Reading notes

• The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christoph Rilke §6 Madonna

  The Virgin Mary; the half-ruined wayside column the riders pass proves, in memory, to have been her image.

• The Book of Images §48 you are the tree

  The Annunciation: the angel's refrain names Mary as the tree to his day and dew, announcing — weary, wide-winged, almost shy — that she will bear God's child.

• The Book of Images §50 Donna Dolorosa

  Our Lady of Sorrows (Mater Dolorosa), the grieving Virgin to whom the quarryman father vowed his son in an hour of distress.

• The Book of Images §54 the Queenly One

  The Virgin Mary as Theotokos ('God-bearer'), the 'Queenly One' of the Madonna icon, who 'will overflow with that Son.'

• The Book of Images §55 the Madonna

  The Virgin Mary; the virgins 'to whom the world was a confusion' withdraw to her service, one of the old destinies the singer unfolds before the child.

• The Life of the Virgin Mary §1 the mother

  Mary herself, born this night to the aged Joachim and Anne.

• The Book of Hours §3 Madonnas

  Images of the Virgin Mary; the monk marks how 'humanly' his southern brothers conceive her, against his own dark and rooted God.

• The Book of Hours §31 handmaid

  The Virgin Mary, the 'visited handmaid' of the Annunciation (Luke 1:38); poems 31--33 form a small life-of-Mary set within the cycle.

• The Book of Hours §111 the God-bearer

  The Gottgebärerin (Theotokos), the Virgin Mary who bore God; Rilke asks God to fulfill not her dream but its inversion—to raise instead the 'Death-bearer.'

• New Poems: The Other Part §28 Mary

  The mother of Jesus, screaming far behind the gallows-place as he 'bellowed and gave out.'

• New Poems: The Other Part §30 Glorify and lift up, my soul

  Mary's Magnificat—'My soul doth magnify the Lord' (Luke 1:46)—rendered as a quiet word to Elizabeth on the hillside.

• Early Poems §2 stone Madonna

  A statue of the Virgin set into a house-wall, of the kind common on the old facades of Prague's Lesser Town.

• Stories of God §64 the most holy Virgin

  The Mother of God, the strict ikon-model Alyosha cannot reach; his version slips into the worldly likeness of Mariana.

• New Poems §67 the old statue

  The processional statue of the Virgin Mary with the Christ-child, carried 'in Spanish raiment' through Ghent.