The First Elegy - AHB

I'm going outside of the box on this one. My subject is a poem entitled, "The First Elegy", by Rainer Maria Rilke, on of Prague's most well know poets. The poem touches on the sacred, and I think it is an interesting piece to place alongside the Decalogue and Wings of Desire. Check it out here.

First thing to notice is the term elegy, which means, "a poem of serious reflection, typically a lament for the dead". Rilke's verse drips with the mysterious aspect of the sacred. The lines seem both familiar and unknowable. One of my favorite lines is, "Ah, who can we turn to, then? Neither angels nor men, and the animals already know by instinct we're not comfortably at home in our translated world." What is fascinating about this line, and the entire piece, is that Rilke communicates a sense of the sacred along with a profound feeling of loneliness. It is as if the presence of a higher order or being fills the human being with uncomfortable feelings that he would not have possessed otherwise; a feeling echoed in this line, "beauty's nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear, and we adore it because of the serene scorn it could kill us with". To me this is something more than just the mysterium tremendum. That phrase speaks of fear, such as the creature feeling, but not the same kind of inward death that Rilke's poem walks through. Perhaps the elegy is not even for someone else, maybe it is being written by the one who is watching his own death occur.

The only feeling more awful than this death is love.

"It's strange not to wish your wishes anymore"