Man has learned much since morning,
For we are a conversation, and we can listen
To one another. Soon we’ll be song.
Hölderlin, “Celebration of peace”
The Sonnets to Orpheus
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (Die Sonette an Orpheus), composed in a burst of inspired creativity in February 1922, stand as one of the most enigmatic and powerful poetic expressions of modern poetry. Written as a poetic gravestone (Grab-Mal) for Wera Ouckama Knoop, a young dancer and friend of the poet’s daughter, who had recently passed away in 1919 at the age of nineteen, these sonnets transcend mere personal mourning and become ontological event and existential meditation.
In these paragraphs, pieces of a homonymous work still in progress, I explore Die Sonette an Orpheus through the philosophical lens of existential ontology: the nature of Dasein, the meaning of being-toward-death, the emergence of truth (aletheuein) and Dasein’s propriation in the world (Ereignis), the meaningful presence of the Other (Mitsein), and the worldhood (Weltlichkeit) as the “there” where Dasein primarily dwells. In this context, Orpheus is not merely a mythic figure, but a cipher for the poetic-transcendental dimension of human Ek-sistenz—that is, the standing-out into the openness of Being.
Dasein and the Poetic Disclosure of Being
At the heart of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit lies the insight that Dasein is the being for whom Being is question and care. In Rilke’s sonnets, the voice of Orpheus, the poet-musician, becomes the metaphorical voice of Dasein itself—one that sings existence into meaningfulness. When Rilke writes, “Gesang ist Dasein,” he is not indulging in metaphor; rather, he is revealing the core structure of Dasein as a poetic articulation of Being. Singing, in existential key, is a possible mode of Being-in-the-world. Yet from the god’s side, singing is the ontopoetic resonance of aletheuein; and so, it is also a dancing and a dispensation of fate in the intricate familiarity of life and death, of joy and angst. Thus, poetically, the sonnet form becomes more than a vessel for beauty; it is an ontological event (Ereignis), a site where Being speaks, language shows its essence as “the house of Being,” and man, embodied in the poet himself, discloses as the “shepherd of Being.”
Ek-sistenz and the Humanness of the Human
To exist (from Latin existere) is to stand out, to project oneself beyond the immediate, to stay open in the open. Heidegger radicalizes this into Ek-sistenz, a term that captures how Dasein always transcends itself toward possibilities caring about his Being as his ownmost way of being. Orpheus, then, represents not just the aesthetic form of the poet but the existential projection of the human into the abyss of Being. His voice emerges from death (he descends into Hades), and yet it sings of light and world.
The poem, as an existential disclosure, is not concerned with attaining something—it is about being-there, fully present, unshielded in the absolute openness of the clearing of Being. It is a form of Ek-sistenz, as it opens the human to the horizon of Being without attempting to possess it as Zuhandensein (readiness-to-hand) or to comprehend it as Vorhandensein (presence-at-hand). Wera Ouckama Knoop, in her innocent youth, was neither moved nor defined by desire or erotic self-attestation. In her—still untouched, yet already in bloom: “…und glänzte klar durch ihre Frühlingsschleier” (“and gleamed bright through her springtime veils”) —something more essential and fundamental was disclosed: “Gesang, wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr, / nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes; / Gesang ist Dasein” (“The song, as you teach it, is not desire, / not courting after something finally attained; / Song is existence”), that is a form of beauty that opens its own reality, beyond moral imperatives but also, as Ezra Pound exhorts, signals the necessity of “base love scorning.” Hence: “Gesang, wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr…”
This refusal of Begehr (desire) and Werbung (courtship) signals a departure from romantic or erotic yearning. The poet is telling a “Jüngling” (young man) that simply loving is not the essence or deepest truth, the primal occurrence—there is something more profound beyond just the feeling and satisfaction of eros-love. The sentence is part of Rilke’s layered poetic logos, especially here in the Sonnets to Orpheus, where love, voice, and transformation are redefined beyond conventional understanding.
The noun “Jüngling” is always masculine in German—both grammatically and in traditional usage. It refers specifically to a young man, often with poetic or slightly archaic connotations, like “youth,” “lad,” or even “stripling” in older English. It is not used for a girl or young woman. So, in this sonnet, is the “Jüngling” Orpheus? The seems to convey a warning: as you approach Wera Ouckama Knoop’s memory, your love cannot be worldly and rudimentary, but elevated and testimonial. Is the “Jüngling” Orpheus? Yes and no. In some sonnets, the Jüngling evokes Orpheus directly—as the poetic voice, the singer, the medium between life and death. In others, the Jüngling seems to represent the human poet, or even the incipient artist, someone awakening to inspiration or creation.
At times, the Jüngling is a symbol of becoming—the youth who is not yet Orpheus, or perhaps Orpheus himself before his full mythic transformation, when his fear and doubt made his head turn to Eurydice at the threshold of Hades. While the word “Jüngling” appears explicitly only once, in Sonnet I.III, his symbolic presence is diffused throughout the cycle as a poetic condition—the one who must learn to sing, who must transform eros and pain into purified Gesang. He is not a recurring figure, but an ontological stance: a metaphor for the becoming-human who is not yet divine, but is summoned toward that form through praise.
Rilke’s Orpheus is not just a mythological character—he is poetic dynamis, convergence of form and possibility, and the mediator between the visible and invisible: it is the archetype of Dasein. The Jüngling sometimes appears uncertain, in pain, learning—a contrast to the god-like Orpheus who sings with cosmic authority. Yet, Rilke collapses these differences fluidly: the poet is Orpheus, the Jüngling is the poet-in-becoming, and both are conduits for the pure song that Rilke envisioned as the nature of poetry as the “Ur-Ereignis” in language.
In Sonnet I.IX, the poet is teaching the Jüngling what true poetic love is—not desire, not possession, but a sublimated offering through praising song and sacrificial wine. That makes the Jüngling the aspiring Orpheus—the one who must learn to transform eros-love into agape-love. And this is the sole way he can approach the “Mädchen” without spoiling the pureness and radicalness of her being: as we approach what is sacred and divine, even in its unsettling mortality. Especially in it. This is the sole way the poet can play his “Leier” to sing the young girl’s death, in which the totality of the ontologizing love is equally evoked.
In the Sonnets, Orpheus is at the same time the whole singing god and the man-god in (trans)formation, a mirror of the poet himself, a universal image of the human becoming—struggling to turn love, longing, and pain into eternal song. Becoming a “singing god” demands self-surrender to the uncontrolled temporality of the god. Language is medium and vessel of the revealing, while the mind sinks into the universal drama letting the Being of beings self-disclose at its own pace and way (zu seinen Gunsten), experiencing the metamorphosis along with the god, in deep embrace with the meaning of Being as Dasein’s most radical possibility; more radical than the possibility of death itself.
It is in this mystical convergence where Dasein’s being, from a merely “being-toward-death” becomes “being-toward-transcendence through death”: “Errichtet keinen Denkstein. Lasst die Rose / nur jedes Jahr zu seinen Gunsten blühn. / Denn Orpheus ists. Seine Metamorphose / in dem und dem. Wir sollen uns nicht mühn / um andre Namen. Ein für alle Male / ists Orpheus, wenn es singt.” (“Raise no commemorating stone. The roses / shall blossom every summer for his sake. / For this is Orpheus. His metamorphosis / in this one and in that. We should not take / thought about other names. Once and for all, / it’s Orpheus when there’s song.”) [I.V].
Weltlichkeit (worldhood): The World as Poetic Horizon
In Heideggerian terms, the world (Welt) is not merely a collection of things but a structured openness in which entities can appear as meaningful. Orpheus sings the world. His song does not reflect the world—it makes the world possible. As Rilke writes: “Ein Mädchen fast… Und fast ein Mädchen wars und ging hervor aus diesem einigen Glück von Sang und Leier…” The meaning of the girl is not her “factual” presence or absence in the empirical sense. Her true meaning emerges from the poem, through the music of the singing god. She is a phenomenon of poetic world-disclosure. Thus, Rilke’s sonnets are not nostalgic retreats into mythology but acts of Weltbildung—world-making. They enact the poetic creation of a horizon in which the human can dwell meaningfully, even—and especially then—, when confronted to their own temporality and being-toward-death.
Sein-zum-Tode (Being-toward-death) and the Poetic Word
The sonnets circle around Dasein’s radical way of being in the world: Sein-zum-Tode—Being-toward-death. The cycle is written as a memorial, and yet it brims with vitality. Death is not denied but integrated. Orpheus, in myth and in Rilke, is the one who sings from the threshold. Wera Ouckama Knoop’s presence is not that of the remembered dead, but of the transfigured trace, because what is lost returns as song through the grace of the singing god. Her absence becomes the site of poetic reappearance, just as Heidegger insists that death is not the end but the “possibility of the impossibility of existence” as it opens itself in the worldhood. This only makes sense when viewed in light of the aforementioned metamorphosis: from “being-toward-death” to “being-toward-transcendence through death.”
The poem, then, becomes a Grab-Mal, a language of onto-poetic transfiguration. The Sonette an Orpheus show the real meaning of “Gesang,” which, according to Hölderlin, is what we, as mortals, are called to become. Rilke lets the revealing appear in the clear of meaning that dawns in the poetic word: “In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch. Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind.” (“To sing truly is a different breath. / A breath about nothing. / A wafting in God. / A wind.”) The humanness of the human can be understood, if possible at all, in transcendence; and transcendence becomes “experience” for Dasein only in the openness of death as its most radical possibility in the horizon of worldhood. Dasein is as existence: not-a-thing (um nichts), in time (Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind), expecting the gods in the contradictoriness of being (where rest is not attainable and reason is powerless before fate and the god’s will: “Sinn ist Zwiespalts. An der Kreuzung zweier / Herzwege steht kein Tempel für Apoll.“ (“Meaning is division. At the crossing of two heart-paths, there stands no temple for Apollo.”)
The poet points to a profound existential circumstance. “Sinn” (meaning or sense) is not clarity or unity—it is Zwiespalt, a splitting or inner conflict. Meaning arises from tension, not from harmony. The crossroads of two heart-paths evokes the deep emotional or spiritual choices one must make. But contrary to classical ideals (Apollo as the god of clarity, reason, harmony), there is no Apollonian temple at this crossroad. That is: there is no rational or divine guarantee of coherence or resolution. One stands alone, without the consolations of classical order or certainty. And it is here that beauty appears. The Angel’s beauty that informs Rilke’s Elegien and is always hovering as a dove of death over the Sonette. This passage is an existential commentary on decision, inner conflict, and the absence of transcendental assurances—echoing Heidegger’s Entschlossenheit (resoluteness) and the solitude of Dasein in its authentic confrontation with—and acceptance of—Being.
A young girl died at the age of nineteen. Could she bear witness to her own being, her own love, her own mortality? She was innocent and simple; can the god—the god who sings—attest to her innocence and simplicity? “Wie hast du sie vollendet, dass sie nicht begehrte, erst wach zu sein? Sieh, sie erstand und schlief.” (“How did you complete her, that she did not desire first to be awake? Look, she arose and slept.”) Orpheus is a singing figure who, through mortality, is granted immortality—by way of the tragedy of loss and death.His song is always truthful, but likewise ambiguous and impossible to understand.
The poet asks: “Wo ist ihr Tod? Wo sinkt sie hin aus mir?…” Yet will the singing god respond? What is the meaning of death? Difficult to bracket Rilke’s final eschatological hermeneutics with full accuracy. Some poems, such as Sonnet VI, offer us a hint; yet, like the Delphic oracle according to Heraclitus, the sonnets to Orpheus neither confirm nor deny—they only give a sign. The messenger will always give praising fruits, never an interpreted world: “Er ist einer der bleibenden Boten, / der noch weit in die Türen der Toten / Schalen mit rühmlichen Früchten hält.” (“He is messenger always attendant, / reaching far through their gates resplendent / dishes of fruits for the dead to praise.”) [Sonnet I.VI.]
Also, in his “Ninth Elegy,” composed in parallel with the Sonnets to Orpheus, Rilke gestures toward the physis of things and the semantic-ontological power of language as a locus of Ereignis but also, potentially, as a veil of concealment: “Sind wir vielleicht hier, um zu sagen: / Haus, Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster, –/ höchstens: Säule, Turm … aber zu sagen, verstehst, / oh zu sagen so, wie selber die Dinge niemals / innig meinten zu sein.“ (“Perhaps we are here to say: house, bridge, brook, gate, jug, fruit-tree, window — at most: pillar, tower . . . / But this (mark well) is indeed to speak of things / As they themselves have never meant to be.”) [“Ninth Elegy,” Duino Elegies].
Orpheus as Ereignig
Rilke’s Orpheus is not simply a mythical figure or a poetic persona; he is Ereignis—not in a superficial or allegorical sense, but in the deep Heideggerian meaning of the term: the event of appropriation, the happening where Being comes into presence through poetic word and attunement. Orpheus does not just sing the world—he brings it forth. The act of singing in Rilke is not a representation of reality, but its disclosure. This process of aletheuein or ontological unconcealment, is usually verbalized through the symbol of the Wein and its related semantic field (wine presser, vinegar, cluster, etc.). The wine incarnates the condition of being-in-time-toward-death, the fact of death as Dasein’s radical possibility, and the mystery, unreachable for the Rilkean reasoning, of the after-death horizon as a transcendental possibility along with its meaning for Dasein’s existence.
Thus, veiled in this mystery, sometimes a numinous voice appears pointing to death as a necessary existential sacrifice that bears an sich a fundamental metamorphosis. This metamorphosis is parallelled with the transformation from grape to wine, that starts “…in seinem fühlenden Süden gereift” (“… warmed by his [the god’s] sympathy’s ripening south”) through the god’s heart as a transient presser, “Sein Herz, o vergängliche Kelter eines den Menschen unendlichen Weins,” (“Came with his heart, oh, transient presser, for men, of a never-exhaustible wine.”), and ends in the “gates of the dead” who are offered the sacrificial wine in praise for their life in the world.
The god’s presence as the “zum Rühmen Bestellter” (the one who has been called or appointed to praise) embraces the wholeness of being and turns it into a wine-world opening the ontological rift to the revealing of the Gesang (song), despite the reality of Traub (dust) and Moder (mold, decay): “Nie versagt ihm die Stimme am Staube, / wenn ihn das göttliche Beispiel ergreift. / Alles wird Weinberg, alles wird Traube…” (“Never does his voice fail him in the dust, / when the divine example seizes him. / All becomes vineyard, all becomes grape.”) and also, “Nicht in den Grüften der Könige Moder / straft ihm die Rühmung Lügen, …” (“Crypts and the mouldering kings who lie there, / do not belie his praising, …”).
The poem is the chalice in which the existential meaning of the god, the song, and the wine becomes, in a way, apprehensible for the human in the clearing of revealing. This resonates with Heidegger’s later understanding of language as the house of Being. In Unterwegs zur Sprache, Heidegger asserts that it is through poetic saying (Dichtung) that the world “worlds.” Likewise, Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus unfold as a sustained meditation on the voice as world-forming, as Ereignis itself.
In the sonnet I.I we read: “Ein Gott vermags. Wie aber, sag mir, soll ein Mensch ihm folgen durch das enge Leierloch? (“A god can do it. But tell me, how can a man follow him through the narrow lyre’s string?”) The narrowness of the lyre is not just a poetic image—it signifies the difficult, almost impossible passage through which Being can be sung, and through which the human must strain to let Being resonate in the free clearing of its appearance. Orpheus becomes the event by which this passage is possible: the god-man of transfiguration: “Gesang ist Dasein.” “Song is existence.” (I.III)
There is danger in all meaningful transformation; yet there is always also a hope, according to Hölderlin, a “rettende Macht” (“saving might”) that cannot be exhausted. Rilke points to the primal place our own lamentation occupies in our souls (“im Gemüt”), yet it is also his task to bring to our hearts the memory that “plötzlich, schräg und ungeübt, / hält sie doch ein Sternbild unsrer Stimme / in den Himmel, den ihr Hauch nicht trübt.” (“… inexpertly limned, / lifts our voices in a constellation / to the sky her breathing has not dimmed.”).
The act of singing, the singing of Orpheus, is not an addition to existence—it is existence in its most transparent and essential form. In Orphic song, Dasein is revealed not as a static subject, but as a becoming, a resonance whose essence is not the fixed Platonic-Aristotelian “eīdos-morphē” but possibility itself. The sonnet thus becomes an ontological act, not just a lyrical performance. Along with ist existential echo, the verse “Gesang, wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr…” (“Song, as you teach it, is not desire… it is Being”) rejects the notion of poetry as striving for a purely intellectual (rational-instrumental) possession of the truth or a crack-free vessel presenting Dasein’s being as existence under the light of ontological completion. Poetry—as the way Dasein is thrown into the task of being the “shepherd of Being” in attentive listening to the song of the singing god—, like Ereignis and Dasein’s being, is non-objectifiable. It is the space of openness (Offenheit), where Being gifts itself without becoming a mere object: “Sein ist nichts anders als der Ort des Gesangs.” (“Being is nothing other than the place of song.”) [II.XIII]
This is a radical mystic-existential stance. Orpheus is not only singing about Being; the singing god is the happening of Being’s disclosure. He is Ereignis because through him, and through the poetic word, Being finds its voice and opens a world of authenticity in the heart of a world of ontological oblivion and therefore unauthentic way of being. And yet, this Ereignis is not “triumph,” it is not an “achievement”—it is a fragile and fleeting self-offered vision of the Being of beings; a brief response to the human question: “Wann aber sind wir?” (“But when are we?”).
This final question pierces to the existential core of Rilke’s life and Weltanschauung. We are not always fully aware of being “there” in the mode of Being as an authentic existence; the event of Being, the fundamental Ereignis—what Goethe called, although in a slightly different context, the “Urphänomenon” (primal phenomenon)—, through song is rare and elusive, because “the nature of things loves to hide.” It demands openness, listening, and in Rilke’s world, suffering. These poems are not simply on or for Orpheus: a sort of ritual libation to appease the external imperative of our mostly empty cultural rituals. They are Orpheus’ voice, his Gesang. They are the poet’s offering for the sacrificial victim, “ein Mädchen fast…” who was called to enter her own death before the god’s stopped playing his lyre at the edge of Hades. Through them, they speak our own Gesang as well: even the one that we still fail to sing.
Shall we trust that the singing god, with the chalice of his wine, will wait for us too—as he once waited for ein Mädchen fast—by the gates of the dead, at the hour of our death?
Cover image: Orpheus, by Odilon Redon (c. 1903-1910). Cleveland Museum of Art.
