Duino Elegies

 

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Preface

Die Erste Elegie
/
The First Elegy

Die Zweite Elegie
/
The Second Elegy

Die Dritte Elegie
/
The Third Elegy

Die Vierte Elegie
/
The Fourth Elegy

Die Fünfte Elegie
/
The Fifth Elegy

Die Sechste Elegie
/
The Sixth Elegy

Die Siebente Elegie
/
The Seventh Elegy

Die Achte Elegie
/
The Eighth Elegy

Die Neunte Elegie
/
The Ninth Elegy

Die Zehnte Elegie
/
The Tenth Elegy

Also by Edward Snow

About the Authors

Copyright

PREFACE

The
Duino Elegies
take their name from Castle Duino, an ancient fortress-like structure set high atop cliffs overlooking the Adriatic near Trieste. It was once a Roman watchtower, and Dante supposedly wrote parts of
The Divine Comedy
there. During the winter of 1911–12, Rainer Maria Rilke, feeling empty and despondent since completing
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
in 1910, was residing there alone when the inspiration for the elegies came to him. Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe (1855–1934), the friend and patron who made the castle available to him, relates in her memoir the story of their genesis:

Rilke later told me how these elegies arose. He suspected nothing of what was taking hold inside him; though he may have hinted of it in a letter he wrote: “The nightingale is approaching—” Had he perhaps felt what was on its way? But things seemed again to fall silent. A great sadness came over him; he began to think that this winter too would be fruitless.

Then, one morning, he received a troublesome business letter. He wanted to be done with it quickly, and had to concern himself with sums and other such tedious matters. Outside, a violent north wind was blowing, but the sun shone and the blue water had a silvery gleam. Rilke climbed down to the bastions which, jutting to the east and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by a narrow path along the cliffs. These cliffs fall steeply, for about two hundred feet, into the sea. Rilke paced back and forth, deep in thought, since the reply to the letter so concerned him. Then, all at once, in the midst of his brooding, he halted suddenly, for it seemed to him that in the raging of the storm a voice had called to him: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?” He stood still, listening. “What is that?” he half whispered. “What is it, what is coming?”

He took out his notebook, which he always carried with him, and wrote down these words, together with a few lines that formed themselves without his intervention. Who had come? And then he knew the answer: the god …

Very calmly he climbed back up to his room, set his notebook aside, and replied to the difficult letter.

By that evening the entire elegy had been written down.
1

Rilke was elated; he copied the poem into a green leather-bound notebook that he and the princess had bought together in Weimar and sent it to her in Vienna on January 21 as “the first Duino work (and the first for a long time!).” Within days he had composed the effortless-seeming “Second Elegy” as well, along with fragments of the third, sixth, and ninth, and the opening fifteen lines of the tenth. His task as a poet had been announced to him.

But nothing further would materialize at Duino. Rilke left the castle in May with no more written, and recommenced the wanderings that had preceded his stay there. Though he continued to write brilliant poems in his notebooks—150 in 1913 and 1914, several of them masterpieces—the
Elegies
and his failure to sustain them were what obsessed him now.
2
(“Yes, the two elegies exist,” he wrote to his ex-lover and lifelong confidant Lou Andreas-Salomé from Spain in January 1913, “but I can tell you when we meet how small and sharply riven a fragment they form of what was then delivered into my power.”) During the next few years he would make sporadic progress: he forced the uneven “Third Elegy” to completion in October 1913 in Paris, and composed more lines of the sixth; in November 1915 he wrote the terse, elliptical “Fourth Elegy” in just two days in Munich. But that would be all for more than six years, until, in February 1922, in another castle-solitude in Switzerland, the floodgates broke.

Rilke had been living alone since July 1921 in the Château de Muzot, a small medieval tower in the Rhône valley near the village of Sierre, Switzerland, where he had deliberately isolated himself in hope of recapturing the inspiration of the elegies. (“I am now taking root and spinning a web around myself inside a primeval tower … in the midst of this incomparably grand, magnificent landscape,” he wrote to Francisca Stoecklin on November 16.) There, during three weeks in February, he experienced a creative storm so extraordinary that his later mythologizing of the resulting work as “given” to him, a “dictation” for which he served as medium or scribe, is understandable. It began on February 2, when he unexpectedly began writing sonnets. After three days of uninterrupted work, he had produced twenty-five of the twenty-six poems that would form the first part of the
Sonnets to Orpheus.
On the morning of February 7, “The Seventh Elegy” came (all but the final lines, which he would add on February 26). That same day he began “The Eighth Elegy,” the masterwork of the sequence, and finished it the following afternoon. On February 9, after completing “The Sixth Elegy,” he composed the difficult ninth and all but the first four lines of “Antistrophes,” a poem that would temporarily serve as the fifth. That evening he wrote excitedly to his publisher, Anton Kippenberg, that the
Elegies
were done (“My dear friend, I am over the mountain! The
Elegies
are here!… I went outside into the cold moonlight and stroked little Muzot like a big animal, its old walls which granted this to me … And my dear friend:
this:
that you have made this possible for me, have been so patient with me:
ten
years! Thanks!… And that you always believed in me—
thanks!
”).

The next day was uneventful. Then, on February 11, Rilke returned to his draft of “The Tenth Elegy.” He kept the first fifteen lines, which had existed since Duino, and composed a completely new version of the rest that same day (later, when asked, he would name the tenth as his favorite). He wrote at once to Princess Marie, who had remained for him, in an almost courtly sense, the patron of the
Elegies:

At last,

          Princess,

At last, the blessed,
so
blessed day, when in this letter the conclusion—so far as I see—of the

Elegies

I can announce to you:

TEN!

From the last, great one (with the opening begun back in Duino: “Someday, at the end of the nightmare of knowing, may I emerge singing praise and jubilation to assenting angels…”), from this last one, which even then was intended to come last,—from this—my hand is still trembling! Just now, Saturday the eleventh, at six in the evening, it is finished!—

Everything in only a few days, it was an indescribable storm, a hurricane in my spirit (like that time in Duino), all the sinews and tissues in me groaned,—there was no thinking about food, God knows who fed me.

But now it
is.
Is. Is.

Amen.

So this is what I've survived for, through everything, on and on. Through Everything. All for this.
Only
this.

One of them I have dedicated to Kassner. But the whole is
yours,
Princess, how could it not be! Will be called:

The Duino Elegies

In the book there will be no dedication (for I can't give you what has been yours from the beginning) but instead:

From the property of …

That same evening Rilke wrote similar letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé and two other close friends—as if the accomplishing of the elegies, which required total solitude, was nonetheless a drama in which a whole circle of acquaintances had to be absorbed. Then, on February 14, in what Rilke described to Lou as a “radiant afterstorm,” a final elegy came, the fifth, or “Saltimbanques,” which he placed at the center of the cycle, discarding “Antistrophes,” a poem that now felt to him inappropriate there.
3
With the
Elegies
complete (save for a handful of lines), there was a last surprise: the sonnets returned almost at once, and Rilke found himself writing nonstop again. Between February 15 and 23 he composed another cycle of twenty-nine fantastically experimental poems that would form the second part of the
Sonnets to Orpheus.

After the second group of sonnets, the tempest at Muzot subsided, and Rilke's elation reached again toward friends. He copied out the last six elegies and sent them to Kippenberg on February 23, “for publication when he saw fit”; on the same day he sent the sonnets to Kippenberg's wife, Katharina (with whom he enjoyed a years-long friendship and correspondence), along with a separate letter asking her to judge if they were suitable for publication. (Both volumes were published sumptuously in 1923.) There was of course to be a copy for the Princess, but Rilke waited until she could visit him at Muzot, so that he could present the poems to her in person and read them to her aloud. That “great day” occurred on June 7. Princess Marie would remember it vividly:

Secretive, tiny, low rooms with old furniture—flowers, many flowers everywhere, among them the five-petaled, flame-colored rose … We went up to the study—a room filled with books, filled with devotion. Adjacent to it the narrow bedroom and the little chapel … Everything seems as if created for the poet. And finally, standing at his desk as he always does, he began to read … As he read—wonderfully, as only he can read—I felt my heart beating more and more strongly, felt the tears running down my cheeks. There are no words for this experience. The next day—in the charming hotel room in Sierre—it was the sonnets' turn. Fifty-seven, and not one too many. Every word a jewel. Some of them make one's heart stand still.
4

In July the Kippenbergs visited and again Rilke read—the
Elegies
one evening for the two of them, the sonnets the next morning for Katharina alone. Plans were discussed for the publication not only of the
Elegies
and the sonnets but of a five-volume edition of his complete works—so convinced was Rilke that all he had been given to say had been said.

In truth he would continue to write poems prolifically at Muzot—there are some thirty pieces in the notebooks from the latter months of 1923, and over a hundred poems in the notebooks of 1924, many of them among his finest. But Rilke never allowed any of this unpublished work to infiltrate his life's story as poet, which
had
to climax with the
Elegies.
(Even the sonnets he would think of as a “bonus” or “reward” that came with the
Elegies'
completion.) So many ethical evasions, disappointments, and things undone he had rationalized in terms of the “waiting” required of him by the task of the
Elegies,
that it was only by rehearsing the drama of their composition that he could feel himself justified and redeemed—even, albeit in a wishful sense, exemplary: