In 1922, however, while staying at Château Muzot in Switzerland, Rilke completed the unfinished elegies in one week, and shortly afterwards he completed his Sonnets to Orpheus. He finished the third elegy in 1913 and the fourth in 1915, but the war and his conscription into the Austro-Hungarian army triggered further depression. In the days after hearing the first line, Rilke wrote the first two of the ten elegies that make up the full 859-line poem, and he also drafted other passages, including what would become the beginning of the tenth elegy. Rilke, who was then in his mid-30s and already established as an important European poet, was staying at the castle on the Adriatic while he recovered from a period of depression. The Prague-born Austrian poet noted down the first line of the poem, Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel / Ordnungen? (‘Who would give ear, among the angelic host / Were I to cry aloud?’), after hearing a voice in the wind speak these words while he was walking near Duino Castle in Italy in 1912. The composition of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies began and ended with inspirational moments that became famous in the history of literature.
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