Observations placeholder
Rilke, Rainer Maria - 22 Fifth Elegy
Identifier
015338
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
Herbert James Draper
A description of the experience
Duino Elegies – Rainer Maria Rilke [The Fifth Elegy]
There, the withered, wrinkled lifter,
an old man, only a drummer now,
shrunk in his massive hide, as though it had once
contained two men, and one was already
lying there in the churchyard, and the other had survived him,
deaf, and sometimes a little
confused in his widowed skin.
And the young one, the man, as if he were son of a neck
and a nun: taut and erectly filled
with muscle and simple-mindedness.