The Sonnets to Orpheus: 1.
The Sonnets to Orpheus: 1. - fact Summary
Written After Personal Loss
This sonnet, one of The Sonnets to Orpheus, was composed in 1922 during a burst of creativity after Rilke’s daughter died. Its imagery of music, trees, and a newly built inner "temple" maps a transformative, consoling response to loss. The poem frames Orpheus-like song as a renewing force that gathers attentive creatures and converts fragile shelter into a deeper, communal hearing.
Read Complete AnalysesA tree ascended there. Oh pure transendence! Oh Orpheus sings! Oh tall tree in the ear! And all things hushed. Yet even in that silence a new beginning, beckoning, change appeared. Creatures of stillness crowded from the bright unbound forest, out of their lairs and nests; and it was not from any dullness, not from fear, that they were so quiet in themselves, but from just listening. Bellow, roar, shriek seemed small inside their hearts. And where there had been at most a makeshift hut to receive the music, a shelter nailed up out of their darkest longing, with an entryway that shuddered in the wind- you built a temple deep inside their hearing.
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