Not death alone, of course, but all the things that go with it. Loss, change, pain, illness, irreparable distress. Night-fears. The ache of incessant consciousness, the cauldron of inherited savagery that steams even in children, the sense of being different from the rest of the creation, the terrifying perfection and indifference of the angel.

But these characterizations of the poem’s themes suggest an abstractness that it avoids. The Elegies are thronged with acrobats, stories, historical characters, myths, statues, cities, landscapes, animals, carnivals, angels, words, a summer morning, dead children, and a host of astonishing metaphors. And always death, a presence, a mystery, looms up, near or far, to give the poem its fullest resonance and meaning. Rilke wrote to a Swiss friend about “the determination constantly maturing in me to keep life open towards death.” To his Polish translator, he elaborated the idea:

Affirmation of life AND death appears as one in the ‘Elegies.’ To admit the one without the other is, as is here learned and celebrated, a limitation that in the end excludes all infinity. Death is the side of life that is turned away from us: we must try to achieve the fullest consciousness of our existence, which is at home in the two unseparated realms, inexhaustibly nourished by both. … The true figure of life extends through both domains, the blood of the mightiest circulation drives through both; there is neither a here nor a beyond, but the great unity.… Transience everywhere plunges into a deep being.

Rilke’s insights about the interpenetration of life and death do not account for everything the Elegies have to tell us, but they make an excellent starting-place for the new reader, for they mark the distinctive territory of the poem (few poets have written so searchingly about the fact and meaning of human mortality) and lead one forward, as the Lament leads the young man through the hushed land of death in the final section of the poem.

Perhaps the reader has noticed that even in explanations like the one quoted above, Rilke resorts to metaphor: nourishment, the circulation of blood, a plunge into a deep. Let this serve to remind us that the poem does not drive toward philosophical statement or toward articles of faith. Its tendency is motion, not rest, and to try to extract a system of thought from it, as readers have learned, is like nailing water or netting wind. Richard Exner spoke of Rilke’s achievement:

… a new language which in turn expresses the very inseparability of intellect and emotion. After all, emotional experiences are expressed in intellectual correlatives, and the intellect interprets the emotional event! … Rilke never said I give you the answers. He said love the questions and perhaps you’ll live your way into the answers.

There is a further lesson in metaphor. It is a unique instrument of thought, a tool, a sixth sense (or better, an extra eye, extra ear, etc.), a ladder rising from the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, a philosopher’s honeymoon, an angel’s mirror. And Rilke is a master of it. In an essay on Dante, the Russian poet Mandelstam provides a valuable insight into the way great poetry moves forward through sequences of metaphorical transformation:

It is only by convention that the development of an image can be called development. Indeed, imagine to yourself an airplane (forgetting the technical impossibility) which in full flight constructs and launches another machine. In just the same way this second flying machine, completely absorbed in its own flight, still manages to assemble and launch a third. In order to make this suggestive and helpful comparison more precise, I will add that the assembly and launching of these technically unthinkable machines that are sent flying off in the midst of flight do not constitute a secondary or peripheral function of the plane that is in flight; they form a most essential attribute and part of the flight itself, and they contribute no less to its feasibility and safety than the proper functioning of the steering gear or the uninterrupted working of the engine.

That this description applies to Rilke’s method and helps to account for the exhilaration and difficulty of his poem should be clear to the reader before he or she is very far into the poem. It occurs from phrase to phrase, as in the list which constitutes the answer to Rilke’s question of the angels (“Who are you?”) early in the Second Elegy. It develops from line to line and stanza to stanza, as in the Fourth Elegy, where we careen through natural images—trees, migratory birds, lions—to the interior landscapes of lovers, to an elaborate trope based on drawing technique, to waiting in a theater for a performance to begin, a dancer, a puppet show, then to the poet’s relation with his father (with figures of tasting and spatial distance) and back to the puppet show, now operated by an angel. Perhaps most wonderful of all, this transforming process operates from Elegy to Elegy, as the poem gathers strength and momentum by recycling and renewing itself. One can read any Elegy by itself, and one can browse, but to read straight through, from First to Tenth, is to experience the full cumulative power of the transformation, the whole flight.

What of the man who made these soaring, changing figures? He is something of a mystery. He has been worshipped and he has been reviled. He is accused of narcissism, of inability to sustain full relationships, of overweening egotism—these ‘failings’ have been much discussed. But Rilke was no monster. He gave of himself to others as he could, when he could, while remaining true in the way he felt he must to his great preoccupations. Stefan Zweig, who knew him in Paris, found himself wondering, as he wrote an autobiography during the Second World War, whether the world would ever again see people like Paul Valéry, Emile Verhaeren, and Francis Jammes, artists who renounced the ephemeral and dedicated themselves fully to their art:

Of all these men, perhaps none lived more gently, more secretly, more invisibly than Rilke. But it was not willful, nor forced or assumed priestly loneliness such as Stefan George celebrated in Germany; silence seemed to grow around him, wherever he went, wherever he was.