ABSTRACT

“The First Elegy” opens famously: “Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel/Ordnungen?” “Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angels’/orders?” (629). None of the angels in their haughty hierarchies would have bothered to hear the cry. It is a hopeless question (as rhetorical questions tend to be). To assign the angels orders or hierarchies implies distances and dimensions, thrones and dominions. But in Rilke’s cosmology angels do not perform their ghostly acrobatics in vast interstellar spaces. They move and have their being in our lives and graves. They are being and non-being at once. They are aerialists of “deep being” “tiefes Sein” into which, Rilke says, all things plunge (Muzot 373). They are supremely physical. They are superior to us only because in the angels the transformation to become invisible is complete, whereas we have yet awkwardly to accomplish it. Rilke’s angels fly—if they have wings—between upstroke and downstroke, life and death, blooming and wilting, longing and lament, systole and diastole. They are sign and symbol of the gradual loss of our bodily density until we, too, are light as breath. They are time. They are time’s immanence in all things.