16. Rilke: Duino elegy Ten

Fig. 26 Leonid Pasternak, Portrait of Rainer Maria Rilke, date unknown. Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leonid_Pasternak_-_Portrait_painting_of_Rainer_Maria_Rilke.jpg, public domain. It is a natural reaction to see in Elegy Ten a kind of summation of the ideas and images of the whole cycle. The themes that we have been tracing do of course recur: angels, flowers, lovers, mythologies. And themes and motifs that dominate Rainer Maria Rilke’s whole poetic oeuvre find .