The following version of this poem was used to create this guide: Rilke, Rainer Maria. Sonnet 29, Part II. Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus (trans. Stephen Mitchell). Vintage International, 2009.

Note that all parenthetical quotations within the guide refer to the lines of the poem from which the quotations are taken.

Rainer Maria Rilke was a Bohemian-Austrian novelist and poet. He is known as one of the most linguistically intense German language poets in history, using poignant imagery to explore the relationship between man and nature, as well as the rest of the changing world. Rilke's work is often considered a bridge between traditional and modernist poetry, as it holds tightly to conventional poetic forms while at the same time placing greater importance on images, experimentation, and communicating complex ideas through short, vivid descriptions.

"Let This Darkness be a Bell Tower" is a common title given to the untitled twenty-ninth sonnet of the second part of Rilke's collection The Sonnets to Orpheus. This collection is a sonnet cycle of 55 sonnets that was published in 1922. Rilke dedicated the sequence to the memory of his daughter's friend, Wera, who died when she was only nineteen years old. The collection is often considered Rilke's masterpiece, displaying some of his most lyrically intense verse. In this particular poem, and unnamed speaker comforts a struggling friend and offers new ways of thinking about one's place in the world.