were compelling reasons for doing so. “Inwardly building the world in the I, showing and observing the I in worlds...” 2Given specifically to Marie von Sivers, 3/15/1911. That was his life's content and soul's breath, and that is the guiding principle that runs through this little book, in which, except in this one case, the noun "I" never appears, but in which the stones that build it are brought together.
He gave us some poems of eurythmy, our young art of movement. He was keen to show, using a few examples, how poetry must enter into the connections of a spiritual world that is revealed in man as well as in the cosmos, and how form and content must correspond strictly, in accordance with the analogies that the essential expressions of man have with cosmic relationships. An art that cuts itself off from these connections must die. It will live if it seeks the essential that underlies our world and the other worlds connected with it.
So he gave us the art of eurythmy, which from a completely human perspective promotes what is needed to find the connection between man and the spiritual world. And in order to introduce the students in a very concrete way to the spirit of feeling one with the universe, he created the poems in which he tried to capture in inner spiritual grasp what was cosmically revealed when our solar system was created. These poems are the Twelve Voices or Moods and Dance of the Planets.
The content of theTwelve Voices exactly follows a moving calmness in the twelve-ness, which is given in the universe as the zodiac, and in the seven-ness, which is present in the universe as the sequence of planets. In the twelve stanzas of seven lines each there is an exact image of what exists in our universe. This is the outer skeleton, so to speak, but it captures in every detail what wants to reveal itself, what has flowed out. The movement of our solar system is captured in the rise and fall within each stanza, and in the rise and fall of the whole poem. The declamation of each stanza corresponds to the respective celestial body, by means of the arrangement of the words in the stanzas, but also in the way in which each individual line plays into it, which corresponds to a planet in motion. Thereby one can feel the energetic movement of Mars, the majestic movement of Jupiter, the mature, ebbing movement of Saturn, and finally the solid, reflective movement of the moon. In the first line of each stanza is the direct sun radiance, and then the gentle, warming movement of Venus and finally the weaving movement of Mercury. And this sevenfold inner soul feeling, from the sun down through Venus, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon, is woven into the mood content of the verse of the respective zodiac sign through which the Sun passes. It is really oneness with the laws of the universe, the opposite of subjective arbitrariness.
We have something similar in the structure of the Dance of the Planets. An attempt is made to give a different world context in twelve verses. Here we have the Sun, the planets, and the Moon. In the four-line verses, the first line is always solar, whereas the last line is lunar. In the four parts of just three stanzas, the curve of cosmic events rises upwards to its zenith and then declines again. In this way the actions and existence of the human soul harmonize, stand together with the spiritual world, calling, longing, and fulfilling, and are repeated four times. The form is extracted from the mystery of the universe.
In this way Rudolf Steiner taught us to feel in the cosmos and taught us to enter into a spiritual world which has its own rules, that will open itself through people. He said to the eurythmy practitioners, “What you see playing out gives you the possibility of gaining mobility and in ever-moving concepts of providing what can be called the word surging through the world and the world-formation holding the word fast.”
This is what Rudolf Steiner taught us, giving us in this way a familiarity with what poetry really is.
For eurythmy he also fashioned world-soul-spirits, Ecce Homo (behold the man crowned with thorns), and spring and autumn. Everywhere we experience one’s insertion into and connection with the spirit, we experience in the collection of glittering radiant intermingling sounds the creative forces of the cosmos itself. The inner rhythm of sounds in this poetry of the future basically takes the place of rhyming that had grown out of the intellectual culture. Rudolf Steiner had previously revealed in his mystery dramas the formation of sound developing as a high artistic principle in our souls. The law of movement in the sound elements takes them away from the sphere of the purely musical, pictorial, and plastic. Corresponding to the elements of all artistic works opening up in their own independent realms, in poetic speech he has brought down to us the sphere of spiritual dynamics.
Let's try to let the poem’s sounds and assonance (the repetition of phonemes) affect us. For example, in Welenseelengeister (World Soul Spirits) the triple i in the first line opens to the a at the end, the repetition of the a in the second and third lines brightens to the final e, which is again introduced by a triple i. This is repeated in the final assonance of the second verse and then gives way to a three-time assonant i in the last two lines of the third stanza where the e returns to the a. Only those who are able to feel artistic sound formation will appreciate what urgent power, what movement, what creative revelation lie in this treatment of the a, e and i, in this poem consisting of three short triple lines, to which the amphibrachic meter (short-long-short) gives certainty of purpose and in uplifting gives momentum. Verily, it is condensed spirit.
To exemplify this deeply living artistic ability to make spiritually weaving work affect us through the movement of sounds, some lyrical passages from the mystery plays have also been included. But only in actually producing the artistic words in the freedom of breathing can one fully feel what lies in this speech, the sounding forth of emotive release, the oscillating light, the plastic inner force.
The majority of the poems contained in this collection were, of course, written spontaneously at seasonal celebrations or are poetic summaries of public lectures, with no claim to artistic design.
Rudolf Steiner did an endless amount to ensure that humanity would again awaken to an understanding of the importance of the seasonal festivals and of cosmic events. He poured out a wealth of profound, light-filled correlations at the Christmas Conference in 1923-24, so a number of the most beautiful maxims he brought were around Christmas. One of the most striking events of our lives was the session in which he gave in poetic form his first truly spoken words, “Let the sun show forth at midnight hours.” The strength must be found to transform this wealth of experience, this force of the sound of phonemes forged into words, into a turning point in the soul’s inner life.
But externally, the path of living in service to spiritual science was steadfastly and generously taken up. At the beginning of the Christmas Conference Rudolf Steiner gave an introduction, entitled “Christianity as Mystical Fact”, in which he spoke about the Orphic Mysteries. It was a deeply felt wake-up call that the shadows of the past lying in darkness would become bright leading lights. Within these Christmas words, which were to be taken up as if carved in stone, as once the Pyramids of Egypt were imagined, within the word’s dark depths would arise the glistening of Osiris and the shimmering of Isis, a personal experience of the hammer-blow of hidden willpower and the surging creative power of the cosmos within the etheric sea. The words speak of the past and the future, of becoming and of subsiding, of material death and the value of living. By uniting with the powers that were being drawn down, the soul is to strive to take up the new light, the Christ. The material world-all could change in spirit in one’s inner glance, were a person to take up in empathy the truth of the iridescent being of Christ.
To take up in full awareness once again, what lies submerged in dreams in our souls of the old mysteries, that was the goal to which Rudolf Steiner directed his work.
To annually take a fresh look at Christmas, the festival of the winter solstice, as an invitation to look deeper into what humanity needs for its development, is what Rudolf Steiner taught us. Much of this is contained in Christmas maxims that were copied from commemorative booklets that were not intended for the public, but which we are happy to be able to pass on. They form a bridge to spiritual experience for those who allow the verses to work on them. Their purest final notes is found in the wonderfully transparent rhythms which
Rudolf Steiner gave to the audience of a thousand people at Christmas Conference.
“At the turning point of time
The World-Spirit-Light entered
The earthly stream of being.”
These were his final Christmas truly spoken words, his fervent wish for us.
“That good will be
What heartfelt
We found,
What purposeful
We guide,
Willingly.”
If I have decided to add to human understanding clearly spoken true maxims, which perhaps cannot be understood straight away, it is because I am convinced that our time needs the forces that can flow in through the path of concentration on such focused imagery. What germinates in such concentrated imagery of truly spoken words is essentially allowing the feeling of connection between human actions and existence and the actions and existence of the world (the total experience of all who have reached the human stage). This is what our time so urgently needs in order to overcome the forces of decline that are presently raging. And Rudolf Steiner's life, work, and death served this goal.
Dornach, December 1923,
Marie Steiner