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An impassioned monologue about coming to terms with human existence, Duino
Elegies is occasioned by Rilke’s intensely private and solitary existence, and
marked by a mystical sense of God and death. In a cycle of ten elegies, Rilke raises the theme of solitude to an existential plane, attempts to penetrate into the essential nature of phenomena and soars to great metaphysical heights. Characterized by his evocative language, his symbolism and use of metaphor, Duino Elegies embodies the metamorphosis of Rilke’s personal ontological torments, his agonizing perception of the limitations and insufficiency of the human condition and fractured human consciousness. The principal themes of these messianic elegies are man’s loneliness, the perfection of the angels, life and death, love and lovers, and the task of the poet.
In Tennyson’s most truly philosophical work, In Memoriam, his heart pours out and questions itself to find at last in religious meditation a tremulous peace. A profound tribute to his dearest friend, the poem is quiet and even in its tone, and written in stanzas of four octosyllabic lines rhyming abba; divided into 131 sections of varying length, and inspired by the changing mood of the author’s own anxieties about change, evolution, and immortality. From the personal, the poem moves to the universal: first, there is an expression of universal doubt, and then of universal faith, which rests ultimately not on reason or philosophy but on the soul’s instinct for immortality. A metrical masterpiece with rhythmic felicities, In Memoriam is the supreme threnody of English literature, where the poet, grappling with the great religious and philosophic questions, enshrines not only his passionate grief at the loss of Arthur Henry Hallam, but the result of seventeen years of solitary brooding over the great problems of life, love and death.
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