linguistic:voice_change
Symbolism and themes

Throughout the Duino Elegies, Rilke explored themes of "the limitations and insufficiency of the human condition and fractured human consciousness... mankind's loneliness, the perfection of the angels, life and death, love and lovers, and the task of the poet". Philosopher Martin Heidegger remarked that "the long way leading to the poetry is itself one that inquires poetically", and that Rilke "comes to realize the destitution of the time more clearly. The time remains destitute not only because God is dead, but because mortals are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality." Rilke explores the nature of mankind's contact with beauty, and its transience, noting that humanity is forever only getting a brief, momentary glimpse of an inconceivable beauty and that it is terrifying. At the onset of the First Elegy, Rilke describes this frightened experience, defining beauty as

... nothing but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us.

Rilke depicted this infinite, transcendental beauty with the symbol of angels. However, he did not use the traditional Christian interpretation of angels. He sought to utilize a symbol of the angel that was secular, divorced from religious doctrine and embodied a tremendous transcendental beauty. In this, however, Rilke commented that he was greatly influenced by the depiction of angels found in Islam. For Rilke, the symbol of the angel represents a perfection that is "beyond human contradictions and limitations" in a "higher level of reality in the invisible". Where there is incongruity that adds to mankind's despair and anxiety is due to human nature keeping us clinging to the visible and the familiar. As mankind encounters the invisible and unknown higher levels represented by these angels, the experience of the invisible will be "terrifying" (in German, schrecklich).

As mankind came in contact with the terrifying beauty represented by these angels, Rilke was concerned with the experience of existential angst in trying to come to terms with the coexistence of the spiritual and earthly. He portrayed human beings as alone in a universe where God is abstract and possibly non-existent, "where memory and patterns of intuition raise the sensitive consciousness to a realization of solitude". Rilke depicted the alternative, a spiritually fulfilling possibility beyond human limitations, in the form of angels. Beginning with the first line of the collection, Rilke's despairing speaker calls upon the angels to notice human suffering and to intervene. There is a deeply felt despair and unresolvable tension in that no matter man's striving, the limitation of human and earthly existence renders humanity unable to reach out to the angels. The narrative voice Rilke employed in the Duino Elegies strives "to achieve in human consciousness the angel's presumed plenitude of being" (i.e. being, or existence, in German: Dasein).

Rilke used the images of love and of lovers as a way of showing mankind's potential and humanity's failures in achieving the transcendent understanding embodied by the angels. In the Second Elegy, Rilke wrote:

Lovers, if Angels could understand them, might utter strange things in the midnight air.

He depicted "the inadequacy of ordinary lovers", and contrasted a feminine form of "sublime love" and a masculine "blind animal passion". At the time the first elegies were written, Rilke often "expressed a longing for human companionship and affection, and then, often immediately afterwards, asking whether he could really respond to such companionship if it were offered to him..." He noticed a "decline in the lives of lovers... when they began to receive, they also began to lose the power of giving". Later, during World War I, he would lament that "the world has fallen into the hands of men". In the face of death, life and love are not cheap and meaningless, and Rilke asserted that great lovers are able to recognize all three (life, love, and death) as part of a unity.

In a 1923 letter to Nanny von Escher, Rilke confided:

Two inmost experiences were decisive for their production: The resolve that grew up more and more in my spirit to hold life open toward death, and on the other side, the spiritual need to situate the transformation of love in this wider whole differently than was possible in the narrower orbit of life (which simply shut out death as the other).

The Fifth Elegy is largely inspired by Pablo Picasso 's 1905 Rose Period painting Les Saltimbanques ("The Acrobats", also known as "The Family of Saltimbanques"), in which Picasso depicts six figures pictured "in the middle of a desert landscape and it is impossible to say whether they are arriving or departing, beginning or ending their performance". Rilke depicted the six artists about to begin their performance, and that they were used as a symbol of "human activity... always travelling and with no fixed abode, they are even a shade more fleeting than the rest of us, whose fleetingness was lamented". Further, Rilke in the poem described these figures as standing on a "threadbare carpet" to suggest "the ultimate loneliness and isolation of Man in this incomprehensible world, practicing their profession from childhood to death as playthings of an unknown will... before their 'pure too-little' had passed into 'empty too-much ' ".

Because of the profound impact that the war had on him, Rilke expressed hope that the task of the intellectual in a post-war world would be to render the world right, preparing people for those gentle transformations that lead to a more serene future. He envisioned the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus as part of his contribution.