The Dunio Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

Source of book: I own this

Rilke had a resurgence in popularity during the so-called New Age Movement - along with Rumi. His often ambiguous, vaguely spiritual, and introspective poems seemed to fit with an ethos of “spirituality” and inspirational self help. It is rather a shame that this happened - for Rumi too, honestly. I believe that in both cases, the poets were more misunderstood than not. Essentially, their works functioned much the way that science works for snake-oil-alternative medicine: as a nice gloss to make hippie consumerism and hucksters seem deep and grounded. And, just as woo in the biological realm continually makes elementary-school level errors about science, woo in the psychological and spiritual realm makes elementary mistakes about mysticism and art. But, that is my opinion. Your mileage may vary. 

But leaving aside the fact that most people will first encounter Rilke and Rumi in less than ideal places, there is actually much to love about their poetry. (You can read my post on Rumi here, if you like.) For someone like me, who has long felt a connection to the more mystical side of Christianity, and who greatly enjoys poetry, poets like Rumi and Rilke and Tagore touch a part of me that resonates with the more universally human search for the Divine - for transcendence. Thus, poets who express spiritual ideas and experiences in a form that isn’t didactic but rooted in those “groanings which cannot be uttered” speak to me in a deeply personal way. This applies across a broad range. So, for example, the poetic parts of the Old Testament I find to be breathtaking. (Isaiah in particular is pure art.) I find certain expressly Christian poets to be wonderful. Milton, Donne, Herbert, Hopkins, and especially Rossetti come to mind. But there are others who do not share the specifics of my own faith tradition but who I find to be equally inspired, so to speak. (It is the epitome of arrogance to believe that somehow the Only True Faith™ somehow was revealed to white European and American theologians in the 16th through 19th Centuries - and that nobody else in history or geography had truth revealed to them. It seems more likely that God didn’t in fact love white people more than anyone else, and that there are visions of the truth - “through a glass, darkly” - that have appeared to many around the world and throughout history.) So, for me, I find Sufi Muslim Rumi’s exploration of truth and search for the Divine to be valuable as well. Ditto for the “song offerings” by the Hindu Rabindranath Tagore. 

And then there is Rilke, who was raised Catholic, but whose spirituality was…complicated to say the least. He had a rather unpleasant childhood. His mother was obsessed with his older sister, who died when she was a week old. His mother apparently saw him as a replacement for her, and dressed and treated him like a little girl for years. In a possibly related development, his parents’ marriage broke up eventually. Rilke left the Catholic church for a while and explored the Eastern Orthodox experience while traveling in Russia. One result of this journey was The Book of Hours, which is one of my all time favorite poetry collections. (Particularly in the luminous translation by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy.) 

Later, Rilke would continue to identify as Catholic, but he didn’t really participate in religious observance, and wrote much more like a mystic. In some ways, I feel closer to that sort of a journey these days, having left organized religion. Although I probably have a different overall viewpoint than Rilke, I would say - and closest to that of Tagore, perhaps? 

Anyway, the Dunio Elegies are usually considered, along with the Sonnets to Orpheus, to be Rilke’s greatest works. I found them quite intriguing, although I think The Book of Hours is still my favorite. 

An elegy is often defined as “a poem of serious reflection, usually a lament for the dead,” but that rather misstates the idea in my experience. For example, Donne’s elegies are not always serious, and are far more expansive than a lament for the dead. Likewise, Rilke’s elegies are indeed serious, but are more about contemplation of life, the universe, and everything, than a reflection on any specific dead person. Mortality is certainly a central theme. But the poems are directed toward the living and the question of how we live with our knowledge of our mortality. 

A central figure in the poem is an angel. Although it seems mostly metaphoric and functions as an outsider to the human experience. It is in a sense a messenger from the Divine (a very Christian idea) but not in the literal sense those of us raised in the Evangelical tradition would think of an angel. But as a metaphor for the boundary between beings living in eternity and those living in spacetime, it works quite well. Which is, I think, Rilke’s intent. Again, this is poetry, not theology. The truth lies in the spaces between the literal meaning of the words. 

I’m kind of unsure how to describe the poems themselves beyond that. They are written in a far freer verse than the more traditional Book of Hours. My particular edition contains the original German and the English translation on facing pages - which is really handy for comparing the poetic form. (My German is limited to performance instructions in Wagner and Mahler, so I can only sort of get the meaning once in a while.) Stephen Mitchell was the translator in my edition, and I thought his work was good. 

Since the elegies are all fairly long, I won’t quote any in full. However, there are individual lines which stood out. 

The opening lines of the first elegy are breathtaking - and an excellent portent of what is to follow:

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ 

hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me

suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed

in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing

but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,

and we are so awed because it serenely disdains

to annihilate us.

Rilke plays with the idea that we mortal humans have one difference with the rest of nature: we are aware of our own mortality and fail to become one with the Divine because of our fear and alienation from the rest of creation. Within the world of the poem cycle, this is Rilke’s view of “salvation.” It is wholeness with creation and a return to communion with the Divine. It is a psychological and spiritual healing. It is a light burden, an easy yoke; not rigid beliefs clung to in order to avoid hellfire. Obviously, this idea is anathema to modern Evangelicals - they are wedded to salvation as a legal transaction whereby God commits a brutal human sacrifice so that he can avoid eternally torturing all the flawed humans he made - now he’ll just eternally torture most of them. This is not, to be clear, the view of Christianity in general or the primary historical view. Rather, it is a way of looking at what Saint Paul called a “mystery” that appealed to some influential white European males during the Protestant Reformation. Many of us feel that, however satisfying it was 500 years ago, it rings really hollow now, and seems to reduce what is arguably the most shocking event in religious teaching (god becomes human, and, rather than come in triumph, suffers and is brutally murdered by humans) into a mere transaction. While also sidelining all the references to restoration, healing, the establishment of a kingdom which looks nothing like earthly power, and so on. 

I am not claiming here that Rilke is a theologian or that he has the pure truth here. Rather, he is expressing a mystical vision of union with the Divine and the salvation of humankind that is a powerful way of looking at things. Once you stop insisting on taking everything literally, you can see such an expansive and holistic vision. To use another metaphor, once you stop insisting on black and white, you can see in color. 

Moving on in the first elegy, here is another line that I loved. 

Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space

gnaws at our faces.

So many times, I have stood out at night and watched the stars. I have stood on a mountain near midnight at 11,000 feet and watched the Perseids fall. I have felt the wind gnaw at my face there. And in the desert on a winter night. Good lord, that is a great line. 

How about the opening to the fourth elegy? 

O trees of life, when does your winter come?

We are not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn us

like migratory birds’. Late, overtaken’

we force ourselves abruptly onto the wind

and fall to earth at some iced-over lake.

Flowering and fading come to us both at once.

And somewhere lions still roam and never know,

in their majestic power, of any weakness.

The fifth elegy was inspired by a painting by Picasso: Les Saltimbanques. The poem addresses itself to each of the characters in the painting - while still focusing on the overarching theme. I won’t quote from it, because it really needs to be read as a unit. Here is the picture, though, because it is a great example from Picasso’s “rose period.” 

This next quote, from the ninth elegy, fascinates me as well. 

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely

in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all

other green, with tiny waves on the edges

of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)--: why then

have to be human--and escaping from fate, keep longing for fate? . . .

            Oh not because happiness exists,

that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.

Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which 

would exist in the laurel too . . . 

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here

apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way

keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. 

Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And wee too,

just once. And never again. But to have been

this once, completely, even if only once:

to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.

I particularly like the bit about happiness as “too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.” That’s a great line that I might have to steal. 

The tenth elegy is probably my favorite, with its personification of Lament as a race of miners who have fallen out of favor in our modern times when only “happy” emotions are socially acceptable. There are several outstanding lines in this one. This is my favorite passage. 

But how alien, alas, are the streets of the city of grief,

where, in the false silence formed of continual uproar,

the figure cast from the mold of emptiness stoutly

swaggers: the gilded noise, the bursting memorial.

Oh how completely an angel would stamp out their market of solace,

bounded by the church with its ready-made consolations:

clean and disenchanted and shut as a post-office on Sunday.

Farther out, though, the city’s edges are curling with carnival.

Swings of freedom! Divers and jugglers of zeal!

And the shooting-gallery’s targets of prettified happiness,

which jump and kick back with a tinny sound

when hit by some better marksman. From cheers to chance

he goes staggering on, as booths with all sorts of attractions

are wooing, drumming, and bawling. For adults only

there is something special to see: how money multiplies, naked, 

right there on stage, money’s genitals, nothing concealed,

the whole action--, educational, and guaranteed 

to increase your potency . . . . . . . . . 

Hot dang. That’s quite the indictment of capitalist consumer culture. And also an inconvenient truth about organized religion: it has “ready-made consolations” - empty platitudes ready to be whipped out whenever the harsh realities of life bump up against trite dogma. It is one of many reasons that religion is irrelevant for many of my children’s generation. Rilke is one hundred percent correct to link trite religious platitudes with consumer culture too. Also marvelous: describing “prettified happiness” as a carnival game. It’s hard to believe he lived a century before social media “influencers.” And what else? The linking of pornography with the pursuit of wealth is fantastic. The culture of wealth (as exemplified best/worst by the Trump family) is absolutely about “hand” measuring contests and toxic masculinity. As I said, this is my favorite poem in the collection. I encourage you to read the whole thing. 

In my book, the Dunio Elegies also includes a few additional poems in an appendix. The first is a fragment of an elegy that was never published. While it is obviously incomplete, it is pretty good. I like this line:

Once poets resounded over the battlefield; what voice

can outshout the rattle of this metallic age

that is struggling on toward its careening future?

While I don’t think war ever was glorious, poetry about war certainly has been. And Rilke (who was traumatized by WWI) certainly foresaw the brutal impersonality of modern warfare - and indeed the industrial age. 

There is also an early version of the tenth elegy - which is clearly inferior to the later version, although it does contain some interesting ideas which were dropped from the final version. Finally, there is a short poem entitled “Antistrophes,” which is kind of a sexist ode to women. Not Rilke’s best work, to say the least. 

But the elegies themselves are beautiful, moving, and insightful. 

***

Note on the name: 

Rilke started writing the elgies in 1912, while he was the guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis at Dunio Castle, on the coast at Trieste. The term “castle” is no longer particularly accurate. There was once a castle on the site, built in the 11th Century - the ruins of that building stand next to the current building. The current castle was initially built in the 14th Century and modified periodically thereafter. In its current form, it has far too many outward facing windows to be considered a proper fortress. But the location is, shall we say, spectacular. 

 Rilke didn’t finish the elegies at Dunio. World War One intervened, and the trauma from that experience affected his ability to write. He finally finished them in 1922. 

The Book of Hours by Rainer Maria Rilke

Source of book: I started out reading this as a library loan, but liked it enough to purchase my own copy.

First of all, because I read this book in English translation, the approach by the translators is important. In effect, this book has three authors: Rilke, and the two women who translated it, Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy. One could make the argument that there are four authors - at least in Rilke’s view, because he considered the Divine to be a co-author of this volume. (Rilke was a non-practicing Catholic, and more of a mystic in practice.)

Barrows and Macy chose to translate freely, rather than adhere to Rilke’s rhymes. His forms are traditional, with alternating rhymes predominating. As they show in the preface, trying to duplicate this in English tends to make the poems sing-song-y, rather than stately as they are in German. Thus, the feel of the translated poems in this case is very modern. The lines are kept intact, but not the meter, so they read as free verse. I recognized a few of the poems as they are translated here, so I suspect that this translation remains popular - particularly for those who tend to quote poetry as soundbites. No knock against the translation for that. It is beautiful enough, and its quotability should be seen as a sign of its universal appeal.

If anything, this reflects Rilke’s current moment of popularity. His mysticism and focus on art for its own sake are refreshing, particularly after the recent period (say, the ‘60s and ‘70s) where so much of poetry became overtly political. (These things go in cycles, of course. And, some political issues wear better than others. For example, Milton’s works on freedom of speech are still powerful, while Yeats’ references to Irish conflicts and personalities are largely lost on modern Americans.)

Rilke wrote The Book of Hours as a young man in his mid-20s, after a visit to Russia. He met with Tolstoy and Pasternak, and became acquainted with Eastern Orthodox monasticism. The very title of the book reflects that influence. The Medieval “Book of Hours” contained prayers and devotions, much like Rilke’s work, which he subtitled, “Love poems to God.” 

Rilke at the age when he wrote The Book of Hours.

I was reminded of another devotional work that I read nearly three years ago, Gitanjali, by the Bengali poet Tagore. That work’s name is “song offerings,” and is likewise a gorgeous expression of a longing for the Divine. In contrast to George Herbert (recently read and reviewed) or Christina Rossetti (reviewed here), Rilke and Tagore do not incorporate much theology into their poems. To the extent that they do, it is of a mystical - and occasionally pantheistic - sort, with a sort of kinship with nature, life, and the whole of experience. I hesitate to use “pantheistic” because that is such a loaded - and negative - word in the circles I grew up in. I rather would describe it as an acknowledgement that we experience the Divine from more than just prescribe religious rituals. The stars above us as well as the dirt beneath sing to us, and we can worship just as well in the open air cathedral of the mountains. As Rilke puts it:

          For all things

sing you: at times

we just hear them more clearly.

With that, here are some of my favorites.

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I’ve been circling for thousands of years

and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?

(I, 2)

We must not portray you in king’s robes,

you drifting mist that brought forth the morning.

Once again from the old paintboxes

we take the same gold for scepter and crown

that has disguised you through the ages.

Piously we produce our images of you

till they stand around you like a thousand walls.

And when our hearts would simply open,

our fervent hands hide you.

(I, 4)

There is so much that is truth in that one. Throughout history, we have always understood the Divine through the lens of our own cultural systems; and so we find difficult to lay aside the old paints and colors and open our hearts to the untamed lion, as C. S. Lewis put it. Or, as another once said, we insist on putting new wine into those old wineskins.

Because Rilke writes these from the viewpoint of the monk, he captures the introvert experience so well. Perhaps poets are all introverts - it is hard to say for sure, but there is strong evidence in that direction. Either way, it is hard to imagine a more beautiful portrait than this one:

I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life, already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open

to another life that’s wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree

rustling over a gravesite

and making real the dream

of the one its living roots

embrace:

a dream once lost among sorrows and songs.

(I, 5)

Or this one:

Why am I reaching again for the brushes?

When I paint your portrait, God,

nothing happens.

But I can choose to feel you.

At my senses’ horizon

you appear hesitantly,

like scattered islands.

Yet standing here, peering out,

I’m all the time seen by you.

…

All creation holds its breath, listening within me,

because, to hear you, I keep silent.

(I, 18)

Or, there is the one that led me to take a look at this volume. In one of the more peculiar, perhaps laughable, connections, I heard a line from this in Flora and Ulysses, a kids’ book about a squirrel with superpowers my kids introduced me to on one of our trips. (You can read my thoughts on this one here.) At a significant moment, this poem is quoted. Under circumstances which can only be described as ludicrous. But the line itself is good (“flare up like flame”) and in context, makes for a moving metaphor of serving as the hands and feet of God on earth.

God speaks to each of us as he makes us,

then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall,

go to the limits of your longing.

Embody me.

Flare up like flame

and make big shadows I can move in.

(I, 59)

Occasionally, bits and pieces of this collection attach themselves to the outside world. A great example of this is one poem that many have noted seems prophetic in hindsight. Rilke published these in 1905, but began writing them in 1899. The end of the century, the fin de siecle, as it came to be known. And, standing on that divide, he wrote these words:

I’m living just as the century ends.

A great leaf, that God and you and I

have covered with writing

turns now, overhead, in strange hands.

We feel the sweep of it like a wind.

We see the brightness of a new page

where everything yet can happen.

Unmoved by us, the fates take its measure

and look at one another, saying nothing.

(I, 8)

Another poem surprised me in that I knew I had heard a version of it before. It is found in a song by Sixpence None The Richer (another C. S. Lewis reference there…) entitled “Still Burning.”

Here is Rilke’s original:

Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.

Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.

And without feet I can make my way to you,

without a mouth I can swear your name.

Break off my arms, I’ll take hold of you

with my heart as with a hand.

Stop my heart, and my brain will start to beat.

And if you consume my brain with fire,

I’ll feel you burn in every drop of my blood.

(II, 7)

Here is the Sixpence version:

you are the burning
the flame that is turning
my smoldering ash into a bird
so stay close my brother
I couldn't stand the loss
you are the bridge of action
I need you to help me cross
I need you to help me

so when you break,
my arms I'll take hold of you
I know your heart is a hand that takes hold of me

my hand that is breaking
is the hand that is making
all the dead things in me grow
a gift of a holy loss
this burning at the dross

This vision of longing and brokenness resonates with those of us who feel deeply and cannot always utter our deepest and darkest needs and fears. We call out to the Divine, and wish to take hold with our hearts when we cannot with our hands.

Likewise, for those of us who have not had a serene journey, and who often feel that our own wrestling fails to even make sense to those around us, can find in this poem a sense of a kindred spirit.

I am praying again, Awesome One.

You hear me again, as words

from the depths of me

rush toward you in the wind.

I’ve been scattered in pieces,

torn by conflict,

mocked by laughter,

washed down in drink.

In alleyways I sweep myself up

out of garbage and broken glass.

With my half-mouth I stammer you,

who are eternal in your symmetry.

I lift to you my half-hands

in wordless beseeching, that I may find again

the eyes with which I once beheld you.

I am a house gutted by fire

where only the guilty sometimes sleep

before the punishment that devours them

hounds them out into the open.

I am a city by the sea

sinking into a toxic tide.

I am strange to myself, as though someone unknown

had poisoned my mother as she carried me.

It’s here in all the pieces of my shame

that now I find myself again.

I yearn to belong to something, to be contained

in an all-embracing mind that sees me

as a single thing.

I yearn to be held

in the great hands of your heart-

oh let them take me now.

Into them I place these fragments, my life,

and you, God - spend them however you want.

(II, 2)

I’ll end with a final poem, about endings.

God, give us each our own death,

the dying that proceeds

from each of our lives:

the way we loved,

the meanings we made,

our need.

(III, 6)