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Rilke, Rainer Maria - 03 First Elegy
Identifier
010892
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Rilke’s poem is very clear in stating where he believes the voices to come from – souls who cannot ‘move on’; they are stuck in some sort of spiritual state that stops them from progressing beyond the state they were in after death.
They are lost souls, possibly souls unaware they are even dead at all…
Herbert James Draper, Oil study for Clyties of the Mist
A description of the experience
Duino Elegies – Rainer Maria Rilke [The First Elegy]
Voices, voices.
Hear then, my heart, as only saints have heard: so that the mighty call raised them from the earth:
they, though, knelt on impossibly and paid no attention:
such was their listening. ….
listen to the breath,
the unbroken message that creates itself from the silence.
It rushes towards you now, from those youthfully dead.
Whenever you entered, didn’t their fate speak to you,
quietly, in churches in Naples or Rome?
Or else an inscription exaltedly impressed itself on you,
as lately the tablet in Santa Maria Formosa.
What do they will of me? That I should gently remove
the semblance of injustice, that slightly, at times,
hinders their spirits from a pure moving-on.