Reading notes

• The Book of Images §46 The God

  The storm-night fable: God, frightened in his solitude as the autumn day dies and night devours the world, discovers that he loves the world; a single cradle-light, homesick in the storm, becomes a ship that carries the child to safety, and God smiles to find that 'She lives.'

• The Book of Images §51 All-Beholding

  Rilke's name here for God, the all-seeing (Allschauender), addressed throughout; the monk offers to stand face-to-face with this weary God against the terror of the resurrection.

• The Life of the Virgin Mary §5 the Lord God

  God himself at work in the conception; the angel asks the proud carpenter whether he does not see it.

• The Life of the Virgin Mary §13 God the Father

  God the Father, who gently holds back the Son so that the empty place beside him shows like a last, earthly grief.

• The Book of Hours §2 God

  Rilke's God is not the finished God of doctrine but a dark, still-becoming one whom the praying monk circles like an ancient tower and helps to build; he is the 'you' the whole cycle addresses.

• New Poems: The Other Part §12 the Lord

  The prophet speaks not his own words but the Lord's—'iron pieces, stones' he must melt and hurl—and bears on his brow the wrath that points to God 'as He is: enraged.'

• New Poems: The Other Part §13 raging one

  The God who, against Jeremiah's will, inflamed his heart and made his mouth a wound; the prophet's complaint to the power that overcame him while he was 'almost a boy.'

• New Poems: The Other Part §21 the Lord's hand

  God at the Last Judgment, who takes up the warm, undesecrated remnant 'from every side' to feel whether it counts.

• New Poems: The Other Part §22 distill for himself God

  Rilke's still-becoming God: not given but distilled inwardly, 'long still not clear,' out of the saint's own ferment of temptation and struggle.

• Duino Elegies §1 God's voice

  The voice the saints could not have borne; Rilke sets it beyond what the listener should try to endure, pointing instead to the 'blowing' that forms out of silence.

• The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge §173 God

  Not the doctrinal God of the Church but a withdrawn, still-becoming God at the edge of Malte's modern dread — the one to whom the dying, the saints, and the unloved address themselves.

• New Poems §12 God went off

  The God of Israel, who at Joshua's command held the sun over Gibeon, 'frightened like a servant,' because one man willed it.