Title: The Mystical Aura in Rilke's Duino Elegies and Alfred Tennyson's in Memoriam: A Comparison
Abstract: This essay makes a critical, comparative study of the mystical elements in the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke's (1923) Duino Elegies and Alfred Tennyson's (1850) In Memoriam, two great elegies in world literature. While juxtaposing the mystical notes in the works, it highlights how the 'mystique' content contributes to the grand design and the overall effect of the poems. The rationale behind the selection of the texts lies in finding a good deal of similarities between the two, of which the mystical element is an important one.An impassioned monologue about coming to terms with human existence, Duino Elegies is occasioned by Rilke's intensely private and solitary existence, and marked by a mystical sense of God and death. In a cycle of ten elegies, Rilke raises the theme of solitude to an existential plane, attempts to penetrate into the essential nature of phenomena and soars to great metaphysical heights. Characterized by his evocative language, his symbolism and use of metaphor, Duino Elegies embodies the metamorphosis of Rilke's personal ontological torments, his agonizing perception of the limitations and insufficiency of the human condition and fractured human consciousness. The principal themes of these messianic elegies are man's loneliness, the perfection of the angels, life and death, love and lovers, and the task of the poet.In Tennyson's most truly philosophical work, In Memoriam, his heart pours out and questions itself to find at last in religious meditation a tremulous peace. A profound tribute to his dearest friend, the poem is quiet and even in its tone, and written in stanzas of four octosyllabic lines rhyming abba·, divided into 131 sections of varying length, and inspired by the changing mood of the author's own anxieties about change, evolution, and immortality. From the personal, the poem moves to the universal: first, there is an expression of universal doubt, and then of universal faith, which rests ultimately not on reason or philosophy but on the soul's instinct for immortality. A metrical masterpiece with rhythmic felicities, In Memoriam is the supreme threnody of English literature, where the poet, grappling with the great religious and philosophic questions, enshrines not only his passionate grief at the loss of Arthur Henry Hallam, but the result of seventeen years of solitary brooding over the great problems of life, love and death.In In Memoriam and Duino Elegies, the mystical thoughts of Tennyson and Rilke are built on the bases of their theistic averments in part as on skeptical underpinnings. Never unaware of the bounds of human consciousness in comprehending the greater reality, they beckon a possibility and process of liberation. As Esslin ( 1977) observes, To confront the limits of the human consciousness is not only equivalent to facing up to the philosophical basis of scientific attitude, it is also a profound mystical experience. It is precisely this of the ineffability, the emptiness, the nothingness at the basis of the universe that forms the content of Eastern as well as Christian mystical experience (p. 416). Mystical thoughts involve a metaphysical inquiry into the divine order that defies any facile physical or intellectual explanations. Metaphysical enquiry has a continuous history as much as philosophy itself. One influential division of its subj ect matter was codified by Christian Wolff (1679-1754). He took metaphysics to have four major parts: ontology (the general doctrine of being or existence), rational theology (the doctrine of God's existence and attributes), rational cosmology (the doctrine of the world), and rational psychology (the doctrine of the existence and attributes of the soul). Kant used the word metaphysics in various ways. In one sense, he took metaphysics of nature and metaphysics of morals to consist of what can be known a priori within these areas. Kant also used the term metaphysics to signify the traditional attempt to establish knowledge about a realm lying beyond the natural world, a transcendent realm. …
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-03-01
Language: en
Type: article
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