person
Antinous
also: the Bithynian boy
The beautiful youth from Bithynia, beloved of the emperor Hadrian, who drowned in the Nile (130 AD) and was deified and set among the stars. Rilke's 'Klage um Antinous' is the grief of the lover who 'filled him with heaviness' and could not simply let him be dead.
Reading notes
- New Poems: The Other Part §6 Bithynian boy
Antinous, the youth from Bithynia beloved of the emperor Hadrian; the speaker is Hadrian himself, mourning the boy he 'filled with heaviness.'