Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Duino Elegies 29Yeats and Rilke are contemporaries with certain interesting parallels—anartistic bent that threatened in their youths to decline intodilettantism, passionate love choices which did not or could not leadto marriage, an obsession with the aristocracy—and yet possessingsuch different perspectives, such varied sources of inspiration, thatthey might have inhabited different cultures in different millennia,rather than the war-threatened western Europe that they shared.Rilke’s Duino Elegies were being composed—beyond the first burstof inspiration at the Princess’s chateau at Duino, which flowered intothe first two elegies before completion at Chateau Muzot—whenYeats wrote “Easter 1916.” Yeats waited three years to publish hispoem, though he seems to have written it quickly, with a surenessthat comes from confidence in one’s own perceptions. Rilke writesthe Duino Elegies over a period of 10 years. Rilke shoulders his waythrough miasmas of depression. Rilke is interrupted and delayed bythe events of the world. The Duino Elegies cannot thrive in the midstof events because they are not about events. They are about internalsturm und drang, about suffering and confusion and longing that noexternal observer could fully verify. Yeats—or for that matter, Eliot in“Prufrock”—begins in a world we recognize and can almost immediatelyevaluate. Rilke arises from deep in his own head, amid thechorus of his yet unintroduced voices, and opens with one of mostimpressive rhetorical queries of all poetry:Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelicorders?What a welter of conditionals! If! The poet is not even sure he isgoing to cry out. Some translations do render the “wenn” in Rilke’sGerman as “though” or “when,” instead of “if,” but I think these donot wish to face the full exhaustion of the spiritual moment. The poetis not sure he is going to cry, and if he does, he is not sure to whom.The Angelic orders are multiform and nonspecific, and invokingthem is like praying to a star, hoping that one in the myriad isinclining its ear at the crucial moment. One is humble. One expectsto pass beneath the notice of the angels. But one is also proud andcautious, holding off from uttering a name—such as Raphael, whois alluded to in the Second Elegy, but not named—lest one appearto be a fool in an age of secularity, indeed of mockery. One may