In the Library
The Duino Elegies
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1923
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 30 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 10
- Length
- Length 7k words
£1.99
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Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
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If you like this, try
Letters to a Young Poet
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rilke's letters to a young cadet give in plain prose the counsel the Elegies sing: live the questions, go into yourself, and treat solitude as the ground of real work.
£1.99
Song of Myself
Walt Whitman
Song of Myself does the same work of praising the barely there world, but shouts its wonder outward where Rilke's elegies kneel and mourn first.
£1.99
About the book
An angel walks the parapet of a castle on the Adriatic, terrible in beauty, indifferent to the human voice that calls out to it. Rainer Maria Rilke began these ten poems in 1912 at Duino Castle on a cliff above Trieste, fell silent for a decade through the Great War and his own collapse, and finished them in a single rapt fortnight in a Swiss tower in 1922; the book was published the following year. The angels of the elegies are not consoling messengers but presences too vast to be borne, before whom every cry vanishes. Rilke proposes that the human task is to praise nonetheless: the jug, the gate, the column, the wing, the briefly-here. The elegies are a threnody that ends in praise.