Chapter 12 Existential Anxiety: Rilke’s Duino Elegies

If my human mind cannot acknowledge that all that is, is right; yet since what is, must be, I will sit amidst the ruins and smile. Truly we were not born to enjoy, but to submit, and to hope.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875, nineteen years later than Freud; both were German-speaking citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but Rilke, unlike Freud, was Roman Catholic. I discussed in the Chapter 11 Wordsworth’s theory of the relationship of infantile experience to poetic sensibility. Rilke, like Wordsworth, sought understanding of himself and his poetry in his childhood origins, but his subjective account of his early experience and its psychic sequelae is very different. Wordsworth described himself as ‘the blessed bab’, because at the breast he gathered passion from his mother’s eye; Rilke came to view himself as ‘the unblessed bab’ who felt annihilated by his mother’s unseeing eyes.

We can contrast Wordsworth’s well-known epiphany on the bond between childhood and adult life with Rilke’s reflection on a similar theme:

Rilke wrote, not of a rainbow, but of the exposed remnant of a demolished house:

And from these walls, once blue, green, and yellow,… the air of these lives issued…. The sweet smell of neglected infants lingered there, the smell of frightened schoolchildren, and the stuffiness from the beds of pubescent boys…. You would think I had stood looking at it for a long time; but I swear I began to run as soon as I recognised this wall. For that’s what is horrible—that I did recognise it. I recognise everything here, and that’s why it passes right into me: it is at home inside me.

One thing both poets did have in common is something they shared with Freud, a belief that what they discover within themselves is of general significance; that in fundamentals all men are the same, transcending culture an