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Rainer Maria Rilke ist der Inbegriff des Dichters in der Moderne. Sein gesamtes Schaffen war geprägt von dem Ziel, die großen Weiten der inneren Welt, der Gefühle wie der philosophischen Reflexion in zeitlos gültige Verse zu fassen. Die Rilke-Verehrung ist weltweit bis heute ungebrochen. Dieser Band umfasst den gesamten Kosmos Rilkes: Sein lyrisches Werk einschließlich aller wichtigen Zyklen wie dem Stunden-Buch und den Duineser Elegien, die Briefe an einen jungen Dichter und Rilkes einzigen Roman, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge.
1040 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 2012
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September 27, 2026
The literary trajectory of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) remains one of the most compelling narratives in modernist poetry, defined by a lifelong, radical devotion to aesthetic transformation. A perpetual nomad marked by childhood trauma and isolating relationships, Rilke successfully translated his biography into a rigorous, stylistic evolution. His early career, rooted in neo-romantic impressionism, prioritized musicality and subjective emotion. However, a pivotal period in Paris as Auguste Rodin's secretary revolutionized his craft, shifting his style toward the objective, meticulously sculpted "Thing-poem" (Dinggedichte). In his final years, this mastery materialized into a complex, philosophical hermeticism that dismantled traditional syntax to explore the boundaries of existence. By examining the direct correlation between Rilke’s existential isolation and his linguistic developments, this analysis will demonstrate how his restless life served as the essential catalyst for pioneering a deeply spiritual, structurally innovative poetic language that reshaped twentieth-century modernism.
Rilke’s work was always deliberately designed as to mirror the experience of a human life, and, as it might feel usual, considering Rilke was a solitary poet, the experience he portrays is the one of a searching artist- searching for beauty and love, deep inside his own soul.
The Book of Hours
“Hey, neighbor God, when I sometimes
disturb you in the long night with persistent knocking—
it is because I rarely hear you breathe
and know: You are alone in the hall.
And if you need something, there is no one there
to offer your fingers a drink:
I am always listening. Give a little sign.
I am very near.
Only a thin wall lies between us,
by chance; for it could be:
a call from your mouth or mine—
and it would collapse
without any noise or sound,
built as it is from your images.”
The Book of Hours is one of Rilke’s earlier poetic works, written in three parts between 1899 and 1903, when Rilke evidently sought to transform his spiritual and religious anxieties and uncertainties into a magnificent work of art. All three parts take the form of dialogues between an I and a You, God. With every thought, every word that comes before its eyes, the I turns toward this questionable figure, who seems both scarcely nameable and silent.
The work is a lament addressed to a higher existence, which itself takes on a complex form. This state of confinement results in a search—a search that begins with the very first word of The Book of Hours, yet has no end.
The work is strongly shaped by two literary movements—by the poetry of aesthetic modernism, in which the representation of consciousness plays a fundamental role, and by Symbolism, which Rilke unites with the structure of the verses and metaphysical vocabulary, transforming them into a musical work.
Here, too, the most important question arises: what exactly is the God to whom we turn—the God from whom we expect answers to the events of the universe, yet receive none?
Here, one could follow a natural path through Rilke’s life and, in particular, his understanding of nature. In Letters to a Young Poet, one of the central ideas is the turning inward: the fact that art can and must be nothing other than a reflection of the soul, and that one should likewise turn outward. Now, one might ask: what exactly does “outward” mean? Rilke himself glorified nature and, it seems to me, it is precisely nature that constitutes this point, this silent figure of God in The Book of Hours—and, to be more precise, I would argue that it is infinity: nature, the soul, and the coexistence of the I and the universe, of I and You, whereby fate has left the You without a soul—the You, therefore, remains silent and has been led into silence.
This metaphysical idea extends beyond Rilke’s work, yet in The Book of Hours we encounter its most direct expression—all sorrows and questions are spoken aloud into the infinite emptiness. God functions here like Spinoza’s God, whom he understood as the union of nature and soul, the infinite wealth of certainty.
This closeness to this existence becomes all the more frightening and sad the more we realize that this simple wall between the I and God can never be overcome, and that, in silence, it provides no answers to our questions.
Letter to a young woman
Rilke’s poetic sensibility is one that can scarcely be compared to anyone else’s, for although the flow of his imagery, his sensitive associations, and his perceptions reaches the highest level of both lyrical and prose art, it possesses a careful individuality of its own. This is why even his personal letters are marked by an indescribable beauty, capable of emotionally reflecting the longing that likewise plays a fundamental role in Rilke’s poetry. Through them, we can feel the love, feel the absence of the young woman, or even internalize the feeling of being capable of loving someone—something I myself have not yet experienced.
The greater, then, seems to be our admiration for such art, because it gives expression precisely to our hope and longing for something that never came—something Rilke brought to paper with such brilliance. Just as Hölderlin wrote of the longing for lost beauty, just as Proust looked back upon such a youthful past with newly altered yet already antiquated eyes and saw lost paradises, it is art that can lend a little color to these unpainted states of our existence.
Letters to a young poet
Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is profound, yet remarkably accessible at the same time. Although the letters contain complex reflections on art, solitude, love, sexuality, religion, and the nature of existence, they never feel like an abstract philosophical treatise. Instead, Rilke writes with an extraordinary intimacy, addressing the young poet not as a teacher speaking from above, but almost as one artist speaking quietly to another. This intimacy is perhaps one of the reasons why the book has remained so compelling to generations of young artists. Its language is deeply poetic, filled with imagery and metaphor, yet its central concerns are remarkably human: How does one know whether one is truly meant to be an artist? How should one live with uncertainty? What does it mean to create when one is still unsure of oneself?
One of Rilke’s most important ideas is that the young artist must learn to turn inward rather than constantly searching for external confirmation. Instead of asking whether his poems are good, whether others will appreciate them, or whether he will succeed as a poet, Rilke encourages the young writer to ask whether writing is something he cannot live without. Art, in this sense, is not primarily a profession or a means of recognition, but a necessity of existence. The artist must discover within himself the reasons for creating and must be willing to continue even when there is no audience, no certainty, and no immediate reward. This makes the book particularly powerful for anyone at the beginning of an artistic life, because Rilke does not offer the young poet an easy formula for success. He offers something more difficult: the possibility of learning how to live with oneself.
Closely connected to this is Rilke’s insistence on solitude. For him, solitude is not simply loneliness or isolation, but a necessary condition for artistic and personal development. The young artist must become capable of being alone with his thoughts, fears, desires, and uncertainties without immediately trying to escape them. Rilke suggests that many of the questions that torment us cannot be solved through immediate answers. Instead, we must learn to live with them. His famous idea that one should “live the questions” captures this attitude particularly well: uncertainty is not necessarily a failure of understanding, but may itself be part of the process through which understanding eventually emerges. Rather than demanding certainty from life, the artist must develop the patience to allow meaning to reveal itself gradually.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is essentially a fragmented notebook filtered through the consciousness of one of the greatest poets of the German language. Written in a series of loosely connected observations, memories, impressions, and reflections, the novel does not follow the conventional structure of a narrative. Instead, Rilke allows consciousness itself to become the organizing principle. Looking out from the window of his Paris apartment, Malte observes the city around him—the people, the streets, the poverty, the darkness—and gradually begins to recognize within these external impressions something deeply connected to his own interior existence. Paris becomes not merely a setting, but a landscape of consciousness, where every encounter seems to awaken another memory, fear, or fragment of thought.
At the center of Malte’s consciousness is the awareness of death. Death is not presented as a distant event that belongs only to the end of life; it is something that quietly accompanies existence from the beginning. Malte remembers the deaths of people he has known, his family, his childhood, his loves, and the moments of fear and tenderness that surround these memories. The past continually returns to him, but it does not return peacefully. Memory becomes almost indistinguishable from haunting. The dead remain present within the living, and recollection becomes a confrontation with everything that cannot be recovered.
There is something particularly striking about the way Rilke transforms these experiences into prose. The language is poetic, lush, intensely visual, and meditative, often moving away from conventional storytelling and toward something closer to lyric poetry. Images appear suddenly and linger in the mind, while ordinary objects acquire an almost metaphysical significance. At times, this reminded me of Marcel Proust, whom Rilke admired immensely: both writers possess an extraordinary sensitivity to memory and the strange relationship between the external world and the inner life. Yet Rilke’s treatment of memory feels darker and more haunted, as though beneath every recollection there exists an awareness of its inevitable disappearance.
Ultimately, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a work of immense beauty, but it is a beauty inseparable from unfulfilled longing and the persistent presence of death. Death lingers behind every human soul quietly, almost invisibly, until it eventually reveals itself. Rilke’s achievement is to make that invisible presence perceptible—to show how mortality inhabits memory, love, solitude, and even the smallest perceptions of everyday life. The result is a novel that feels less like a story than an extended meditation on what it means to exist while knowing that everything we love is, in some sense, already passing away.
Duino Elegies
Between 1912 and 1922 Rilke spent ten years in the Duino castle writing his late work- by many considered his definite masterpiece- The Duino Elegies.
Rilke’s Elegies are melodic and musically compelling, through which we can sense the profound loneliness and alienation of the speaker.
“Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen?”
“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ orders?”
(The First Elegy, the first sentence)
These are the first words of Die Erste Elegie. Immediately what we feel, is aloneness. I wonder how many times I have walked alone, hoping to feel the existence of another soul. It happens often—sometimes I feel it happens too often—walking near the lake of my childhood home, wandering through the woods, whether through the white forest covered in the sediments of winter snow or beneath the shining green leaves that reflect their light into my eyes: eyes that long for a girl who is not there. No one is there, and if I screamed, if I cried out, no one would hear me among the angels’ orders.
„und gesetzt selbst, es nähme
einer mich plötzlich ans Herz, ich verginge von seinem stärkeren Dasein.“
„and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence.“
(The First Elegy, the second sentence)
This is the first elegy‘s second sentence. Rilke meticulously and carefully takes us through the idea of what this solitude is and how the feeling of an angel‘s love gets into the deepest depths of his soul, thus making him fade. Love is exactly that- a weakening in the spirit of the I. And the angels are the ones, who break our heart in the attempt of pulling it together. I, myself, have never felt a lover‘s pressing on my heart, but often does this idea cross my imagination, how I either hold someone’s hand or press my head against their heart- I, then, feel fading, Ich vergehe, I vanish from my own soul to fall into the orders of angelic love. I connect with a love for a brief glimpse of inexperienced memory, this dream of broken loneliness.
And here again, in the Duino Elegies, Rilke provides us spiritual longing, and, yet again, as in the Book of Hours, we can sense the metaphysical ambiguity of the „Angel“.
The angelic symbolism that Rilke constructs expresses something almost beyond human comprehension. And still there is no doubt, that an angel can be something to experience.
Even in my everyday life, perhaps because of my lack of faith, inexperience regarding love or just the doubts of my thoughts, the idea of what my life is for often crosses my mind, almost ineluctably and involuntarily. Then I often fall into this stream of wondering, like Proust fell into memory, and do the exact thing as him- experience the given moment of imagination before my eyes with all my senses, as if all my hearing, thinking and feeling melted into one. This stream of wonder gives me nothing, but questions, out of which, after pressing my head against someone’s heart, drifting my face to the lips of a beloved, and getting to know how soft or cold the hand of the other is, hope arises.
Rilke’s angels are, at least so it seems to me, the representing of love. Love, which is the substance of the spirit- which makes us experience joy, which lets us feel everything we want to feel and thus make life worth living. And at the same time every angel is terrible, shining with Terror, for all love arises from absence. And the greater the suffering one had from it, the Absence of love, the greater we feel the connection to it.
There we see one of Rilke‘s most poetic concepts, which also is one of the most important notions in the poetry of the romantic era- that to suffer, is to learn how to live. In Rilke, we can sense that suffering gives us to path to what we need, in order to get out of it- through the absence of love, through loneliness and having no angels of beauty around somebody, we must learn how to crawl out of the darkness by any means possible, so the absence of love doesn’t take us to the heights of despair, so we live out of beauty around us, and not die in hope of some day maybe getting close to it.
„Und wir, die an steigendes Glück,
denken, empfänden die Rührung,
die uns beinah bestürzt,
wenn ein Glückliches fällt.“
„And we, who have always thought
of happiness climbing, would feel
the emotion that almost startles
when happiness falls.“
(The Tenth Elegy, the last four verses
of the Duino Elegies)
Within the gorgeousness of Rilke’s verses, there are very few poets who approach his melody, vocabulary, and elegance. The Duino Elegies remain both a work of experimental art and an epic poem. Perhaps the most beautiful exploration of the human experience in poetry. It is, simultaneously, a work which truly leaves me hope, hope to find the beauty, hidden beneath the shadows of loneliness.
Sonnets to Orpheus
The Sonnets to Orpheus is a cycle of 55 sonnets written by Rainer Maria Rilke in 1922. It is widely considered one of the masterpieces of 20th-century modernist poetry, written during a legendary burst of creative inspiration alongside the completion of his Duino Elegies at Castle Muzot in Switzerland.
The Sonnets to Orpheus are heavily inspired by the Ovidian myth of Orpheus. The mythical Greek musician Orpheus represents the ultimate poet. Because he descended into the underworld and returned, he bridges the gap between life and death. Rilke presents him as a deity of praise and song, famously stating in the third sonnet: "Song is existence" ("Gesang ist Dasein").
Rhythmically the sonnet utilises rather unusual lines, which make the work, despite maintaining the strict structure of the sonnet, an experimental experience that always brings immense complexity with itself.
In the sonnets, we see Rilke stumbling upon all of his artistic ideas- the questions of time, death, love are given to us with poetic powder and lyrical beauty- and furthermore, what Rilke emphasises in this late work is the idea of transformation, and more precisely, transformation through art. Orpheus, as already described, is the artist, who through the beauty of his can transform the even the gods, yet he cannot save his Eurydice. His pains and sorrows make his love fade and his loneliness shine. This is also what Ovid created with his Metamorphoses- the humanistic change of consciousness.
Rilke, thus, ultimately rejects despair, urging readers to praise the world despite its technological alienation and inherent suffering. By bending traditional sonnet structures with radical rhythms and deeply compressed metaphors, Rilke created a timeless, philosophical masterpiece that demands a total, courageous embrace of life's constant transformation.
It is of no doubt that art is something which provides us a life beyond the boundaries of our imagination- and great art, as it is the case with Rainer Maria Rilke, may leave us transformed and understood. It may, as it was in my case, leave us feeling more, experiencing more and thus, through this experience of life, give a shimmer of hope- that life is time of experienced beauty, instead of dying while awaiting it.
I certainly hope it’s the first one, although my whole life until now, feels rather like an endless wait. However, I do hope. It has not left me yet.
Rilke’s work was always deliberately designed as to mirror the experience of a human life, and, as it might feel usual, considering Rilke was a solitary poet, the experience he portrays is the one of a searching artist- searching for beauty and love, deep inside his own soul.
The Book of Hours
“Hey, neighbor God, when I sometimes
disturb you in the long night with persistent knocking—
it is because I rarely hear you breathe
and know: You are alone in the hall.
And if you need something, there is no one there
to offer your fingers a drink:
I am always listening. Give a little sign.
I am very near.
Only a thin wall lies between us,
by chance; for it could be:
a call from your mouth or mine—
and it would collapse
without any noise or sound,
built as it is from your images.”
The Book of Hours is one of Rilke’s earlier poetic works, written in three parts between 1899 and 1903, when Rilke evidently sought to transform his spiritual and religious anxieties and uncertainties into a magnificent work of art. All three parts take the form of dialogues between an I and a You, God. With every thought, every word that comes before its eyes, the I turns toward this questionable figure, who seems both scarcely nameable and silent.
The work is a lament addressed to a higher existence, which itself takes on a complex form. This state of confinement results in a search—a search that begins with the very first word of The Book of Hours, yet has no end.
The work is strongly shaped by two literary movements—by the poetry of aesthetic modernism, in which the representation of consciousness plays a fundamental role, and by Symbolism, which Rilke unites with the structure of the verses and metaphysical vocabulary, transforming them into a musical work.
Here, too, the most important question arises: what exactly is the God to whom we turn—the God from whom we expect answers to the events of the universe, yet receive none?
Here, one could follow a natural path through Rilke’s life and, in particular, his understanding of nature. In Letters to a Young Poet, one of the central ideas is the turning inward: the fact that art can and must be nothing other than a reflection of the soul, and that one should likewise turn outward. Now, one might ask: what exactly does “outward” mean? Rilke himself glorified nature and, it seems to me, it is precisely nature that constitutes this point, this silent figure of God in The Book of Hours—and, to be more precise, I would argue that it is infinity: nature, the soul, and the coexistence of the I and the universe, of I and You, whereby fate has left the You without a soul—the You, therefore, remains silent and has been led into silence.
This metaphysical idea extends beyond Rilke’s work, yet in The Book of Hours we encounter its most direct expression—all sorrows and questions are spoken aloud into the infinite emptiness. God functions here like Spinoza’s God, whom he understood as the union of nature and soul, the infinite wealth of certainty.
This closeness to this existence becomes all the more frightening and sad the more we realize that this simple wall between the I and God can never be overcome, and that, in silence, it provides no answers to our questions.
Letter to a young woman
Rilke’s poetic sensibility is one that can scarcely be compared to anyone else’s, for although the flow of his imagery, his sensitive associations, and his perceptions reaches the highest level of both lyrical and prose art, it possesses a careful individuality of its own. This is why even his personal letters are marked by an indescribable beauty, capable of emotionally reflecting the longing that likewise plays a fundamental role in Rilke’s poetry. Through them, we can feel the love, feel the absence of the young woman, or even internalize the feeling of being capable of loving someone—something I myself have not yet experienced.
The greater, then, seems to be our admiration for such art, because it gives expression precisely to our hope and longing for something that never came—something Rilke brought to paper with such brilliance. Just as Hölderlin wrote of the longing for lost beauty, just as Proust looked back upon such a youthful past with newly altered yet already antiquated eyes and saw lost paradises, it is art that can lend a little color to these unpainted states of our existence.
Letters to a young poet
Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet is profound, yet remarkably accessible at the same time. Although the letters contain complex reflections on art, solitude, love, sexuality, religion, and the nature of existence, they never feel like an abstract philosophical treatise. Instead, Rilke writes with an extraordinary intimacy, addressing the young poet not as a teacher speaking from above, but almost as one artist speaking quietly to another. This intimacy is perhaps one of the reasons why the book has remained so compelling to generations of young artists. Its language is deeply poetic, filled with imagery and metaphor, yet its central concerns are remarkably human: How does one know whether one is truly meant to be an artist? How should one live with uncertainty? What does it mean to create when one is still unsure of oneself?
One of Rilke’s most important ideas is that the young artist must learn to turn inward rather than constantly searching for external confirmation. Instead of asking whether his poems are good, whether others will appreciate them, or whether he will succeed as a poet, Rilke encourages the young writer to ask whether writing is something he cannot live without. Art, in this sense, is not primarily a profession or a means of recognition, but a necessity of existence. The artist must discover within himself the reasons for creating and must be willing to continue even when there is no audience, no certainty, and no immediate reward. This makes the book particularly powerful for anyone at the beginning of an artistic life, because Rilke does not offer the young poet an easy formula for success. He offers something more difficult: the possibility of learning how to live with oneself.
Closely connected to this is Rilke’s insistence on solitude. For him, solitude is not simply loneliness or isolation, but a necessary condition for artistic and personal development. The young artist must become capable of being alone with his thoughts, fears, desires, and uncertainties without immediately trying to escape them. Rilke suggests that many of the questions that torment us cannot be solved through immediate answers. Instead, we must learn to live with them. His famous idea that one should “live the questions” captures this attitude particularly well: uncertainty is not necessarily a failure of understanding, but may itself be part of the process through which understanding eventually emerges. Rather than demanding certainty from life, the artist must develop the patience to allow meaning to reveal itself gradually.
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is essentially a fragmented notebook filtered through the consciousness of one of the greatest poets of the German language. Written in a series of loosely connected observations, memories, impressions, and reflections, the novel does not follow the conventional structure of a narrative. Instead, Rilke allows consciousness itself to become the organizing principle. Looking out from the window of his Paris apartment, Malte observes the city around him—the people, the streets, the poverty, the darkness—and gradually begins to recognize within these external impressions something deeply connected to his own interior existence. Paris becomes not merely a setting, but a landscape of consciousness, where every encounter seems to awaken another memory, fear, or fragment of thought.
At the center of Malte’s consciousness is the awareness of death. Death is not presented as a distant event that belongs only to the end of life; it is something that quietly accompanies existence from the beginning. Malte remembers the deaths of people he has known, his family, his childhood, his loves, and the moments of fear and tenderness that surround these memories. The past continually returns to him, but it does not return peacefully. Memory becomes almost indistinguishable from haunting. The dead remain present within the living, and recollection becomes a confrontation with everything that cannot be recovered.
There is something particularly striking about the way Rilke transforms these experiences into prose. The language is poetic, lush, intensely visual, and meditative, often moving away from conventional storytelling and toward something closer to lyric poetry. Images appear suddenly and linger in the mind, while ordinary objects acquire an almost metaphysical significance. At times, this reminded me of Marcel Proust, whom Rilke admired immensely: both writers possess an extraordinary sensitivity to memory and the strange relationship between the external world and the inner life. Yet Rilke’s treatment of memory feels darker and more haunted, as though beneath every recollection there exists an awareness of its inevitable disappearance.
Ultimately, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge is a work of immense beauty, but it is a beauty inseparable from unfulfilled longing and the persistent presence of death. Death lingers behind every human soul quietly, almost invisibly, until it eventually reveals itself. Rilke’s achievement is to make that invisible presence perceptible—to show how mortality inhabits memory, love, solitude, and even the smallest perceptions of everyday life. The result is a novel that feels less like a story than an extended meditation on what it means to exist while knowing that everything we love is, in some sense, already passing away.
Duino Elegies
Between 1912 and 1922 Rilke spent ten years in the Duino castle writing his late work- by many considered his definite masterpiece- The Duino Elegies.
Rilke’s Elegies are melodic and musically compelling, through which we can sense the profound loneliness and alienation of the speaker.
“Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel
Ordnungen?”
“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ orders?”
(The First Elegy, the first sentence)
These are the first words of Die Erste Elegie. Immediately what we feel, is aloneness. I wonder how many times I have walked alone, hoping to feel the existence of another soul. It happens often—sometimes I feel it happens too often—walking near the lake of my childhood home, wandering through the woods, whether through the white forest covered in the sediments of winter snow or beneath the shining green leaves that reflect their light into my eyes: eyes that long for a girl who is not there. No one is there, and if I screamed, if I cried out, no one would hear me among the angels’ orders.
„und gesetzt selbst, es nähme
einer mich plötzlich ans Herz, ich verginge von seinem stärkeren Dasein.“
„and even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence.“
(The First Elegy, the second sentence)
This is the first elegy‘s second sentence. Rilke meticulously and carefully takes us through the idea of what this solitude is and how the feeling of an angel‘s love gets into the deepest depths of his soul, thus making him fade. Love is exactly that- a weakening in the spirit of the I. And the angels are the ones, who break our heart in the attempt of pulling it together. I, myself, have never felt a lover‘s pressing on my heart, but often does this idea cross my imagination, how I either hold someone’s hand or press my head against their heart- I, then, feel fading, Ich vergehe, I vanish from my own soul to fall into the orders of angelic love. I connect with a love for a brief glimpse of inexperienced memory, this dream of broken loneliness.
And here again, in the Duino Elegies, Rilke provides us spiritual longing, and, yet again, as in the Book of Hours, we can sense the metaphysical ambiguity of the „Angel“.
The angelic symbolism that Rilke constructs expresses something almost beyond human comprehension. And still there is no doubt, that an angel can be something to experience.
Even in my everyday life, perhaps because of my lack of faith, inexperience regarding love or just the doubts of my thoughts, the idea of what my life is for often crosses my mind, almost ineluctably and involuntarily. Then I often fall into this stream of wondering, like Proust fell into memory, and do the exact thing as him- experience the given moment of imagination before my eyes with all my senses, as if all my hearing, thinking and feeling melted into one. This stream of wonder gives me nothing, but questions, out of which, after pressing my head against someone’s heart, drifting my face to the lips of a beloved, and getting to know how soft or cold the hand of the other is, hope arises.
Rilke’s angels are, at least so it seems to me, the representing of love. Love, which is the substance of the spirit- which makes us experience joy, which lets us feel everything we want to feel and thus make life worth living. And at the same time every angel is terrible, shining with Terror, for all love arises from absence. And the greater the suffering one had from it, the Absence of love, the greater we feel the connection to it.
There we see one of Rilke‘s most poetic concepts, which also is one of the most important notions in the poetry of the romantic era- that to suffer, is to learn how to live. In Rilke, we can sense that suffering gives us to path to what we need, in order to get out of it- through the absence of love, through loneliness and having no angels of beauty around somebody, we must learn how to crawl out of the darkness by any means possible, so the absence of love doesn’t take us to the heights of despair, so we live out of beauty around us, and not die in hope of some day maybe getting close to it.
„Und wir, die an steigendes Glück,
denken, empfänden die Rührung,
die uns beinah bestürzt,
wenn ein Glückliches fällt.“
„And we, who have always thought
of happiness climbing, would feel
the emotion that almost startles
when happiness falls.“
(The Tenth Elegy, the last four verses
of the Duino Elegies)
Within the gorgeousness of Rilke’s verses, there are very few poets who approach his melody, vocabulary, and elegance. The Duino Elegies remain both a work of experimental art and an epic poem. Perhaps the most beautiful exploration of the human experience in poetry. It is, simultaneously, a work which truly leaves me hope, hope to find the beauty, hidden beneath the shadows of loneliness.
Sonnets to Orpheus
The Sonnets to Orpheus is a cycle of 55 sonnets written by Rainer Maria Rilke in 1922. It is widely considered one of the masterpieces of 20th-century modernist poetry, written during a legendary burst of creative inspiration alongside the completion of his Duino Elegies at Castle Muzot in Switzerland.
The Sonnets to Orpheus are heavily inspired by the Ovidian myth of Orpheus. The mythical Greek musician Orpheus represents the ultimate poet. Because he descended into the underworld and returned, he bridges the gap between life and death. Rilke presents him as a deity of praise and song, famously stating in the third sonnet: "Song is existence" ("Gesang ist Dasein").
Rhythmically the sonnet utilises rather unusual lines, which make the work, despite maintaining the strict structure of the sonnet, an experimental experience that always brings immense complexity with itself.
In the sonnets, we see Rilke stumbling upon all of his artistic ideas- the questions of time, death, love are given to us with poetic powder and lyrical beauty- and furthermore, what Rilke emphasises in this late work is the idea of transformation, and more precisely, transformation through art. Orpheus, as already described, is the artist, who through the beauty of his can transform the even the gods, yet he cannot save his Eurydice. His pains and sorrows make his love fade and his loneliness shine. This is also what Ovid created with his Metamorphoses- the humanistic change of consciousness.
Rilke, thus, ultimately rejects despair, urging readers to praise the world despite its technological alienation and inherent suffering. By bending traditional sonnet structures with radical rhythms and deeply compressed metaphors, Rilke created a timeless, philosophical masterpiece that demands a total, courageous embrace of life's constant transformation.
It is of no doubt that art is something which provides us a life beyond the boundaries of our imagination- and great art, as it is the case with Rainer Maria Rilke, may leave us transformed and understood. It may, as it was in my case, leave us feeling more, experiencing more and thus, through this experience of life, give a shimmer of hope- that life is time of experienced beauty, instead of dying while awaiting it.
I certainly hope it’s the first one, although my whole life until now, feels rather like an endless wait. However, I do hope. It has not left me yet.
July 19, 2019
Rilke-Bedarf für das Jahr definitiv gedeckt!
Zur Ausgabe: Ich besitze ein paar der Anaconda-Ausgaben von "Gesammelten Werken" zu Poe, Kafka und Rilke. Die machen habtisch einiges her und bieten einen guten Überblick und sind dafür, für ein Hardcover in der Größe, relativ günstig.
Zum Inhalt: Vorher kannte ich Rilke nur als schwermütigen Schriftsteller von Liebesgedichten und wie das oft so ist, wenn der Ruf vorauseilt, versucht man das Gelesene mit Mühe in diese Vorlage zu pressen. Passt auf jeden Fall nicht immer. Gerade das Schreiben über Gott und die religiöse Komponente bei Rilke haben mich (peinlich, dass als Germanistikstudentin zuzugeben) überrascht. Die Gedichte, vor allem die Duineser Elegien habe ich dann auch eher halbherzig gelesen.
Den einzigen Roman in der Ausgabe "Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge" gefiel mir zu Beginn sehr gut, besonders die Familiengeschichte, die nach und nach aufgedeckt wird. Gen Ende wurde mir auch das zu schwafelig - ehrlich.
Der Rilke der Neue(n) Gedichte gefällt mir wohl am besten: Hier finden sich so viele kraftvolle und moderne Gedichte, die deutlich machen, dass er ein großer Künstler war.
Mein Favorit:
Morgue
Da liegen sie bereit, als ob es gälte,
nachträglich eine Handlung zu erfinden,
die mit einander und mit dieser Kälte
sie zu versöhnen weiß und zu verbinden;
denn das ist alles noch wie ohne Schluss.
Was für ein Name hätte in den Taschen
sich finden sollen? An dem Überdruss
um ihren Mund hat man herumgewaschen:
er ging nicht ab; er wurde nur ganz rein.
Die Bärte stehen, noch ein wenig härter,
doch ordentlicher im Geschmack der Wärter,
nur um die Gaffenden nicht anzuwidern.
Die Augen haben hinter ihren Lidern
sich umgewandt und schauen jetzt hinein.
Zur Ausgabe: Ich besitze ein paar der Anaconda-Ausgaben von "Gesammelten Werken" zu Poe, Kafka und Rilke. Die machen habtisch einiges her und bieten einen guten Überblick und sind dafür, für ein Hardcover in der Größe, relativ günstig.
Zum Inhalt: Vorher kannte ich Rilke nur als schwermütigen Schriftsteller von Liebesgedichten und wie das oft so ist, wenn der Ruf vorauseilt, versucht man das Gelesene mit Mühe in diese Vorlage zu pressen. Passt auf jeden Fall nicht immer. Gerade das Schreiben über Gott und die religiöse Komponente bei Rilke haben mich (peinlich, dass als Germanistikstudentin zuzugeben) überrascht. Die Gedichte, vor allem die Duineser Elegien habe ich dann auch eher halbherzig gelesen.
Den einzigen Roman in der Ausgabe "Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge" gefiel mir zu Beginn sehr gut, besonders die Familiengeschichte, die nach und nach aufgedeckt wird. Gen Ende wurde mir auch das zu schwafelig - ehrlich.
Der Rilke der Neue(n) Gedichte gefällt mir wohl am besten: Hier finden sich so viele kraftvolle und moderne Gedichte, die deutlich machen, dass er ein großer Künstler war.
Mein Favorit:
Morgue
Da liegen sie bereit, als ob es gälte,
nachträglich eine Handlung zu erfinden,
die mit einander und mit dieser Kälte
sie zu versöhnen weiß und zu verbinden;
denn das ist alles noch wie ohne Schluss.
Was für ein Name hätte in den Taschen
sich finden sollen? An dem Überdruss
um ihren Mund hat man herumgewaschen:
er ging nicht ab; er wurde nur ganz rein.
Die Bärte stehen, noch ein wenig härter,
doch ordentlicher im Geschmack der Wärter,
nur um die Gaffenden nicht anzuwidern.
Die Augen haben hinter ihren Lidern
sich umgewandt und schauen jetzt hinein.
September 29, 2024
Отрицательный результат - тоже результат, и понимание нелюбимых вещей может быть даже характерней. Здесь именно тот случай.
Меня с первых же страниц напряг Евгений Витковский. Когда с первы же строк переводчик начинает рассказывать какие все остальные переводчики дураки, то есть кажется статья использована для самолюбования. Поэзию сложно переводить, тут всегда надо делать скидку на то, что в оригинале это звучит просто божественно. Я пробовал крепиться и списывать на сложности перевода, но "ни уму не сердцу". Поэзия Рильке мне представляется словесным салатом типа "по тихой грусти сопли с сахаром". Ладно. Великий поэт может писать, по крайней мере, неординарную прозу. Нет, там примерно тоже самое. Всё это уныло, сентиментально, не структурировано , размазано. Судя по всему, Рильке, в принципе не производил чувств из приемлемого мне спектра и интересных мыслей. Я почитал его письма к Лу Саломе, в другой книге: это бесконечное нытьё. Прочитав три тома могу с лёгкий сердцем решить, что мне Рильке не нравится и не интересен.
Меня с первых же страниц напряг Евгений Витковский. Когда с первы же строк переводчик начинает рассказывать какие все остальные переводчики дураки, то есть кажется статья использована для самолюбования. Поэзию сложно переводить, тут всегда надо делать скидку на то, что в оригинале это звучит просто божественно. Я пробовал крепиться и списывать на сложности перевода, но "ни уму не сердцу". Поэзия Рильке мне представляется словесным салатом типа "по тихой грусти сопли с сахаром". Ладно. Великий поэт может писать, по крайней мере, неординарную прозу. Нет, там примерно тоже самое. Всё это уныло, сентиментально, не структурировано , размазано. Судя по всему, Рильке, в принципе не производил чувств из приемлемого мне спектра и интересных мыслей. Я почитал его письма к Лу Саломе, в другой книге: это бесконечное нытьё. Прочитав три тома могу с лёгкий сердцем решить, что мне Рильке не нравится и не интересен.
September 2, 2020
Ist leider gar nicht so meins. Habe es abgebrochen. 2 Sterne weil ich es unfair finde nur 1 Stern zu geben ...
September 26, 2022
Om in te blijven lezen ❤️
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