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In 1919 he left Germany for Switzerland, where he spent the rest of his life. He disliked the country intensely, regarded it as "a waiting room plastered with Swiss views." But in the 13th-Century Muzot Castle, he delivered his final elegies: those tremendous, all but murderous mysteries of mind, swarming with "exciting, dangerous, forbidding" angels, which Mrs. Butler calls "the strangest perhaps of all the strange poems our century has produced." Rilke is one of the most difficult of poets to translate; but this passage on angels will faintly suggest both his quality and the violence of the Muzot experience:
Earliest triumphs, and high creation's favorites,
Mountain-ranges and dawn-red ridges
Since all beginning, pollen of blossoming godhead,
Articulate light, avenues, stairways, thrones,
Spaces of being, shields of delight, tumults
Of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, singly,
Mirrors, drawing back within themselves
The beauty radiant from their countenance.
Death had a joke in store for the celebrant of girlhood, roses and death. Gathering roses one day for a lovely virgin from Egypt (dry source of all cults of death), he scratched his hand. Shortly afterwards it became clear that Rilke had leukemia, a hideously painful disease of the white corpuscles. This century's great minstrel of death, who dreaded the very word, met it in complete integrity, refusing anesthetic, floated upon the sumptuous hospitality of friends whom he refused to see. "Except for the presence of the doctor and the nurse he died, as he had lived, alone, surrounded by every care and comfort, and suffering the tortures of the damned."
* Whom critics refer to as the German Keats (1770-1843).