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Sur les maisons des morts mon ombre passe SONNETS TO ORPHEUS Introductionīeau ciel, vrai ciel, regarde-moi qui change!Īprès tant d’orgueil, après tant d’étrange I wish once more to thank Peter Porter and Ray Ockenden who generously gave their time and their talent in working on the Sonnets.ĭavid Luke was kind enough to read a draft of the Letters to a Young Poet, and his notes on my text were of great help to me: my thanks to him also. Sonnets to Orpheus Die Sonnette an Orpheus They contain insights which are as profound today as when they were written, almost a century ago. By now the letters have become a part of literary folklore.

Rilke's ten letters to the young officer-cadet Franz Xavier Kappus, written between 19, were later published as Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke's was a deeply inward, introspective nature, but in the Sonnets he succeeds brilliantly in looking out from his isolation: in making poetry from material which lies in an important sense 'outside'.

A tension which adds life to Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus comes through a paradox. The young dancer Vera, for whom the Sonnets are inscribed, taken so young into the Underworld, becomes Eurydice. In them, Rilke partly identifies himself with Orpheus. The Sonnets were 'taken down' during a very few weeks in 1922 - weeks in which the poet also brought his Duino Elegies to completion. They ask to be read by the ear and by the inner eye as much as by the intellect.

The Sonnets have an astonishing range which takes in the Singing God and his beloved Eurydice legend in general, along with time, flight and change architecture, music and dance animals, plants, flowers and fruits. His Sonnets to Orpheus may appear comparatively simple, even casual, at first reading, but they are crammed with content which resonates far beyond the familiar legend of Orpheus and Eurydice. 'They are perhaps most mysterious, even to me,' wrote Rainer Maria Rilke of the Sonnets to Orpheus, 'in the manner in which they arrived and imposed themselves on me - the most puzzling dictation I have ever received and taken down.' Rilke, born in Prague in 1875, died at Valmont near Montreux in the last days of 1926.