ABSTRACT
From his letter of early January 1922, we gather that Rainer Maria Rilke had received Gertrud Knoop’s response, for now Wera’s illness and death are the explicit focus. Much of the letter exposes Rilke’s strenuous efforts to apply his theory of the seamless unity of life and death to Wera’s suffering and untimely passing. If it is an effort whose labor we witness in the letter as only partially, if at all, accomplished; it therefore necessitates its continuance in The Sonnets to Orpheus, whose arrival was only days away from the date of the letter. The preponderance of exclamation, repetition, and mawkish idealization, the too easy movement—via a summarizing parenthesis—from life to some cheaply redemptive “Whole” signal that any theory attempting to explain a death as tragic and terrifying as Wera’s must fall woefully short.
