David Lentz's Reviews > Duino Elegies

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.

The 10 elegies succeed in finding the world in a word, as William H. Gass advised was the objective of the most earnest poets. Rilke's greatness emanates from his fearlessness in taking on an epic macro-perspective. He is, after all, peering out into the universe and hearing the whispers of angels to inspire him:

"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic
Orders? and what if one of them would suddenly
take me to his heart."

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."

This is fairly bold, even daunting positioning for a poet and Rilke means to attack the big stuff. He is grand like Faust addressing Mephistopheles. Or Milton in "Paradise Lost." Or Dante in "Inferno."

Rilke's poetry is rich and densely packed with meaning. 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.

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.

But 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.

In the Second Elegy he writes:
"Each angel is terrifying. And, alas, even though I know
about you, almost deadly birds of the soul, I still invoke you."

Some truly intriguing questions are framed from Rilke's discourse among the angels:
"Does then the cosmic space
into which we dissolve, taste of us? Do the Angels
really hold only that which spring from them,
or do they, at times, as if by oversight, enfold unto themselves
a hint of our being as well?"

In the Fourth Elegy he invokes the images of puppetry as he sits before the stage:
"An angel has to come, take part, and draw the puppets up high.
Angel and puppet: at last there is a real play."

In the Seventh Elegy we find that Rilke is taking on the Zeitgeist, the spirit of time:

"Do not believe that destiny is more than a summing up of childhood...
The Zeitgeist builds vast reservoirs of power for itself, shapeless
as the tense urge that it extracts from all things.
He no longer recognizes temples. We are secretly hoarding these extravagances of the heart."

In the Eighth Elegy he speaks more of destiny:
"That's what destiny is: to oppose
and nothing but that, and forever to oppose...
And we: spectators, always, everywhere,
turned toward everything and never outward.
It overfills us. We arrange it. It falls apart.
We rearrange it and we, ourselves, fall apart."

A favorite few lines emerges from this elegy by Rilke:
"Who, then, has turned us around like this, that we,
whatever we do, appear like someone about
to depart? So much like the man on the final hill
that shows him his whole valley for one last time,
who turns, and stops there, lingering-,
this, then, is how we live, forever taking our leave."

In the Ninth Elegy he has advice for us when we address the angels and God:
"Praise the world to the Angel, not the unspeakable one, you
can't impress him with grand emotion: in the Universe,
where he feels so intensely, you are only a beginner. So show
him simplicity, shaped from generation to generation,
that is ours and lives near our hands and within our sight.
Tell him things. He will stand amazed...
Look, I live. On what? Neither childhood nor future
grows less... A surfeit of being
wells up in my heart."

The final elegy deals with a woman named Lament:
"That some day, emerging from the grim vision,
I might sing jubilation and praise to assenting Angels.
That of the clear striking hammers of my heart
no one would fail me from slack wavering or
broken strings. That my weeping face would
make me more radiant; that my trivial tears might flower...
We were, she says, a great race once."

I urge you to take on Rilke's "Duino Elegies" and to read it slowly and linger on every radiant word: this is the really good stuff.

Are we all no less than Rilke in his castle by the sea seeking to make sense of the tumult of the universe in dialogue with our own angels?

The translation by Leslie P. Gartner is inspiring.