The Divine in Lyrical Cycles “The Book of Hours” and “The Duino Elegies” by R.M. Rilke

The lyric cycles "The Book of Hours" and "The Duino Elegies" represent two turning points in the oeuvre of Rainer Maria Rilke, and both show a very special vision of figures embodying the divine (God – in "The Book of Hours", and Angel – in "The Duino Elegies"). These two cycles are also comparable in structure: each cycle is a single self-reflexive poetic utterance, where the central images and mythologems are repeated and developed from poem to poem. Both the image of the God from the "Book of Hours" and the image of Angel from "The Duino Elegies" strongly differ from their prototypes from the Scriptures, and seem to be Rilke's own mythologems. Although the cycles have been widely studied in terms of their religious and mystical references, the possible continuity and commonality of these cycles has not yet been clearly identified. In this study, "The Divine" refers to the actual images of God and Angel, as well as their attributes, in accordance with this, an attempt is made to compare the two cycles in their relation to the image of the divine, to establish how the images of God and Angel are revealed at the level of names and motives, and to determine what they mean for the poetics of early and late Rilke.