Gaspara Stampa: An Italian noblewoman (1523-54) who fell in love with Count Collatino di Collalto at the age of twenty-six and was deserted by him three years later. She responded by recording the story of their love and her experience of solitude and loss in a series of two hundred sonnets.

Santa Maria Formosa: A famous church in Venice, which Rilke visited twice in 1911. The reference is to one of the commemorative tablets on the church walls—it isn't known which one, though there has been much speculation.

Linos: An obscure figure of Greek myth. Several legends refer to him, always in connection with music, early death, and his relation to Apollo—either as kin (brother, son) or as slain, would-be rival. Some commentaries on "The First Elegy" cite stories in which the void left by Linos's death was so sudden and severe that its trembling amazement was called music. Others make reference to the ritual lament for Linos, supposedly related to music's origin because those who were numbed by his death were revived by the song of Orpheus. Whatever Rilke's sources (and they are fragmentary at best), he conflates the cosmological and the psychological to construct his own elliptical myth of grief: in the beginning full space nurturing an "almost divine" youth; then fullness transformed into emptiness (the void is not originary here; it comes into being as the absence of presence) when the youth inexplicably "steps out of it," "leaves," "is gone" (the word "death" is studiously avoided); then the penetration (equally unexplained) into this absence—characterized not as a realm of lament but as shock petrifying into rigidity, numbness, an almost Golgotha-like aridity of feeling—by a music that is ambiguously both "first" and "daring," "adventurous" (the music is already there; no Orphic maker or source is indicated); and with that the desert spell is broken, the void comes alive—not with music per se but with "vibrations," phenomena prior to melodies heard or feelings felt.

(Back to "Duino Elegies" by Rainer Maria Rilke)