Duino Elegies of Rilke
Are whose elegies?
Occasioned by whose death?
And, who is composing them?

The German poet who had worked
With the French sculptor, Creator
Ofthe Thinkers or the Kiss – Auguste Rodin
Wrote these ten elegies over ten years.

He could imagine himself in place of the dead
And formulate the hopes and fears of theirs
And spelt them out in these elegies
And a few other poems and sonnets.

As the Russian Marina Tsvetayeva wrote to him in 1926
“You are poetry itself”: I still remember how in 2008
I had taken his poems translated by Stephen Mitchell
To Ekanth, the hotel on top of Lavasa during the monsoon.

And got the shock of Rilke’s acquaintance
With that brilliant introduction by Robert Hess:
Rilke feels Eurydice had more things to do by being
In the Underworld than joining Orpheus above!

Daniel Trevelyn Joseph

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/what-possibilities/