Book 1, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke : Chapter 4, Requiem Summary

The first poem in this section is "Requiem for a Friend." This is a poem that includes love, letting go, and straightforward grieving. It is pages long. There are a few stanzas. There is a new aspect to this one. This poem has paragraph indentations. The English version of the poem opens with, "I have my dead, and I have let them go," (p. 73). Further on down in the same stanza, at the first indentation, the line reads, "I thought you were much further on. It troubles me / that you should stray back, you, who have achieved / more transformations than any other woman," (p. 73). He writes in the early part of this poem about the fears that came up when the character to whom the...