DUINO ELEGIES AND THE SONNETS TO ORPHEUS
by RAINER MARIA'RILKE
Translated by A. POULIN JR.
205 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $10.95.
$4.95 paperback.
Pacing outside Duino Castle near Trieste in early 1912, German Poet Rainer Maria Rilke heard a voice above the Adriatic surf: "And if I cried, who'd listen to me in those angelic orders?" Rilke took this enigmatic question as the signal to begin his chef-d'oeuvre: a series of poems that would unite the visible order of things with the invisible universe of thought—to see the world as the angels might. He finished two...