The Sonnets to Orpheus: 10.
The Sonnets to Orpheus: 10. - context Summary
Late Rilke: 1922 Sonnets
This sonnet is from Rilke’s 1922 collection The Sonnets to Orpheus and exemplifies his late concerns with transformation, art, and the human condition. Addressing both tombs and waking life, the speaker greets relics and recovered speech as part of a cycle that moves from silence into expression. The poem frames intellectual and emotional wrestling with doubt, and closes by noting the ambiguous tension between knowing and not knowing in the human face.
Read Complete AnalysesYou who are close to my heart always, I welcome you, ancient coffins of stone, which the cheerful water of Roman days still flows through, like a wandering song. Or those other ones that are open wide like the eyes of a happily waking shepard -with silence and bee-suck nettle inside, from which ecstatic butterflies flittered; everything that has been wrestled from doubt I welcome-the mouths that burst open after long knowledge of what it is to be mute. Do we know this, my friends, or don't we know this? Both are formed by the hesitant hour in the deep calm of the human face.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.