Rilke's Duino Angels and the Angels of Islam

This article's point of departure is Rilke's specification that the angels of his Duino Elegies are not to be equated with Christian ones, being more comparable to Islamic angels. Existing efforts to apply this notion to the Duino Elegies have focused on the phenomenological aspect of the elegiac angels, but this article argues that the rhetorical function of the angels within the cycle is key, and it demonstrates how Rilke's angels are rhetorically linked with the angels of Islam. The critical connection between the Duino Elegies and the Qur'an is that the angels in both cases are finally subordinate to the objectives of the poetic persona/poet. The article concludes by showing how Rilke's rhetorical use of his Duino angels is also continuous with the conventions of the classical German elegy. ********** "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic/orders? And even if one of them pressed me/suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed/in his stronger existence." (1) These lines, the famous, ever startling opening of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies (completed in 1922), have been explicated almost as much for their biographical interest as for their primacy within Rilke's text--a cycle of ten elegies expounding nothing less than the mature poet's conception of his own place and calling within the world of creation. Along with his Sonnets to Orpheus, also completed in 1922, this late work is widely considered Rilke's masterpiece, if not in fact the supreme accomplishment of twentieth-century German lyric poetry as a whole. (2) Written in early 1912, well after the Prague-born poet had first established his literary reputation, these opening lines of the Duino Elegies mark a major comeback for Rilke after a long period of inactivity in which he intermittently despaired of ever writing again. Certainly the circumstances surrounding their inception are well known. Since October of 1911, he had been the house guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis at Duino Castle on the Adriatic. One day in January, after receiving an annoying piece of business mail, he had fled outdoors to mull over his response just as a strong bora was blowing up from the sea. Almost reverentially, the Princess relays what ensued in her memoirs: Rilke climbed down to the bastions which, jutting to the east and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by a narrow path along the cliffs. These cliffs fall steeply, for about two hundred feet, into the sea. Rilke paced back and forth, deep in thought, since the reply to the letter so concerned him. Then, all at once, in the midst of his brooding, he halted suddenly, for it seemed to him that in the raging of the storm a voice bad called to him: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?".... He took out his notebook, which he always carried with him, and wrote down these words, together with a few lines that formed themselves without his intervention ... Very calmly he climbed back up to his room, set his notebook aside, and replied to the difficult letter. By that evening the entire elegy had been written down. (3) The opening lines of the Duino Elegies, then, have a more than usually dramatic bit of inception history attached to them, but they are striking as well for introducing the idiosyncratically conceived angels that are the figurative mainstay of the entire poetic cycle. By the beginning of the second elegy, these angels have become the object of an apostrophe that is sustained over the remaining eight elegies and--we might say--over the next ten years of Rilke's life, till the completion of the cycle in 1922. Commensurate with their centrality in this work, the angels have come in for a good deal of critical attention, yet Rilke's best known specification about how they are to be viewed has inspired surprisingly little discussion. It is a fact all the more curious since the comment in question--the poet's advice to his Polish translator in a letter of 1925--has been cited fully as much as the inception account itself: "The 'angel' of the Elegies has nothing to do with the angel of the Christian heaven (rather with the angel figures of Islam). …