The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke
Riding, riding, riding across a plain in Hungary in 1663, an eighteen-year-old carries the standard for an Austrian troop moving against the Turks, and takes a rose petal from a woman at a roadside to keep inside his tunic. Twenty-seven short prose-poem panels bring the troop to a captured castle, a banquet, a staircase and a countess, with a fire somewhere below. Composed in a single night in 1899 and twice revised, it sold in the hundreds of thousands as a pocket book carried to the front in the First World War, to its author's discomfort.
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