Images of Absence: Death and the Language of Concealment in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

Images of Absence: Death and the Language of Concealment in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke discusses Rilke’s exploration of death as ambivalence, anonymity and invisibility in images of deferral and encryption, examining poems from New Poems to Sonnets to Orpheus, with special attention to the Requiem poems of 1908. Its contribution to Rilke scholarship is to more fully state Rilke’s production of an ‘otherness’ of death in self-consciously literary devices that emphasise the ‘art’ in ‘articulation’ and propose that the human relation to death is made in the paradoxes of poetic writing, integrating death via its resistance to interpretation and integration. Under this focus, the ‘death of one’s own’ (‘der eigene Tod’) of the middle period takes on more artistic implications than previous interpretations of it have permitted. It becomes the poet’s work or ‘making’ of death, a construct in which death’s alienation appears charged, completed and aestheticised in metaphors, similes and poetic forms that represent language reaching beyond modes of familiarisation into depersonalised, estranged spaces. The study traces through the different phases of Rilke’s poetry the relation he sets up between the textuality of the text and the hidden quality of death.