Now I like a fair amount of what I’ve read of Rilke, setting aside different approaches to translation.

But Duino Elegies–despite or perhaps because of its ambition, despite or perhaps because of its mystical reveries, and despite or perhaps because of the devotion it has received from so many–struck me as over-charged, over-worked. His approach to Christian mysticism here, from one forlorn or forgotten, longing for attention but fearing it, is striking in its paradoxes and honesty. We long for what we cannot understand, dread a truth as it may or may never emerge. Too, I admired how these same terrors of faith find their way to the writing of poetry, to the relationships we meet.

And so it is not at all the subject of the works (though perhaps not all elegies traditionally, but at least reveries) that I could not attach myself to, but the dithyrambic abstractions and oaths that make up the preponderance of his verse here. There is little of lightness or delicacy about topics which might call for it: instead, we have long and weighed-down verses of the non-sensical:

He attaches these to moments of clarity, of particular or peculiar happenings, but the heaviness, the almost didactic revelatory tone remains. Even in the Third Elegy, my favorite, he cannot help but “tell the world” rather than allow moments to unwrap themselves as they will:

I can almost just turn this to prose and put it in the hands of a melodramatic primetime 20-something. And that sounds cruel, but it’s the nature of this unwavering series of long pronouncements that I am reacting to.

None of this is to say that I will read no more Rilke, nor that this was an unenjoyable read. But in contrast to the “Sonnets to Orpheus” (of course) or individual poems like “Song of the Dwarf” or “Day in Autumn” or “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” I was expecting . . . lighter?