Duino Elegies

The Duino Elegies, a cycle of ten poems by Bohemian-Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, are among the most celebrated works in German-language literature. Rilke began writing them in 1912 while staying as a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis at Duino Castle, on the Adriatic coast. The poems were dedicated to the Princess upon their publication in 1923. Over the following decade, the elegies remained unfinished for long periods, as Rilke struggled with severe depression, sometimes linked to World War I and his conscription into military service. Apart from brief bursts of work in 1913 and 1915, he did not return to the project until after the war. In February 1922, while living at Château de Muzot in Veyras, Switzerland, Rilke experienced what he called a "boundless storm, a hurricane of the spirit" and completed the collection in a frantic rush. Soon after their 1923 publication, the Duino Elegies were recognized as his most important achievement.

These poems are intensely religious and mystical, using the imagery of angels and salvation in ways that depart from traditional Christian understanding. The first elegy opens with a cry of philosophical despair: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?" Rilke also writes that "each single angel is terrifying." Though the term "elegy" typically suggests melancholy and lament, many passages in the cycle are marked by a positive, energetic tone. The elegies as a whole have been described as a transformation of Rilke's "ontological torment" and as an "impassioned monologue about coming to terms with human existence." They explore themes such as the limits and inadequacy of the human condition, fractured human consciousness, human loneliness, the perfection of angels, life and death, love and lovers, and the poet's role. Rilke's work, and the Duino Elegies in particular, influenced many twentieth-century poets and writers. In popular culture, his lines are frequently quoted on love or angels, and appear in television, film, music, New Age philosophy, theology, and self-help books.

The writing of the elegies began after Rilke completed his autobiographical novel *The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge* in 1910, a work that depicts a young poet terrified by modern urban chaos. Following a psychological crisis and severe depression, Rilke was invited to Duino Castle in late 1911 by Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis, whom he had met years earlier. While there, Rilke and the Princess collaborated on a translation of Dante's *La Vita Nuova*. After she left to join her husband, Rilke spent weeks alone. In January 1912, while writing *Das Marien-Leben*, he claimed to have heard a voice in the wind while walking along the cliffs near the castle, speaking the first line of the elegies: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?" He wrote it down and completed the draft of the "First Elegy" that night. Within days, he drafted the "Second Elegy" and composed fragments later used in other elegies, including the opening of the "Tenth Elegy." Over the next years, he worked sporadically: in Ronda, Spain, in 1913, he wrote part of the "Sixth Elegy"; later that year in Paris, he continued the "Sixth" and completed the "Third Elegy." During World War I, he wrote the "Fourth Elegy," finishing it the day before he was conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army in November 1915. After his discharge in 1916, he returned to Munich for the rest of the war but wrote little poetry.

Rilke did not focus on completing the elegies again until 1920. By then romantically involved with Baladine Klossowska, he traveled to Switzerland seeking a home near Geneva to immerse himself in French culture. They wanted to move into the Château de Muzot, a 13th-century manor house without gas or electricity near Veyras in the Rhone Valley, but had trouble with the lease. At Rilke's suggestion, Swiss merchant and arts patron Werner Reinhart leased the property on their behalf. In July 1921, Rilke and Klossowska moved in; Reinhart later bought the property and gave Rilke a lifetime tenancy. That summer, Rilke's daughter Ruth became engaged. In December, he wrote to Gertrud Ouckama Knoop, widow of his friend Gerhard and mother of the dancer Wera Ouckama Knoop, a former friend of Ruth's, to announce the engagement. Gertrud replied with an account of Wera's death at age 19, which moved Rilke to compose the *Sonnets to Orpheus* and complete the *Duino Elegies*. Rilke wrote that Wera's image dominates and moves the *Sonnets*, which frequently address her by name or allude to her as a dancer or the mythical Eurydice. He composed nearly all the poems of Part I of the *Sonnets* in a rush of inspiration between 2 and 5 February 1922, completing the elegies shortly thereafter.