Rilke’s answer to our sense of transience is not the Christian message of transcendent, eternal life, rather it is to sing, speak and affirm the abundance of our being from within the here and now of our fragile and temporary lives on the earth, accepting death rather than repressing it. The Angel becomes the being who can witness our attempts to praise and transform the visible world by imbuing it with meaning. In the Elegies we are called upon to transform the things of the visible world within the interior and invisible space in our imagination by interacting with them, experiencing and expressing them in their fullest meaning and relation to ourselves, and so enabling them to live within us. The invisible is also imagined in the Elegies as the other side of mirrors.Īfter the Neue Gedichte New Poems Rilke develops his concept of ‘Weltinnenraum’ (‘world-inner-space’) (from ‘Es winkt zu Fühlung fast aus allen Dingen’/’Almost all things beckon us to feeling’, a uncollected poem written in 1914) where the boundary between inner consciousness and outer world collapses. The Angel belongs to the realm of the invisible – that side of consciousness that we cannot access because we cannot recognise a higher degree of reality. They explore in the figure of the Angel (a non-Christian angel) a super-consciousness that is whole and self-replete because it is not inhibited by subjectivity. the instinctive nature of animals, intense, unrequited love, and those who die young and bypass the stage of awareness of death. The poems ‘try out’ alternative models of consciousness, e.g. They explore how in the modern world we are limited by inherited and prescribed ways of thinking, unable to relate to death, perpetually distracted and filled with a sense of isolation and exclusion from a former state of complete and whole being. The Elegies lament our modern human consciousness, before finally shifting key and reaching out towards affirmation of life.

The intensity of his inspiration lapsed after this, and Rilke was unable to complete the Elegies until 1922 when he was staying at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland.

The voice’s words became the first line of the First Duino Elegy: ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the orders of Angels?’ Immediately, Rilke wrote the first two elegies and some fragments that would form the next eight to produce a cycle of ten poems. In 1912, during the period when Rilke was struggling to write, he had a moment of inspiration during a visit to Castle Duino, near Trieste, when he heard a voice calling to him.

Rilke elegies