But it's hard to grasp, so it becomes again the world. Lovers come close to the open, filled with wonder, when the beloved doesn't block the view It surges up behind the other, unbidden. For when death draws near, we look beyond it with an animal's wide gaze. Sometimes a child loses herself in this stillness and gets shaken out of it. We are always making it into a world and never letting it be nothing: the pure, the unconstructed, which we breathe and endlessly know, and need not crave. Never, not for a single day, do we let the space before us be so unbounded that the blooming of one flower is forever. And when they move, they move in timelessness, as fountains do. For the animals, their death is, as it were, completed. into the open, which is reflected Free from death. That there is something out there we know only from the animals' countenance, for we turn even the young child, forcing her to look backwards at the shapes we make, not outwards in the animals' eyes. Only our are as though reversed, and set like traps around themselves, keeping us inside. Northwestern University Press, 1998.8th Duino Elegy By Rainer Maria Rilke Translated by Joanna Macy & Anita Barrows With their whole gaze the creatures behold what is. We will read selections from Rilke’s novel, art writing, and letters, to contextualise the Duino Elegies and to consider more broadly the role of the poet in modernity.įor all primary readings we will refer to this version:

Ultimately, with the Duino Elegies, he achieved his aim of finding meaning in his suffering and providing, as he describes it, ‘peace’ and ‘safety’ to the readers of his poetry. Rilke suffered from the new conditions of modernity, moving between between the city and the country, and questioning whether he should stop writing poetry and begin psychoanalysis. In this course we will study the relationship between tradition and modernity, and what Heidegger calls the ‘trace of the holy,’ in the Dunio Elegies.

While out walking he claimed to hear a voice calling to him the first lines of the first Elegy: ‘Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels?’

Rainer Maria Rilke wrote the Duino Elegies between 19 at the Duino Castle on cliffs overlooking the Gulf of Trieste in Italy.

Duino elegy 1