ABSTRACT
Only Rilke’s angels are complete. While they move with terrifying effortlessness through the realms of life and death, his animals, like his human mortals, find such passage arduous. Although the animals of “The Eighth Elegy” do not look at but through death and walk in eternity, they still suffer from the “weight and melancholy” of the loss of a Wordsworthian celestial light that once connected them “infinitely gently” to that blessed prelapsarian realm that any poet would fail to uncover. What Rilke mourns especially in the Elegies is the loss of that infinite gentleness that people divine and apprehend in the animal’s sorrow. All animals — human and non-human — in Rilke’s work, have faces, all of them are incomplete, pleading, looking, longing. It is what makes him the animal he is: exiled from himself and exiled from human closeness.
