ABSTRACT
In the first of the Duino Elegies, Rilke’s vocation is to heed what the dead want of him. Hermes”, plays out achingly gently the pure movement of the dead’s spirits. The poem performs as if in slow motion Orpheus’s doomed desire to bring Eurydice back to life after she is bitten by a snake and dies on their wedding day. In the ninth sonnet of the second series of The Sonnets of Orpheus, Rilke’s poems are allegorized “als die heimliche leise Gewahrung,” as a secret, gentle safekeepingthat silently transforms us inwardlylike a quiet playing child of infinite coupling. Since most children don’t play quietly, and since Rilke had no interest in raising his daughter, his poetry, we might suspect, also labors to displace the noisy child.
