Duino Elegies
The opening cry asks who among the orders of angels would hear it if it were made, and answers that every angel is terrible; the ten sections that follow move through lovers who block each other's view, acrobats on a threadbare carpet, children who died early, the animal that sees the open where people see only world, and a Lament who leads the newly dead up into the mountains of primal pain. The Angel addressed is explicitly not the Christian one, and the instruction finally arrived at is to praise this world to him - to say house, bridge, fountain, gate, jug, fruit tree, window. Begun at Duino castle above the Adriatic in 1912, stalled through the war years, and finished at Muzot in a few days of February 1922 alongside the Sonnets to Orpheus.
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