Duino Elegies

[Fidelia Boldul]

The Duino Elegies are intensely religious, mystical poems that employ the symbolism of angels and salvation, but in a manner atypical of Christian interpretations. Rilke begins the first elegy in an invocation of philosophical despair, asking: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?" (Wer, wenn ich schriee, hrte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?)[3] and later declares that "each single angel is terrifying" (Jeder Engel ist schrecklich).[4] While labelling of these poems as "elegies" would typically imply melancholy and lamentation, many passages are marked by their positive energy. Together, the Duino Elegies are described as a metamorphosis of Rilke's "ontological torment" and an "impassioned monologue about coming to terms with human existence", discussing themes of "the limitations and insufficiency of the human condition and fractured human consciousness ... man's loneliness, the perfection of the angels, life and death, love and lovers, and the task of the poet".[5]

Rilke's poetry, and the Duino Elegies in particular, influenced many of the poets and writers of the twentieth century. In popular culture, his work is frequently quoted on the subject of love or of angels and referenced in television programs, motion pictures, music and other artistic works, in New Age philosophy and theology, and in self-help books.

In 1910 Rilke completed the loosely autobiographical novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge) in which a young poet is terrified by the fragmentation and chaos of modern urban life. After he experienced a psychological crisis accompanied by severe depression.[6] Rilke was invited in late 1911 to Duino Castle by Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, whom he had met a few years earlier.[7]

In the following years, Rilke worked sporadically on the elegies. While staying at Ronda, Spain in 1913, he wrote part of what would become the "Sixth Elegy".[13] He moved to Paris later that year where he continued work on the "Sixth Elegy" and completed the "Third Elegy".[14] During World War I, Rilke wrote the "Fourth Elegy",[15] completing it the day before he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in November 1915.[16] After Rilke was discharged in 1916, he returned to Munich for the duration of the war,[17] but wrote very little poetry during that time.[18]

It wasn't until 1920 that Rilke began to focus on completing the Duino Elegies.[19] Rilke, who had become romantically involved with Baladine Klossowska, journeyed to Switzerland looking to find a place to live near Geneva, where he could immerse himself in French culture.[20] Rilke and Klossowska wanted to move into the Chteau de Muzot, a 13th-century manor house that lacked gas and electricity, near Veyras in the Rhone Valley, but they had trouble negotiating the lease. At Rilke's suggestion, Werner Reinhart, a Swiss merchant who used his wealth to support composers and writers, leased the property on their behalf. In July 1921, Rilke and Klossowska had moved in.[21] Later, Reinhart bought the property and turned it over to Rilke for life.[22]

Duino Elegies, which is 859 lines long,[b] was published by Insel-Verlag in Leipzig in 1923. Prominent critics praised the work and compared its merits to the works of Hlderlin and Goethe.[29] During the 1920s, many of the younger generation of poets and writers did not like Duino Elegies because of the poems' obscure symbols and philosophy. The poet Albrecht Schaeffer [de], who is associated with the literary circle of Stefan George, dismissed the poems as "mystical blather" and described their "secular theology" as "impotent gossip".[30] Novelist Hermann Hesse describes Rilke as evolving into his best poetry with the Duino Elegies, that "at each stage now and again the miracle occurs, his delicate, hesitant, anxiety-prone person withdraws, and through him resounds the music of the universe; like the basin of a fountain he becomes at once instrument and ear".[31] In 1935, critic Hans-Rudolf Mller argued that Rilke could be seen as a mystic and the poems could be treated as mystical literature, whereas more recent critics believe the poems should be seen as a study of mysticism itself.[32]

Theodor W. Adorno wrote "But the fact that the neoromantic lyric sometimes behaves like the jargon, or at least timidly readies the way for it, should not lead us to look for the evil of the poetry simply in its form. It is not simply grounded, as a much too innocent view might maintain, in the mixture of poetry and prose.... The evil, in the neoromantic lyric, consists in the fitting out of the words with a theological overtone, which is belied by the condition of the lonely and secular subject who is speaking there: religion as ornament."[33] Adorno further believed the poems reinforced the German value of commitment that supported a cultural attraction towards the principles of Nazism.[34]

Throughout the Duino Elegies, Rilke explored themes of "the limitations and insufficiency of the human condition and fractured human consciousness ... mankind's loneliness, the perfection of the angels, life and death, love and lovers, and the task of the poet".[5] Philosopher Martin Heidegger remarked that "the long way leading to the poetry is itself one that inquires poetically", and that Rilke "comes to realize the destitution of the time more clearly. The time remains destitute not only because God is dead, but because mortals are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality."[35] Rilke explores the nature of mankind's contact with beauty, and its transience, noting that humanity is forever only getting a brief, momentary glimpse of an inconceivable beauty and that it is terrifying. At the onset of the First Elegy, Rilke describes this frightened experience, defining beauty as

Rilke depicted this infinite, transcendental beauty with the symbol of angels. However, he did not use the traditional Christian interpretation of angels. He sought to utilize a symbol of the angel that was secular, divorced from religious doctrine and embodied a tremendous transcendental beauty. In this, however, Rilke commented that he was greatly influenced by the depiction of angels found in Islam.[37] For Rilke, the symbol of the angel represents a perfection that is "beyond human contradictions and limitations" in a "higher level of reality in the invisible". Where there is incongruity that adds to mankind's despair and anxiety is due to human nature keeping us clinging to the visible and the familiar. As mankind encounters the invisible and unknown higher levels represented by these angels, the experience of the invisible will be "terrifying" (in German, schrecklich).[38]

As mankind came in contact with the terrifying beauty represented by these angels, Rilke was concerned with the experience of existential angst in trying to come to terms with the coexistence of the spiritual and earthly. He portrayed human beings as alone in a universe where God is abstract and possibly non-existent, "where memory and patterns of intuition raise the sensitive consciousness to a realization of solitude".[39] Rilke depicted the alternative, a spiritually fulfilling possibility beyond human limitations, in the form of angels.[40] Beginning with the first line of the collection, Rilke's despairing speaker calls upon the angels to notice human suffering and to intervene.[41] There is a deeply felt despair and unresolvable tension in that no matter man's striving, the limitation of human and earthly existence renders humanity unable to reach out to the angels.[42] The narrative voice Rilke employed in the Duino Elegies strives "to achieve in human consciousness the angel's presumed plenitude of being" (i.e. being, or existence, in German: Dasein).[43]

Rilke used the images of love and of lovers as a way of showing mankind's potential and humanity's failures in achieving the transcendent understanding embodied by the angels. In the Second Elegy, Rilke wrote:

He depicted "the inadequacy of ordinary lovers", and contrasted a feminine form of "sublime love" and a masculine "blind animal passion".[45] At the time the first elegies were written, Rilke often "expressed a longing for human companionship and affection, and then, often immediately afterwards, asking whether he could really respond to such companionship if it were offered to him ..."[46] He noticed a "decline in the lives of lovers ... when they began to receive, they also began to lose the power of giving".[47] Later, during World War I, he would lament that "the world has fallen into the hands of men".[48] In the face of death, life and love are not cheap and meaningless, and Rilke asserted that great lovers are able to recognize all three (life, love, and death) as part of a unity.[49]

Two inmost experiences were decisive for their [i.e., The Sonnets to Orpheus and The Duino Elegies] production: The resolve that grew up more and more in my spirit to hold life open toward death, and on the other side, the spiritual need to situate the transformation of love in this wider whole differently than was possible in the narrower orbit of life (which simply shut out death as the other).[50]

The Fifth Elegy is largely inspired by Pablo Picasso's 1905 Rose Period painting Les Saltimbanques ("The Acrobats", also known as "The Family of Saltimbanques"), in which Picasso depicts six figures pictured "in the middle of a desert landscape and it is impossible to say whether they are arriving or departing, beginning or ending their performance".[51] Rilke depicted the six artists about to begin their performance, and that they were used as a symbol of "human activity ... always travelling and with no fixed abode, they are even a shade more fleeting than the rest of us, whose fleetingness was lamented". Further, Rilke in the poem described these figures as standing on a "threadbare carpet" to suggest "the ultimate loneliness and isolation of Man in this incomprehensible world, practicing their profession from childhood to death as playthings of an unknown will ... before their 'pure too-little' had passed into 'empty too-much'".[52]

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