Daniel O'Sullivan
Promptings from Rilke’s Duino Elegies
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926,) born in Prague and one of German literature's greatest lyric poets, continues to fascinate, as does the period in which he lived. The approaching storm of the First World War which would doom Old Europe and its cultural dominance bathes that time, La Belle Époque and its aftermath, in an apprehensive, elegiac light.
Rilke embodied and, in a sense, transcended German Romanticism with its cult of art and its priests of the aesthetic. His depth of insight led the later Existentialists to claim him as one of their own. He constantly travelled, from castle to castle, estate to estate, a guest of wealthy patrons, without a permanent residence-- only a rented room or a borrowed apartment. He had many friends, occasional intimacies, but no one to whom he could commit completely. Rilke and his wife, the sculptress Clara Westhoff, gradually separated not long after the birth of their daughter.
His Elegies, at the summit of the Romantic tradition, prophetically lament the desolation that its perspectives finally entailed, yet offer themselves as spiritual guides for affirming those very perspectives. Rilke believed the Elegies to be oracular. They were, he insists, dictated to him, presented as a whole during the days and nights of January 20th to 23rd 1912 at Duino Castle, on the Adriatic coast near Trieste, where he was spending a solitary winter. He copied down the first three, but then the inspiration left him. During WWI, invalided out of service in the Austrian Army, he did some work on the fourth elegy. The inspiration returned in the winter of 1922 at Muzot Tower in Switzerland and in the space of another few days days he "transcribed" the rest of the Elegies along with, amazingly, twenty nine of the fifty-five Sonnets to Orpheus.