The First Elegy

Placing poetry at the crossroads of American life since 1910.

The First Elegy Home > Poems > The First Elegy Poems The First Elegy By Rainer Maria Rilke Share Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels’ Orders? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly to his heart: I’d be consumed in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying. And so I grip myself and choke down that call note of dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we turn to in our need? Not Angels, not humans, and the sly animals see at once how li

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