Duino Elegies

Based on Wikipedia: Duino Elegies

A Voice in the Wind

In January 1912, a man walked alone along the cliffs of an ancient castle on the Adriatic Sea. The wind howled. And in that howl, Rainer Maria Rilke heard a voice speaking the words that would become one of the most haunting openings in modern poetry: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?"

He scribbled the line in his notebook immediately. By nightfall, he had drafted the entire first elegy.

What followed was not the triumphant outpouring of a masterpiece but rather a decade of creative paralysis, depression, and war. The Duino Elegies would not be finished until 1922, and their completion would come in a burst so violent that Rilke compared it to a hurricane tearing through his mind. The result was ten poems that transformed German literature and established Rilke as perhaps the most lyrically intense poet the language had ever produced.

The Castle and the Princess

The story begins with exhaustion. In 1910, Rilke had finished his only novel, a loosely autobiographical work called The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. The book told the story of a young poet overwhelmed by the chaos and fragmentation of modern urban life. It wasn't just fiction. Rilke himself was falling apart.

What followed was a severe psychological crisis. Depression consumed him.

Enter Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, an aristocrat Rilke had befriended a few years earlier. In late 1911, she invited him to stay at Duino Castle, her family's medieval fortress perched on the cliffs overlooking the Adriatic near Trieste. At the time, this region belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a vast patchwork of nationalities and languages that would soon tear itself apart in the First World War.

The castle itself was ancient and atmospheric, the kind of place where you might expect to hear voices in the wind. Rilke and the Princess worked together on translating Dante's La Vita Nuova—"The New Life"—a fitting project, given that Rilke was searching for a new direction in his own work. When Marie left to join her husband at another estate, Rilke stayed behind alone.

Alone with the wind. Alone with the cliffs. Alone with whatever was waiting to speak to him.

Angels That Terrify

The voice Rilke heard that January day gave him more than a first line. It gave him a central image that would dominate all ten elegies: the angel.

But these are not the angels of Christmas cards or Renaissance paintings. They are not comforters or messengers of hope. "Each single angel is terrifying," Rilke wrote. In German: Jeder Engel ist schrecklich.

Why terrifying? Rilke's angels represent a level of being so far beyond human comprehension that merely glimpsing them would overwhelm us. They embody transcendental beauty—beauty so pure and complete that it makes our fragmented human existence seem pitiful by comparison. We cannot reach them. We cannot communicate with them. They exist in a realm of perfection while we stumble through a world of contradictions and limitations.

This was not a Christian vision, though Rilke used Christian vocabulary. He explicitly rejected traditional religious interpretations of angels. Instead, he said he was influenced by the depiction of angels in Islam, where these beings serve as intermediaries between the divine and human realms, terrifying in their power and purity.

For Rilke, the angel became a symbol of everything humanity yearns for but cannot have: wholeness, permanence, perfect understanding. The tragedy at the heart of the elegies is that we are built to desire the infinite while being trapped in the finite.

The Ten-Year Silence

After those first explosive days at Duino, when Rilke drafted the first and second elegies and sketched fragments of others, something unexpected happened.

He stopped.

Oh, there were bursts of activity. In 1913, while staying in the Spanish town of Ronda—a dramatic place built on the edge of a deep gorge—he worked on what would become the sixth elegy. In Paris later that year, he finished the third elegy. But mostly, the elegies lay dormant.

Then came the war.

The First World War shattered Rilke's world in ways both practical and spiritual. In November 1915, the day before he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army, he completed the fourth elegy in what must have felt like a desperate race against time. The army wanted his body. He was determined to leave at least this much of his soul behind.

His military service was brief—he was discharged in 1916, probably because he was useless as a soldier—but the damage was done. Rilke retreated to Munich and wrote almost nothing for years. The war had confirmed his darkest fears about human nature. He would later lament that "the world has fallen into the hands of men."

The Hurricane Returns

By 1920, the war was over, but Rilke remained artistically paralyzed. He had fallen in love with Baladine Klossowska, a painter, and together they searched for a place to live in Switzerland. They found it in the Château de Muzot, a thirteenth-century manor house in the Rhône Valley near the town of Veyras.

The place had no gas. No electricity. It was medieval in the most literal sense.

They couldn't afford the lease. A wealthy Swiss merchant named Werner Reinhart, who made a habit of supporting artists and composers, stepped in. He leased the property on their behalf. Later, he would buy it outright and give it to Rilke for life.

For months, Rilke lived at Muzot without finishing the elegies. Then, in December 1921, something arrived in the mail that would unlock everything.

It was a letter from Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, the widow of an old friend. Rilke had written to tell her about his daughter Ruth's engagement. In response, Gertrud sent him an account of her own daughter's death. Wera Ouckama Knoop had been a dancer, once a friend of Ruth's, and she had died at the age of nineteen.

Something about this story of a young dancer's death broke open the dam.

Fourteen Days of Fury

What happened next remains one of the most remarkable creative episodes in literary history.

Between February 2nd and 5th, 1922, Rilke wrote nearly all of the poems that would become Part One of the Sonnets to Orpheus—a completely separate work inspired by Wera's image. Then, between February 7th and 15th, he finished the Duino Elegies, completing poems he had abandoned for nearly a decade. Then, from February 16th through 22nd, he wrote the remaining sonnets.

In three weeks, he produced two of the greatest poetic works of the twentieth century.

"That which weighed upon and tortured me is accomplished," he wrote to Klossowska during this period. "Never within my heart and mind have I borne such a hurricane. I am still trembling from it."

He went outside in the moonlight to caress the old stone walls of Muzot, as if thanking the building itself for sheltering him through the storm.

To his old friend Lou Andreas-Salomé—a brilliant intellectual who had also been close to Nietzsche and would later become a psychoanalyst—he wrote that everything in him had cracked and bent under the pressure. "All that was fiber, fabric in me, framework, cracked and bent."

What the Elegies Are About

Calling these poems "elegies" is slightly misleading. An elegy traditionally mourns a death or laments a loss. While melancholy certainly pervades Rilke's work, many passages pulse with surprising energy and even joy.

The ten elegies wrestle with enormous questions. What are the limitations of human consciousness? Why are we so lonely? What is the relationship between life and death, between loving and losing? What role does the poet play in making sense of existence?

At the heart of everything is a tension that cannot be resolved. Humans cling to the visible, the familiar, the concrete. But we sense—or at least Rilke sensed—that there is something beyond all this, an invisible realm of meaning and beauty. The angels represent that realm. And we cannot reach it.

Or can we?

The elegies are not simply despair. They document what the philosopher Martin Heidegger called "a long way leading to the poetry"—a journey of inquiry into what it means to be human in a world where, as Heidegger put it, "God is dead, but mortals are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality."

Beauty and Terror

One of Rilke's most famous passages comes early in the first elegy:

Beauty is nothing but the beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us.

This is Rilke's definition of beauty—not something pleasant or decorative, but something that approaches annihilation. We can barely stand it. It could destroy us if it chose to. That it doesn't is not kindness; it's indifference. Beauty disdains to destroy us because we are beneath its notice.

This is terrifying. It is also, Rilke suggests, the truth about our encounters with anything genuinely beautiful or transcendent. We get only momentary glimpses, and even those glimpses shake us to our core.

Lovers and Their Failures

Rilke used love and lovers throughout the elegies to explore humanity's potential and its failures. In the second elegy, he wrote:

Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utter strange things in the midnight air.

The suggestion is that lovers come closest to the transcendence embodied by angels—but only if angels could understand them, which they cannot. There is a gulf that even love cannot bridge.

Rilke distinguished between different types of love. He depicted what he saw as "sublime love"—associated with the feminine—and contrasted it with "blind animal passion"—associated with the masculine. He noticed that lovers often declined as their relationships progressed: "when they began to receive, they also began to lose the power of giving."

His own life reflected this ambivalence. During the years he wrote the elegies, Rilke often expressed longing for human companionship and affection, only to immediately question whether he could actually respond to such companionship if it were offered.

Yet love is not dismissed. In the face of death, Rilke argued, life and love are not cheap or meaningless. Great lovers recognize that life, love, and death are all part of a single unity. In a 1923 letter, he wrote that one of the experiences essential to completing the elegies was "the resolve that grew up more and more in my spirit to hold life open toward death."

The Acrobats

The fifth elegy takes an unexpected turn. Instead of angels and abstractions, Rilke meditated on a painting: Pablo Picasso's 1905 work Les Saltimbanques, or "The Family of Saltimbanques."

Saltimbanques were traveling acrobats and circus performers—entertainers who lived on the margins, always moving, never settling. Picasso painted six of them standing in a desert landscape. It's impossible to tell whether they're arriving or leaving, beginning or ending their performance.

For Rilke, these figures became symbols of human existence itself. We are all saltimbanques, practicing our professions from childhood to death, never understanding the unknown will that moves us. We stand on a "threadbare carpet"—thin material between us and the void—performing for an audience we cannot see.

There's something both pathetic and noble in this image. The acrobats are "even a shade more fleeting than the rest of us." Yet they persist. They perform.

Reception: Mystic or Monster?

When the Duino Elegies were published in 1923 by Insel-Verlag in Leipzig, critical response was divided.

Many prominent critics praised the work in the highest possible terms, comparing Rilke to Hölderlin—the great German Romantic poet who went mad—and to Goethe himself, Germany's literary god. The novelist Hermann Hesse, who would later win the Nobel Prize, wrote that in the Duino Elegies, "the miracle occurs": Rilke's fragile, anxious personality withdraws, and "through him resounds the music of the universe."

But younger poets and writers often found the elegies obscure and pretentious. The poet Albrecht Schaeffer, who belonged to the literary circle of Stefan George (a rival poet-prophet figure), dismissed them as "mystical blather" and "impotent gossip."

The philosopher Theodor Adorno raised a more troubling critique. He argued that Rilke's poetry dressed words in theological overtones that were betrayed by the secular, lonely speaker actually doing the talking. Religion as ornament, in other words—spiritual language without spiritual substance. Even more damningly, Adorno believed the poems reinforced German values of commitment and submission that contributed to "a cultural attraction towards the principles of Nazism."

This last charge is controversial and was hardly Rilke's intention—he died in 1926, years before the Nazis took power, and his sensibility was profoundly internationalist. But the critique reminds us that no work of art exists in isolation from its cultural context.

The Question of Mysticism

Are the Duino Elegies mystical poetry?

Critics have debated this for a century. In 1935, the scholar Hans-Rudolf Müller argued that Rilke could be understood as a genuine mystic and the poems treated as mystical literature. More recent critics have pushed back: perhaps the elegies are better understood as a study of mysticism—an exploration of what it means to seek transcendence—rather than mysticism itself.

The distinction matters. A mystic claims direct experience of the divine. Rilke's speaker in the elegies desperately wants such experience but seems unable to achieve it. The angels remain unreachable. The cries go unheard. If this is mysticism, it is the mysticism of failure—which may be the most honest kind.

A Hope Amid Destruction

The First World War devastated Rilke in ways that went beyond his brief and humiliating military service. He saw a civilization he loved—the cosmopolitan, multilingual culture of the old Habsburg Empire—destroy itself in industrialized slaughter.

Yet by the time he finished the elegies, Rilke had found something like hope. He believed that the task of intellectuals and poets in the post-war world was "to render the world right"—to prepare people for gentle transformations that might lead to a more serene future. The Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus were his contributions to that task.

Whether the transformations have been gentle, whether the future has been serene, is a question readers in every subsequent generation have had to answer for themselves.

Afterlife

The Duino Elegies entered English in 1931, when Edward and Vita Sackville-West published their translation through the Hogarth Press—Virginia Woolf's publishing house. Since then, at least twenty-four English translations have appeared, each attempting to capture Rilke's difficult, densely musical German.

Rilke's influence on twentieth-century poetry was enormous. His images and phrases filtered into popular culture, quoted whenever discussions turn to love or angels or the difficulty of human existence. He has been embraced by the New Age community—sometimes to the dismay of literary scholars—and his letters have been mined as wisdom literature, compared to the Sufi mystic Rumi and the Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran.

Television shows quote him. Movies reference him. Self-help books appropriate his words.

Whether Rilke would be pleased by all this attention is unclear. He was a man who needed solitude, who cracked under the pressure of his own creative storms, who spent a decade unable to finish what he had started so brilliantly at that castle on the cliff.

But he finished it. In February 1922, in a medieval manor house with no electricity, the hurricane finally passed through him and left these ten poems behind. They ask the oldest questions—Who are we? What are we doing here? Is anyone listening?—and offer no easy answers.

Only the wind. Only the angels. Only the terrifying beginning of beauty.