Reading notes

• The Book of Images §61 the Angel

  Rilke's recurring Angel, here the one who wrestled the patriarch in Genesis; to be overcome by him is not loss but growth -- the seed of the 'terrible' Angel of the later Duineser Elegien.

• The Life of the Virgin Mary §1 angels

  Rilke's recurring Angel; here the whole heavenly host, who must strain not to break into song on the night Mary is born.

• The Life of the Virgin Mary §13 great angel

  The same Angel of the Annunciation returns, at the cycle's close, to summon Mary to her death.

• The Book of Hours §27 Angels

  Rilke's Angel: here the speaker's own longing rises before God 'like the greatest of all Angels,' a pale, unredeemed figure holding out its wings---the seed of the terrible Angel of the later Elegies.

• New Poems: The Other Part §9 the Angel

  The angel who twice fed the exhausted Elijah in the wilderness, giving him strength for the forty-day journey to Horeb (1 Kings 19).

• New Poems: The Other Part §21 Angels

  At the resurrection the angels anoint the dried dead and tuck into each one's armpit the single thing he did not desecrate in life, keeping it warm for the Lord's testing hand.

• New Poems: The Other Part §22 the Angel came

  The angel who answers the tempted saint's cry not by freeing him but by driving the demons back into him, so the inner wrestling—and the slow distilling of God—goes on.

• Duino Elegies §1 Every Angel is terrible

  Rilke's recurring Angel: a being of pure, terrible beauty (schrecklich), not a comforting cherub; the refrain that governs the whole cycle.

• Early Poems §143 One Angel

  A church angel (a carved or painted altar figure) warding the incense; the first faint sounding of the Angel that the Duino Elegies would make terrible.

• The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge §131 angel

  The angel as a figure of overwhelming, uncomforting presence rather than a gentle messenger; in Malte it shadows the childhood terrors and the dread of the unsayable, kin to the 'terrible' Angel of the later Duino Elegies.

• New Poems §14 an angel came

  The angel said to comfort Christ in Gethsemane; Rilke's poem denies the comfort — 'Why an angel? Ah, it was the night that came.'

• New Poems §19 smiling angel

  The carved angel of the sundial, serenely indifferent to the human hours that 'slide' from its dial.

• New Poems §66 the Angels

  The Beguines fling their song, 'from the last word,' toward the Angels, 'who do not give them back.'

• The Sonnets to Orpheus §43 flown over by angels

  Rilke's Angel, the being of complete and terrible being from the Duino Elegies; here the hidden gardeners' trees, 'flown over by angels,' bear fruits of consolation not our own.