Rilke at the Castle

It was another winter. Rilke set his pen to the air and nothing. Duino Castle and its grand white and silver grounds, the promise of the nightingale. Nothing.

One day, as the princess tells it, a business letter arrived. Full of the numbers that other world and difficult to answer. He climbed down to the path by the cliff, thinking.

Then, a voice: “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angel’s hierarchies?”

And the letter was written, and the Duino Elegies.

The letter still arrives for each poet, as it did for Rilke, when the sky is the poet’s sky and the nightingale has promised, and yet nothing comes. What arrives is the letter, full of that other world and its ugly demands. And, somehow, when he dares to answer it, both worlds open.