Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

Duino Elegies 33an individual, but a multitude,the personification of the fatherslying in our depths like mountainsleveled to the lowest summits . . .What a task Rilke sets for himself! Not only is the soul a multiple, aconglomeration of competing voices struggling, but they are minimalized“like mountains leveled to the lowest summits.” The voices thepoet makes manifest are doomed within their own historical context,minions of old orders, upholders of exhausted societies about to enterthe flames—or withered and gone in the flames—of World War I.The dedication of the poem reads: “The Property of Princess Marievon Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe.” Whatever the princess’s personalqualities, she is a representative—a remnant, one might say—of anage whose power is drained. The refinement and salons and sunny spasand hopeful decadence of the milieu from which the poem, or at leastthe poet, springs, are not efficacious in forming an integral identity.They are memories of lovely things gone. Those who build their liveson memory are halted there, dead-stopped in a moment in time, bythe failure of the imagination.It would come close to minimalizing this great poem to observetoo closely its historical context, the inference that it can be read inone sense as a decadent age’s elegy to itself. Contemporary—whichis to say, twenty-first century—readers may lack sympathy for theisolation of the voices in these elegies. We have the world at ourfingertips in a spectrum of gratifications that are immediate, ifnot always very profound. Let me suggest that the Duino Elegiesis prophetic, as was Jeremiah, in that it portrays an age at thebrink of hell brought on by its own inclinations, by its own badhabits. The twenty-first century is, so far, the enemy of introspection,partially because so much of the twentieth was glutted withit, intellectually castrated by it. Rilke can no more escape the netof inwardness than can the rest of Europe in his time, but he is atleast prepared to cry out for help, or annihilation. Ninety years later,inwardness is indeed conquered, not by sublime personal integrityand restoration, but by an even vaster chorus of voices, comprisingnearly all the voices of the world, in which one can lose oneself sothoroughly there is no further need for self at all. The angel whoactually answered the poet’s intended cry in history was not the one