Duino Elegies of Rilke <br />Are whose elegies? <br />Occasioned by whose death? <br />And, who is composing them? <br /> <br />The German poet who had worked <br />With the French sculptor, Creator <br />Ofthe Thinkers or the Kiss – Auguste Rodin <br />Wrote these ten elegies over ten years. <br /> <br />He could imagine himself in place of the dead <br />And formulate the hopes and fears of theirs <br />And spelt them out in these elegies <br />And a few other poems and sonnets. <br /> <br />As the Russian Marina Tsvetayeva wrote to him in 1926 <br />“You are poetry itself”: I still remember how in 2008 <br />I had taken his poems translated by Stephen Mitchell <br />To Ekanth, the hotel on top of Lavasa during the monsoon. <br /> <br />And got the shock of Rilke’s acquaintance <br />With that brilliant introduction by Robert Hess: <br />Rilke feels Eurydice had more things to do by being <br />In the Underworld than joining Orpheus above!<br /><br />Daniel Trevelyn Joseph<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/what-possibilities/
