Rilke's existentialist cry in the shadow of Duino castle was heard by no one but himself. He thought he was alone in the universe, delivering a lamentation for the lost. He was wrong.

The poems are composed of ten elegies Rilke started writing in 1912 while a guest of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis (1855–1934) at Duino Castle, near Trieste on the Adriatic Sea. Rilke (1875–1926) ...