Romantic Invocation: A Form of Impossibility

Abstract

Rilke’s Duineser Elegien begin with a stepping away from invocation: ‘Wer wenn ich schriee, hörte mich’. The invocation, which convention- ally announces the beginning of epic poetry, is suspended in the amber of a conditional clause embedded in a question about the efficacy of invocation. This stepping away is, however, complicated by the fact that the question is itself a sort of invocation — calling out in asking about the point of calling out — so that it in a sense argues against its own argument against invocation and suggests an attachment to as well as doubts or anxieties about the act of calling out to a transcendent other. In this chapter, I wish to suggest that this ‘oxymoronic’ combina- tion of aversion and attachment — which pulls the poet simultaneously in opposite directions — is not peculiar to Rilke but is, rather, more generally representative of the Romantics’ attitude towards this conven- tional poetic form of calling out, which leaves the post-Miltonic speaker ‘stammer[ing] where old Chaucer used to sing’ (Keats, Endymion, I, 134).²

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders? (Rilke, Duino Elegies, I, l)¹