Duineser Elegien: The everlasting and the ephemeral

To read Rainer Maria Rilke’s work might be considered not an easy task for some. Undoubtedly, there are those who regard his metaphysical poetry as complicated and obscure. Hermetic, even. I know this because I was one of those who once fought for clarity and distinction. However, like a terrible angel hovering over the castle in Duino, the Duineser Elegien remain a strong presence in today’s poetry. But how can we aspire to understand what we have not ventured into? We must unthread his words in order to get closer to the ineffable.
In doing so, I’ve come to learn that there are many constant concepts and figures throughout the elegies that allude to the mortal and the divine, especially angels. However, Rilke’s angelic creature seems greatly distant from any religious preconception: it’s the thin line, the translucent threshold he constructs between the everlasting and the ephemeral that lets us see these angels as a transcendental form of human existence, desolately gazing at the limitations and deficiencies of our ephemeral society.

Finally they have no more need of us, the early-departed,

weaned gently from earthly things, as one outgrows

the mother’s mild breast. But we, needing

such great secrets, for whom sadness is often

the source of a blessed progress, could we exist without them?

The poet, while pointing the difference between us, the mortals, and them, the divine, suggests in the first two lines of this stanza that having crossed to the realm of death, these angels are nothing more than humans stripped of their humanity. But, could we exist without them? Although the question posed by Rilke is left unanswered, we, the mortal, the ephemeral, can rely on the promise that we will be rewarded by death, who will bestow upon us the eternal, the majestic yet fierce and terrible form of the angel.