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A review by taylorzart
Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke
5.0
I read this with the class RILKING led by Ariana Reines (one of my fave contemporary poets, I highly recommend you check her out). There's a lot of themes here that are always guaranteed to excite me - the razor's edge of divinity and humanity, the power of childhood, anti-capitalism, our relationship to death - and these elegies took those themes and made them feel painfully relevant to this bizarre moment.
The elegies are absolutely full of melancholy, but a melancholy that is not without hope - at least I think so. I read a call to action in the weight of these works. Something about the melancholy here serves as a reminder to live while you're alive. And sometimes that requires a resetting - a perspective that remembers the transcendence of childhood and love and the natural world. And all of it is complex and sometimes it really hurts, but it is our humanity. And dammit, that is something.
The elegies are absolutely full of melancholy, but a melancholy that is not without hope - at least I think so. I read a call to action in the weight of these works. Something about the melancholy here serves as a reminder to live while you're alive. And sometimes that requires a resetting - a perspective that remembers the transcendence of childhood and love and the natural world. And all of it is complex and sometimes it really hurts, but it is our humanity. And dammit, that is something.