Some truly intriguing questions are framed from Rilke's discourse among the angels: And, alas, even though I knowĪbout you, almost deadly birds of the soul, I still invoke you." It is perhaps the height of optimism that Rilke believes he can directly confront the meaning of the universe from a castle near Trieste, where Joyce also wrote, on the Adriatic Sea under the auspices of a patron in Marie Von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe over four months.īut the muse does come speaking in the undertones of summoned angels and Rilke listens attuned to their whispers to build in the divine dialogue an opus magnus from the turrets and towers of the castle walls. His elegies are epic in his perspective of the universe but there is a relative brevity compared to epic poets who take on the universe in lengthy discourse. Rilke's poetry is rich and densely packed with meaning. Or Milton in "Paradise Lost." Or Dante in "Inferno." He is grand like Faust addressing Mephistopheles. This is fairly bold, even daunting positioning for a poet and Rilke means to attack the big stuff. Rilke in the First Elegy goes on to say that "Beauty is nothing else but the beginning of terror, which we are just able to bear and we are stunned by it because it so serenely disdains to destroy us." Orders? and what if one of them would suddenly "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic He is, after all, peering out into the universe and hearing the whispers of angels to inspire him: Rilke's greatness emanates from his fearlessness in taking on an epic macro-perspective. Gass advised was the objective of the most earnest poets. The 10 elegies succeed in finding the world in a word, as William H. In "Duino Elegies" it seems as if Rilke is explaining the meaning of his life indirectly to God through divine messengers the presence of whom we can scarcely sense. Duino Elegies speaks in a voice that is both intimate and majestic on the mysteries of human life and our attempt, in the words of the translator David Young, “to use our self-consciousness to some advantage: to transcend, through art and the imagination, our self-deception and our fear.” He wrote these words, the opening of the first Duino Elegy, in his notebook, then went inside to continue what was to be his major opus-completely only after another ten, tormented years of effort-and one of the literary masterpieces of the century. From out of the fierce wind, Rilke seemed to hear a voice: Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (If I cried out, who would hear me up there, among the angelic orders?). One morning he walked out onto the battlements and climbed down to where the cliffs dropped sharply to the sea. Rainer Maria Rilke was staying at Duino Castle, on a rocky headland of the Adriatic Sea near Trieste. We have a marvelous, almost legendary image of the circumstances in which the composition of this great poem began.
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