ABSTRACT
In January 1912 Rainer Maria Rilke received a bothersome business letter while he was a guest at Castle Duino on the Adriatic coast. Even though he had been writing poems sporadically during the fall and winter, he felt despondent, as Marie von Thurn and Taxis, his hostess at Duino, reports, because he feared that another season would pass without any true poetry. Thinking about the proper response to the business letter, Rilke climbed down to the bastions where the cliffs fell about 200 feet down into the sea and walked back and forth on a narrow path. A heavy Bora blew, but the sun, nevertheless, brilliantly illuminated the stormy sea. His thoughts were suddenly interrupted when it seemed to him that he heard a voice calling to him from out of the storm: “Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic orders?”1 He wrote in his notebook, and a few other verses followed “without his own contribution.” Marie Taxis continues her account: “Who came?…He knew it now: the god…Quietly he climbed back up to his room, put aside his notebook, and finished his business letter. When evening came, the whole elegy had been written down” (RDE: 50).2
