Duino Elegies

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)

The Duino Elegies (German: Duineser Elegien) are a collection of ten elegies written by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Rilke, who is "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets," began writing the elegies in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (nee Princess Marie zu Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst) (1855-1934) at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. The poems were dedicated to the Princess upon their publication in 1923. During those years, the works languished incomplete as Rilke suffered from severe depression—some of which was caused by the events of World War I. He returned to the work with renewed inspiration—writing in a frantic pace he described as "a savage creative storm"—and completed the collection while staying at Muzot Castle in Veyras, in Switzerland's Rhone Valley.

The Duino Elegies are intensely religious, mystical poems that weigh beauty and suffering while employing the rich symbolism of angels and salvation but not in keeping with typical Christian intrepretations. Rilke begins the first elegy in an invocation of philsophical despair, asking: "Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?" (trans. "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?"), and later states that "every angel is terrifying."

Presentation

Duino Castle near Trieste, Italy, was where Rilke began writing the Duino Elegies in 1912

Muzot Castle in Veyras, Switzerland, was where Rilke completed writing the Duino Elegies in "a savage creative storm" in February 1922.

Rilke had been visiting Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis in the Duino castle near Trieste in January 1912 and, according to his own recounting, had taken a stroll near the castle, atop the steep cliffs that dropped down to the beach.

Rilke said later he had heard a voice calling to him as he walked near the cliffs, and he had used its words as the opening of the first Elegy: "Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?" (Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?).

A cycle of major poems had been in Rilke's mind already before this moment of inspiration, and within days he produced the first two elegies and some fragments which would find their way into the others, including the opening section of the tenth. After this, inspiration for the cycle stopped abruptly and could not be recaptured, although he continued with other poetic drafts.

The completion of the elegies was delayed by Rilke's battle with depression, and also by the First World War which shook the foundations of his beliefs and his way of life; the German-speaking aristocracy among which he had moved and his native country, the Austrian Empire, were among the prime casualties of the war. The cycle was completed only in February 1922, when Rilke was staying at the Muzot castle in Veyras, Rhone Valley, Switzerland. It was also during this time that Rilke wrote the Sonnets to Orpheus. Rilke described the sudden return of inspiration in a letter at this time as "a savage creative storm", and claimed that he had dropped meals because the poetic spirit took hold of him for many hours on end, but his host denied that he had ever appeared disorderly or untidy, or missed out on a meal, and the few surviving manuscript drafts do not look as if written in frantic haste.

External links

• The Duino Elegies in German
• The Duino Elegies in English. Translated by A.S. Kline
• The Duino Elegies in English. Translated by S.M. Cohn