Poetry for Students

Volume 19 29

only child of Josef Rilke, a minor railway official,

and Sophie Entz Rilke. In 1897, Rilke changed his

name to Rainer Maria Rilke. By most accounts, he

had an unhappy childhood, raised by parents who

were mired in an unhappy marriage. Rilke was ed-

ucated at military boarding schools and, later, stud-

ied philosophy for a short time at Prague’s

Charles-Ferdinand University. His real education,

however, came after he left Prague. In Munich, he

socialized with the city’s literati, published two po-

etry collections, and staged a few of his plays. In

Venice, he met Lou Andreas-Salome, an intellec-

tual more than a decade older than Rilke, who had

a strong influence on many of Europe’s writers and

artists, including Freidrich Nietzsche. Andreas-

Salome became Rilke’s lover for a short time, ac-

companied him on his travels throughout Europe

and Russia, and had a lasting influence on his

thinking and work.

Raised Roman Catholic, Rilke was obsessed

with religious questions, though he eschewed con-

ventional religious thinking. He believed the hu-

man condition was essentially that of aloneness and

that human beings could access God the most when

they were alone. Because his early poems at-

tempted to describe the contours of his own con-

sciousness, they were often abstract and largely

unsuccessful. However, once Rilke began studying

the visual arts and learning the ways in which

painters created effects, his poetry changed. The

first book that began showing these changes was

Das Buch der Bilder(The Book of Images) pub-

lished in 1902. In poems such as “Childhood,”

Rilke uses finely honed language and focused sim-

iles to depict universal experiences.

Ril ke’s style changed even more after serving

as secretary to sculptor Auguste Rodin in Paris

from 1905–1906. In place of the often abstract and

sentimental verse he had been writing, he began

writing poems that described concrete subjects in

symbolic yet detailed terms, and his poems took on

a more chiseled, tightly structured quality. He

called these compositions “thing poems” and pub-

lished a collection of them titled New Poems

(1907). Following the publication of New Poems,

Rilke began an itinerant existence over the next

seven years, traveling to more than fifty different

places, including North Africa, Paris, Egypt,

Berlin, Spain (Toledo), and Duino (between Venice

and Triest), where, as the guest of Princess Marie

Tour en Taxis, he began writing what became The

Duino Elegies(1923), the best-known and most

celebrated of his works.

In addition to The Duino Elegies, Rilke’s most

popular and enduring works include The Book of

Hours(1905),Sonnets to Orpheus(1923), the novel

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge(1930), and

Letters to a Young Poet(1929), a collection of ad-

vice in the form of letters. After a lifetime spent bat-

tling various ailments, Rilke died of leukemia on

December 29, 1926, in Montreaux, Switzerland.

Poem Text

Childhood

Rainer Maria Rilke

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