The Carousel (Rilke) by John Greening
The Carousel
Jardin du Luxembourg
A roof, a shadow, round and round it spins
for a little while, this brightly coloured band
of horses from a hesitating land
that’s going, gone. Some do have more than reins,
a cart or carriage, but they manage to present
brave faces, as they must, while at their side
a furious crimson lion keeps its pride
and now and then an old white elephant.
You’ll even find a Monarch of the Glen
down from the hills, except he has a saddle
with a little girl in blue who’s fastened in.
And there a pale boy sits, while underneath,
his small hand’s grip is growing hot and faint
as the lion’s tongue pokes out between its teeth.
And now and then an old white elephant.
And girls who pass by sitting upright may
have outgrown all those pony games already
but cheerfully hang on, a touch unsteady,
and stare off up elsewhere, perhaps this way.
And now and then an old white elephant.
And round it goes, accelerates, and stops,
forever orbiting with no clear aim.
A red, a green, a grey one, blurry shapes
in profile barely formed go through the same
and sometimes there’s a brief bright smile that drops
a blessing as it passes, before it sweeps
the stake back to this breathless blindfold game.
JOHN GREENING (translator)
Das Karussell from Neue Gedichte by Rainer Maria Rilke, part of John Greening’s complete translation of Rilke’s New Poems to appear in November 2025 from Baylor UP.
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This is a translation of an early 20th century German poem about the oldest carousel in Paris. The original poem, by Rainer Maria Rilke, appeared in a collection, New Poems, that was not only a stylistic breakthrough for Rilke but a milestone in the development of modern poetry. Rilke referred to these ‘new poems’ as thing-poems.
‘The Carousel’ (Das Karussell) dates from roughly the same time as the first Imagist poems in English, by T.E. Hulme. Imagism, which valued clarity, succinctness and visually precise imagery, was the earliest major modernist movement in English poetry. Clearly, something was in the air in Europe. Perhaps it was part of the ‘revaluation of all values’ that Nietzsche had written about – a rejection of the old certainties; specifically, in relation to Imagism, a rejection of the 19th century romanticism that was so closely associated with music. Poets were starting to cast a cold eye on the world around them.
The above is, admittedly, a lot of baggage to hang on a poem about a merry-go-round in a park. In one sense, the poem is a simple piece of description. Just as the same wooden animals reappear as a carousel rotates, so a line featuring an ‘old white elephant’ occurs three times in what is a fairly short poem. This mimetic effect is one of the first things we learn about poetry in school (think of Wilfred Owen’s ‘stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ from ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’).
But Rilke’s close observation was in part an act of restraint, a sticking to the script of reality in one whose natural inclination was towards inwardness and even mysticism. He was at this time, famously, the personal secretary and assistant of the sculptor Auguste Rodin (think of The Thinker), whose advice to the somewhat blocked writer was to repeat his own exercise from student days: Regardez les animaux – to look at animals in a zoo for hours on end. Rilke did so, in the Jardin des Plantes, less than a mile’s walk from the old carousel’s home in the Jardin du Luxembourg: the most celebrated of Rilke’s thing-poems that resulted from this exercise was ‘The Panther’. Judging by his success here, it will be interesting to see what John Greening makes of this modern classic when his translation of New Poems appears later in the autumn (November 2025).
Back to ‘The Carousel’. Part of its power is the hint of the transcendent behind the observed reality. The eyes of those girls who have just about outgrown this play ‘stare off up elsewhere’, and the ‘brief bright smile that drops / a blessing as it passes’ points forward to the ending of the fifth of the ten great visionary poems that Rilke would go on to write, the Duino Elegies, in which he describes two imagined lover-acrobats as ‘the at last truthfully smiling pair on the quietened carpet’.
For some readers, such thing-poems as ‘The Carousel’ and ‘The Panther’ were Rilke’s most powerfully direct and accessible poems; for some, they were the spadework for the sequences produced in a ‘savage creative storm’, Sonnets to Orpheus and then Duino Elegies. Rilke put it best himself when he wrote of the preparatory nature of this Rodin-inspired period:
Work of seeing is done,
now practise heart-work
upon those images captive within you; for you
overpowered them only: but now do not know them.
(translated by Michael Hamburger)
After many years of having to make do with well-meaning but somewhat limited translators of Rilke, readers are better served these days – though this is in danger of going into reverse, as the poet’s renown soars. It could be said that Rilke himself is in danger of becoming the poet of first (or, after Rumi, second) resort for spiritually inclined self-help authors; to be fair, he was rather asking for it with his famous poem-ending, ‘You must change your life’. Even the popular black comedy-drama film about Nazi Germany, Jojo Rabbit, ends with a Rilke quote. A quick look online for other versions of ‘The Carousel’ / ‘The Merry-Go-Round’ will underline how good a job Greening has done here.
Greening is an accomplished poet himself, with more than 20 collections to his name. There is a lightness of touch that contrasts with the plodding rhythm (yes, monotonous like a carousel, we get it) of several other attempts. And he adds elements of his own, too, though not obtrusively, like the playfulness of ‘sweeps… stake’ and ‘lion… pride’. Greening remarks, ‘It’s frequently forgotten what a formal and playfully musical poet Rilke was: the metrical ingenuity and clever rhymes of his middle period tend to be swept away when he’s put into English.’ He goes on to describe his own approach as translator:
‘The Carousel’ really won’t spin properly in free verse, not least because of what one might call the white elephant in the room. The famous refrain (‘und dann und wann ein weisser Elefant’) is a metrical challenge in English, and translators have sought all kinds of ways to make it work. ‘Dann und wann’ is easy enough, but it’s that trochaic adjective ‘weisser’… Marielle Sutherland has ‘a white, white elephant’, Stephen Cohn ‘a small white elephant’, Ruth Speirs ‘an elephant, a white one, J.B.Leishman ‘an elephant all white’. Without some insistent rhythm the repeated line falls flat, though Derek Mahon’s effective free imitation ‘Jardin du Luxembourg’ opts to avoid the repetition altogether and offers one passing ‘elephant ivory-white’. My own compromise is to present the troublesome creature as a survivor, a doughty veteran, like Rilke himself, perhaps.
Technique is all part of the ‘game’, but poetry is more than a game. Like the ring game still played by children on this old Parisian carousel, where they hold sticks to try to ‘spear’ metal rings from a dispenser held patiently by the carousel’s operator – a game reminiscent of the jousting associated with late mediaeval chivalry – ‘The Carousel’ is both exercise and transcendence.