Translator Stephen Mitchell says: The Duino Elegies are widely acknowledged to be the greatest poem of the twentieth century. Some literary critics say these remarkable poetic outpourings have no, or few, equals in literary history. In February 1922 Rilke composed the last four of the Duino Elegies and the fifty five Sonnets to Orpheus. Specifically, I remembered the lines from his Ninth Duino Elegy which make the epigraph for this post. I was put in mind of the German poet Rainer Marie Rilke (1875-1926) this morning when I read today was his birthday. Rainer Maria Rilke, Translated by William Gass in Reading Rilke by William Gass, Alfred A. To realize, through their rapture, rapture for all? Of this cunning earth, in urging on lovers, They could be? Isn’t it the hidden purpose To speak in a way which the named never dreamed Are we, perhaps, here just to utter: house,īridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window –Īt most: column, tower…but to utter them, remember, Nor does the wanderer bring down a handful of earthįrom his high mountain slope to the valley (for earth, too, is mute),īut a word he has plucked from the climbing: the yellow and blue Petal of the poor man’s orchid in Ossie Murray’s garden in Jamaica
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