Duino Elegies- Life Or Death

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through the first elegy and Rilke hits upon death, he has cried out to the angels and found them lacking and unable to help, for they themselves do not always seem to know whether they are walking among the land of the living or the dead.
the hero survives.
Even his ruin
is only another
excuse to continue
a final birth.
But nature, exhausted
takes lovers
back into herself
as if she couldn't accomplish
that kind of vitality twice.(Duino Elegies)
But he respects death and sometimes he is defensive of the dead to make it seem as if he were almost jealous of their plight.
It's very hard to be dead
And you try
To make up for the lost time
Till slowly you start
to get wiffs
of eternity
But the living are wrong
In the sharp
distinctions they make. (Duino Elegies)
In one sense the dead are wiser than the living, but at the same time the living have no need for the dead. Rilke seems to tell us to listen to what the dead have ...

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