"Every angel is terrifying": The 2nd Duino Elegy of Reiner Maria Rilke.

"Every angel is terrifying. And yet, alas, I invoke you,
almost deadly birds of the soul, knowing about you...."

So begins Reiner Maria Rilke's Second Duino Elegy. An evocation of our shrinking before the awful self-containment of the heaven-sent, and our yearning for our material substantiality.
We are beings with our feet in the mud and our heads in the heavens, condensed stardust, yet orphans.

It opens reminding us of the first elegy's insight that the perfection that the human heart conjures is terrifying, and that the easy relation of angelic orders and man as found in the story of Tobias is no more. we have grown past such easiness in the face of mystery, and must find our place between heaven and earth.

This is a valuable call to both those who would deny their lived humanity to seek salvation by supernatural agents, and to those who would reduce every path to a passionless, cold materiality.

In this way Rilke writing in the first decades of the 20th century foreshadows concerns almost a century in the future.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell,
Music - Lark Ascending Ralph Vaughan Williams

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