Duino Elegies

The spine passes the subtractive test. The First sets the terms: the cry the angels will not hear, the lovers who cannot hold each other, the early dead. The Eighth gives the diagnosis, the Ninth the answer and the Tenth the descent; remove any of them and the arc from lament to praise breaks. The cycle answers itself across its length: the angels who cannot hear in the first lines are, in the Tenth’s first line, the angels whose assent the poet hopes for. Three things hold the axis down. The fifth place was filled twice, so a slot in the cycle could take another poem. The Third could go with little loss, and the Sixth gathers passages written over ten years. And the rhetoric sometimes says three times what it has achieved once, as in the Seventh’s repeated invocations.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Consciousness sets the human being against the world as a spectator, always in the posture of someone leaving, while the animal sees what we cannot: “Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur / das Offene” (“With all its eyes the creature sees / the Open”, VIII). The First finds us not very reliably at home in the interpreted world; the Fourth says it in three words, “Wir sind nicht einig” (“We are not of one mind”). The Ninth’s answer, that transient things need us to say them, holds as a description of what poems and memory do. Held off the top because that answer rests on Rilke’s own metaphysics of an inward transformation of the world, which may be declined while the diagnosis is accepted, and because the condition disclosed is the single consciousness, with almost nothing social in it.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Elevation is the cycle’s mode, and it comes often. The opening reaches the dreadful sublime at once, and then defines the axis: “Denn das Schöne ist nichts / als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grad ertragen” (“For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to bear”, I). The Second’s angels are mirrors drawing their beauty back into themselves; the Seventh exults; the Ninth lists the things to be said. The whole of the Tenth rises: the city of pain, the land of the Laments, the Sphinx, the constellations, and the youth climbing alone into the mountains of primal pain. Then the cycle closes on a falling. Held below the top only because the height thins in the Third and in parts of the Fifth.

Score: 9.4 / 10

The myth is built, not borrowed. The angel is Rilke’s construction, not the messenger of Scripture but a being in whom the visible is already wholly invisible: “Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich” (“Every angel is terrible”, I). It bears weight from the first line to the last. The Tenth builds an underworld from new materials, a fairground city of pain and beyond it the land of the Laments, where an older Lament leads a dead youth through her family’s former greatness and shows him its stars. The lovers, the early dead, the puppet, the acrobats with Madame Lamort, the hero and the animal recur as load-bearing parts. Held a step down because some figures are evoked rather than built: Tobias, Linos and Gaspara Stampa are allusions, and so is the hero’s mother in the Sixth.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The inheritance is the German elegy: Klopstock, Goethe’s Roman Elegies and above all Hölderlin, with his long line and his withdrawn gods. Nearer still stood Rilke’s own Neue Gedichte (1907 to 1908), whose object poems had made his name. The swerve is away from that manner: in place of the thing seen exactly, an invented cosmology, spoken in a voice that addresses angels, lovers, the earth and the reader; and the elegy itself turned, its lament become praise and the mourning poem an argument for being here. The stake was real: ten years, a crisis in which the cycle could not be finished, and a reputation for exactness staked on a high rhetoric. Held below the top because the long line and the vanished gods are Hölderlin’s, a proven path, and because in 1922, the year of The Waste Land, the turn ran toward eloquence while the age ran toward the fragment.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Change the form and the knowledge goes. The cycle argues that saying transforms things, and it makes the argument by saying. The Ninth’s nouns, “Haus, / Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster” (“house, / bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window”), are lifted into the line and kept, doing what the question around them proposes. The address is the second instrument: the cycle speaks to those who cannot answer, the angel, the dead and the beloved, and the unanswered address enacts the separation it laments. The ten parts carry a turn, from the First’s cry to the praise of the Seventh and Ninth, and the long, flexible line holds both the stretched lament and the broken-off exclamation. Held off the top where the form contains a doctrine stated rather than enacted, in the expository passages of the Eighth and parts of the Sixth.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, and there is a century of it. Rilke explained the cycle himself, in a letter to Witold Hulewicz of 1925. Romano Guardini wrote a commentary and Jacob Steiner a line-by-line study; Heidegger made the poet the subject of “Wozu Dichter?” (1946); Paul de Man read Rilke’s figures in Allegories of Reading (1979). The readings conflict, and none has closed the cycle. Is the angel a being, a limit or a figure for the finished poem? Is the praise of the Seventh and Ninth earned, or asserted against the lament? Is the Open a place, or a name for what consciousness has lost? Is the falling at the close consolation or plain fact? The sound and syntax also yield on return, read aloud. Held a step below the top because some of the yield is doctrine, and repeats.

Score: 9.3 / 10

The field is German poetry of the first half of the twentieth century and, through translation, the European and American lyric. The force is a real reorganisation of what a long lyric could do in modernity: a poem could build its own metaphysics and its own myth without a creed and still speak with the authority of the old elegy. It renewed Hölderlin’s form more than it broke it, and German poetry’s technical course after 1922 ran more through Trakl, Benn, Brecht and Celan than through the elegies; that holds it below the top. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Heidegger’s “Wozu Dichter?” (1946) shaped the philosophical reading of poetry; the cycle runs through English and American poetry in translation; and the angels of Wenders’s Wings of Desire (1987) are its descendants. The reach was to sensibility more than to method.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over a century. The text survives whole, as Rilke completed it and saw it through the press in 1923, and nothing in it is lost or in doubt. It has been in print without a break since, read in German and taught in schools and universities, and read in English since Leishman and Spender’s version of 1939, with Mitchell’s (1982) and Snow’s (2000) among those that followed. Its opening lines are among the most quoted in modern poetry, and it is used outside poetry, in philosophy, in film and in the popular reading of Rilke as a counsellor, which is presence and not proof. Nothing is charged on its fabric. Held where it stands because a century is not millennia, and because much of its readership reaches it through quotation rather than through the elegies whole.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Judged on Rilke’s German. The craft is load-bearing, and it is the craft of syntax set against the line. In the opening question the genitive “der Engel” ends the line and its noun, “Ordnungen”, waits at the head of the next, so that the break holds the reader suspended over the angels’ order. The Ninth’s nouns are placed so that each stands alone; the Tenth’s last lines descend in short phrases to the final verb, “fällt”. The long line ranges from the grand address to the bitter catalogue of the Fifth’s fairground, the inwardness of the Third and the plain speech of the Ninth, and compounds such as “Hiersein” are made to bear meaning. Charged: a preciosity in places, as in some of the Fifth’s satire; repetition that slackens the Seventh; invocation where an image would have served.

Score: 9.3 / 10

One law governs: the human being is incomplete between the animal, which lives in the Open, and the angel, which is complete, and that incompletion is the ground both of lament and of the task of saying. Take the two most distant elements: the Fifth’s acrobats on their threadbare carpet in the suburbs of the universe, and the Tenth’s Sphinx and stars. They obey the same law. The acrobats perform a completion they do not possess, and the fair at the edge of the Tenth’s city of pain recalls their fairground before the youth passes beyond it. The law covers the Attic gravestones, the puppet theatre and the gnat. Held off the top because the decade of composition shows: the Third’s river-god of the blood speaks in a register near psychoanalysis that the rest does not share, and the Fifth’s satire stands apart in tone.

Score: 9.0 / 10

A lyric cycle of ten poems holds more orders than its form usually allows. Consciousness, as its subject; love and the body, in the lovers and the Third’s inherited desire; childhood and the family, in the mother of the Third and the father of the Fourth; death, in the early dead and the dead youth of the Tenth; the sacred, in the angel and the withdrawn gods; the natural order, in the animal, the gnat, the birds and the fig tree; culture, in the Attic gravestones, the cathedral, the Sphinx and the pylons of Egypt; the city and commerce, in the Tenth’s city of pain and its fair. One task, the saying of the world into words, holds them together. What keeps the axis lowest is what is absent: labour, the state, society and history as an agent lie outside the cycle, or appear only as satire in the Tenth.

Score: 8.2 / 10