![]() I did it to make stark the premise the ninth elegy argues. Consider the quote above…I omitted the lush extensions: the laurel which would have a heart, and the loving description of the particular green of the its leaves. To have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. And we too,īut to have been this once, completely, even if only once: ![]() ![]() Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heartīut because truly being here is so much because everything hereĪpparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way That’s the first line of his first elegy written at Duino Castle in Italy in 1910. “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the hierarchies of angels? ” If you are alone at cliff’s edge, beaten by a harsh salt wind, the ruins of the 11th century behind you, a steep rocky drop to the sea before you-I can think of no better company than Rilke, who, in just such a position, heard: You are, too, if you are trying to stay truly alive. I prefer the very-human poets vibrating like strings strung too taut between beauty and loss, to any text that lures me out of the world, or teaches me not to suffer with it. They can somehow bear the world as it is-I don’t say they don’t flinch, that they don’t cry out-but they take it: they embrace our transient world, they suffer, they love, and they sing. They wrestle with the dark angels and never win. ![]() I know texts more consoling than scripture. ![]()
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