RAINER MARIA RILKE

of his life and the beginning”, Rilke was blessed indeed. He
himself told his son-in-law and biographer that the roots of his
life’s work went back far into his childhood. Rilke’s life was
peculiarly of a piece, a coat without seam ; nothing that enriched
his last great poems was not discernible, in rudimentary form, in
his earliest writing, and not one of the essentials of his youthful
character and genius appears to have become atrophied in him.
At the age of thirty-five he was still re-living his own childhood,
with fascination and with anguish, in the wonderful childhood
passages of Malte Laurids Brigge ; and his fourth Duinese Elegy,
written in the bitter war years, looks to the integrity of childhood
as the only resolution of the fatal dichotomy between the actual
and the possible in human nature, and to its timelessness as the
only answer to the challenge of time.

NOTE 4, PAGE 14

After seven months of living in Paris, exhausted by ill-healch
and the power of Rodin’s personality, Rilke could bear his
imprisonment in this city of hospitals, “armies of sick, hosts of
dying, nations of dead”” no more, and fled alone to a favourite
haunt * in Italy for some weeks of solitude and sun-bathing. He
lay in the warm sand, ran and danced in the wind, swam in the
sea, and loved whenever possible to cast off his borrowed
bathing-costume of red-and-black striped stockinette and take
these pleasures naked. This was the beach where Shelley’s body
was washed ashore and buried, later to be exhumed and burned.

NoTE 5, PAGE 15

Jens Peter Jacobsen (1847-1885), naturalist and psychological
novelist, was the son of a merchant and a schoolmaster’s daughter,
who gave him a happy upbringing in a little harbour town in
Denmark. The enthusiasm of his youth was divided between
botany (his expeditions in the near-by marshes in search of algae
possibly undermined his health) and versifying (his early poems
were damned with faint praise by the great critic Georg

* In that same year Viareggio was harbouring two other holiday-
makers, d’Annunzio and Quida.

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