Les Roses
Bussum: The Halcyon Press, 1927. First edition. 34, [6] pp. Publisher’s unprinted wrappers. Spine a little darkened, soft crease to lower front corner of covers and most leaves with a tiny attendant closed tear to the edge of the cover.
330 copies were printed; this copy unnumbered and designated Service de Presse (hors tirage). The standard edition was issued with a printed label on the front cover; this copy bears no trace of ever having had one.
The first publication of A.A.M. Stols at the Halcyon Press. Published just weeks after Rilke’s death on December 29, 1926, with an introduction by Paul Valéry. Twenty-four poems composed in French on the rose, one of Rilke’s totemic subjects: a motif to which he was endlessly drawn, and, if the myth is to be believed, was the cause of his death- a thorn from a rose pricking his hand, the wound failing to heal and growing rapidly worse, a harbinger of the leukemia that was to send him among the assenting angels.
As E.M. Butler wrote in her biography of Rilke in English in 1941, “There is no doubt that roses cast a spell upon Rilke. Monique Saint-Helier recounts how he once sent her some fading flowers to die with her, because he was going away. His description of a vase of falling roses in Late Poems represents him as keeping them in his room until they were really dead, when he embalmed their petals in books and used them for pot-pourri. Rilke’s roses were always explicitly in enclosed spaces: in death-bed chambers, in his study at night, in rose-bowls, bringing summer into a room, bestrewing the chimney-piece as they shed their petals. And even in his garden at Muzot, they seemed to be clad in pink silk boudoir-gowns and red summer dresses, like carefully tended and cherished, fragrant and fragile hothouse blooms.” In Worpswede in 1900, Rilke brought flowers to his new friends Paula Modersohn-Becker and Clara Westhoff (who was to become his wife): “I invented a new form of caress: placing a rose gently on a closed eye until its coolness can no longer be felt; only the gentle petal will continue to rest on the eyelid like sleep just before dawn.” Ritzer E73. Item #2649
Price: $850.00