Its center, where the performers bounce and tumble, is both a pestle and the flower’s pistil whose pollen (perhaps the dust they stir up) goes nowhere, but refertilizes its own blossom, leading to a false fruition. This is one of many images comparing and contrasting human life to flowers, trees, fruit, and pollination.

Subrisio Saltat.: an abbreviation of subrisio saltatoris, acrobat’s smile.

Angel: suppose there’s a place: like the Fourth Elegy, the Fifth begins with a vision of unsatisfactory art (in both cases, performance) and closes with a vision in which the difficulties are resolved in the presence of death and a satisfactory performance is envisioned.

SIXTH ELEGY

To the possible forms of idealized humanity—those who died young, lovers, children, performing artists—whose attempts to fulfill the ideal cause various forms of anguish, Rilke now adds the hero. It is as if the epic hero has suddenly come into the poem, almost as an afterthought. It is a wonderfully subtle portrait, focusing as it does not so much on the hero as on analogies (e.g. the fig tree) and effects (on children, mothers, lovers, and “each heart”). There is something faintly comic about the hero’s first asserting himself as a sperm cell. Heroes may be wonderful, but the role is reserved for the few and is as distant, somehow, as a legend.

Karnak: ancient Egyptian holy place, site of many temples and ruins. Rilke had visited it in 1911. The image here seems to be that characteristic depiction of the conqueror, smiling in his chariot as he is pulled by horses who smile the same smile. The smile is another recurrent image in the Elegies.

SEVENTH ELEGY

The poem now turns from life-transcendence, as envisioned in the ideal performances and the hero, to life-acceptance. The wooing voice, motivated by desire for a less transient state of being, is rejected, and the poem performs a kind of backward somersault into a beautiful image of a summer dawn. Now the dead seem to long for and seek out our earthly existence. And we are the ones who learn how to love and celebrate the visible, “to transform it within.” Human imaginative achievement, as represented by music, architecture, and love, can now be understood and praised. In the letter to his Polish translator (cited in the Introduction) Rilke wrote:

Nature, the things we move among and use, are provisional and perishable; but, so long as we are here, they are our possession and our friendship, sharing the knowledge of our grief and gladness, as they have already been the confidants of our forebears. Hence it is important not only to run down and degrade everything earthly, but just because of its temporariness, which it shares with us, we ought to grasp and transform these phenomena and these things in a most loving understanding. Transform? Yes; for our task is so deeply and so passionately to impress upon ourselves this provisional and perishable earth, that its essential being will arise again ‘invisibly’ in us. We are the bees of the invisible. We frantically plunder the visible of its honey, to accumulate it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

EIGHTH ELEGY

The celebration of human transience in the preceding Elegy is here sharply qualified. Self-consciousness, time-consciousness, and death-consciousness, which mark us off from animals and, at times, children and lovers, are Rilke’s version of a fallen condition. As he pursues the idea he discovers that even animals may not be altogether at home in this existence because they may have some awareness of the contrast between the comfort of the womb and the exposure of birth. Only creatures like gnats, who come into being in the open air, can be completely at home in the world, taking it for a womb, a mother. If there is a humorous touch in the image of the gnat hopping happily on its wedding day, there is nothing of the kind in the poem’s somber and splendid conclusion, one of those summaries of our life that give this poem its impressive scope. This Elegy is dedicated to Rudolf Kassner, an Austrian writer and thinker, because of discussions he and Rilke had at Duino about the preferability to certain states of existence (they did not agree) and such questions as the “happiness of the gnat.”

NINTH ELEGY

The poem now swings back to something more like the mood of the Seventh Elegy. But praise and pain are tightly woven together by this point in the Elegies. We would choose human existence, the opening lines affirm, if we had the alternative of metamorphosis (like Daphne, evading love to become a laurel), but the justification of our choice would not be easy to explain. It becomes clear as the poem moves forward that given our limitation we must accept and celebrate not only our own perishability but that of the things around us. If music, architecture, sculpture, heroism, and love stood for the achievements of the human imagination before, poetry now begins to come into its own as Rilke considers the function of language itself as a means of identification and praise. The letter (quoted in the note, the Seventh Elegy) in which Rilke speaks of “the things we move among and use” as “our possession and our friendship,” is relevant here as well.

TENTH ELEGY

Rilke takes several risks in the final Elegy. If the Third Elegy paralleled the epic descent to the underworld, this one seems to take us beyond life and into death in a way that no other poet has attempted. The narrative line and allegorical manner make this Elegy somewhat more accessible, but there is no slackening of imaginative intensity.