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Rilke, Rainer Maria - 05 First Elegy
Identifier
005924
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Water baby - Herbert James Draper
A description of the experience
Duino Elegies – Rainer Maria Rilke [The First Elegy]
Finally they have no more need of us, the early-departed,
weaned gently from earthly things, as one outgrows
the mother’s mild breast.
But we, needing such great secrets,
for whom sadness is often the source of a blessed progress,
could we exist without them?
Is it a meaningless story how once, in the grieving for Linos,
first music ventured to penetrate arid rigidity,
so that, in startled space, which an almost godlike youth
suddenly left forever, the emptiness first felt
the quivering that now enraptures us, and comforts, and helps.