A Visual Explication of the End of Rilke’s Duino Elegies

And yet if the eternal dead were to wake an image in us,
look, they might be pointing to the catkins
hanging from empty hazels, or they might remind us
of the rain that falls on the dark earth in early spring.

And we, who have always thought
of happiness as ascending,
would feel the emotion
that almost undoes us
when a happy thing falls.1

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