ABSTRACT
The first of The Sonnets to Orpheus mythologizes not only the fortuitous arrival of the 55 sonnets but also the unexpected completion of the Duino Elegies that Rilke had commenced in the castle of Duino in 1912 and continued as a fragmentary draft in Paris in 1913 and in Spain in 1914. The war, as we read in many of his letters, interrupted his work, and it was not until February of 1922 that in a burst of creativity, the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus came to him in a matter of a few weeks, sudden and serendipitous like a rush or wafting from an open grave—Eurydice’s grave, Paula Modersohn-Becker’s grave, the grave of Wera Knoop “whose incompletion and innocence holds open the door to the grave” (Muzot 377), and to whom the sonnets are dedicated.
