The Difficulty of Dying: Rilke's Self-Composed Epitaph Summary

The next section of the book is dedicated to Mood's analysis of the epitaph Rilke wrote roughly a year before his death in order that it might be engraved on his tombstone. The epitaph reads, "Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire, / to be no one's sleep under so many / lids." Mood spends the first part of the section discussing the contradiction it was to Rilke's desire and belief to have had a cross also placed at his grave, something his daughter did, and with which his grandson and most of his readers disagreed.

Next, he moves to his analysis of the epitaph, beginning with the rose. Throughout Rilke's poetry, the rose is symbolic of the pairing of life and death, and death and love, as in the poem from his twenties entitled...