Lines 1-6a and 77-79 of the ninth elegy and lines 1-12 of the tenth elegy were written at Duino, but were completed in 1922. He began both the third and sixth elegy between January and March 1912, but completed them at various stages in the following years. While at Duino in 1912, Rilke completed the first and second elegy in January and February. The Duino Elegies is composed of ten elegies and an appendix in which Rilke included fragmentary pieces and the poems he wrote in the effort towards completing the elegies but which “time, so to speak, destroyed before they could be born, or cut off in their development to such an extent that the broken edges show”. Very calmly he climbed back up to his room, set his notebook aside, and answered the difficult letter.īy the evening the whole First Elegy had been written. Taking out the notebook that he always carried with him, he wrote down these words, together with a few lines that formed by themselves without his intervention. Then, all at once, in the midst of his thoughts, he stopped it seemed that from the raging storm a voice had called to him:“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” Rilke walked back and forth, completely absorbed in the problem of how to answer the letter.

Rilke climbed down to the bastions which, jutting to the east and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by a narrow path along the cliffs, which abruptly drop off, for about two hundred feet, into the sea. Outside, a violent north wind was blowing, but the sun shone and the water gleamed with silver. He wanted to take care of it quickly, and had to deal with numbers and other such tedious matters.

Then, one morning, he received a troublesome business letter. A great sadness came over him he began to think that this winter too would be without result. He had felt no premonition of what was being prepared deep inside him though there may be a hint of it in a letter he wrote: “The nightingale is approaching-” Had he perhaps felt what was to come? But once again it fell silent. Rilke later told me how these Elegies arose. Rilke’s host, Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, wrote in her memoirs of the moment as recounted by Rilke: It was along this path that the Duino Elegies was brought to life.

Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke