Duino Castle
(Duino, Italy)
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

The unique combination of offering respite from the machinations of everyday life and having a physically inspirational presence helps a place become a person’s creative muse, and Rilke’s experience in Duino is perhaps the strongest argument I know in support of the idea that places can hold a mystical creative power for writers and artists. When poetry or novels, paintings or sonatas repeatedly rise out of the somehow hallowed ground, the confluence of person and place becomes more than a happenstance arising simply from time spent there. I have always been fascinated by the artistic purity and power of the Duino Elegies, and so, finding myself in Eastern Europe several years ago, I made a pilgrimage to Duino with a friend. We drove our little rental car all the way from the Slovenian alps into the town of Duino, through its narrow streets where colorful laundry hung, bougainvillea grew over every stone wall, and old women sat framed in the shade of 14th century doorways. Once at the castle, we wound our way through the rooms open to the public (some areas are still inhabited by the Von Thurn und Taxis family), and up to the ramparts. To my disappointment, it was a clear blue day on the Adriatic, with no sign of storm, and not a single angel in sight. Later that night, as my friend and I were walking the steep steps up from the harborside restaurant where we’d eaten dinner, green lightning did began to streak, sending an electric current through my nerves. Then the north wind picked up and began rifling through the bougainvillea, through my hair, and rippling the hem of my summer skirt. The ever-so-slight touch of intimacy with the Duino elements that night has allowed me to read more deeply into the Elegies. For example, the whole first stanza now connotes a much more visceral experience for me than I had been able to access prior to my pilgrimage:

Establishing an intimate relationship with one’s natural surroundings, whether sought out or happened upon, is critical to many artists. Two contemporary poets whose work expresses this intimacy are Anne Carson, whose lines from “The Anthropology of Water: Water Margins” thread through this essay, and James Wright. A quintessential poem about the intimacy a speaker feels with the natural surroundings of a specific place is Wright’s “Blessing.” The first line of the poem places the speaker in a specific geographical locale:

The adjective “those” conveys a level of familiarity at the outset, and this familiarity grows into full-blown intimacy over the course of the poem, coming into fruition in the final five lines:

It is not the speaker’s emotions that move him to make a gesture of intimacy toward the pony, but rather the breeze that moves him to do so. In the last line, this intimacy with the natural landscape, of which theses ponies are a part, transforms him in just the same way the spring sun transforms a flowering tree or the rain transforms the grass.

Like Wright’s field in Rochester, Minnesota, my Connecticut lake cottage is not in a place as dramatically beautiful as Rilke’s cliff-side castle or the imposing Catalan landscape outside Miró’s studio. Although natural grandeur is undisputedly inspiring, an intimate connection with even the humblest of natural surroundings can provide creative nourishment for a poet.