Rainer M. Rilke’nin Duino Ağıtları’nda Çocuk(luk) İmgesi
The Image of Child(hood) in Rainer M. Rilkes Duino Elegies

Summary/Abstract: This study analyzes the image of child(hood) in the Duino Elegies of the Austrian poet-writer Rainer M. Rilke. These elegies, consisting of ten poems written by Rilke between 1912-1922 at the turn of the century, address a multifaceted and traumatic turning point in human history, focusing on the problems of human existence through the central motifs of death, life, and love. This series, whose corpus incorporates some of the most striking angelic imagery in world poetry, represents a reaction and an alternative to the great crisis, loss of meaning and value, that materialized with the outbreak of World War I. Within the multi-coded semantic fabric of elegies interwoven with references to human history, childhood holds a special place. Because this represents a decisive stage in both the individual and collective history of human(ity). This study, which aims to analyze the image of child(ren) in Rilkes elegies, hypothesizes that this image fundamentally functions to illuminate human existence and the human condition. The roadmap is to elucidate the concept of child(hood), to assess its place in Rilke’s poetics, and specifically to analyze its manifestations in elegies. Drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory and Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of history, this interdisciplinary analysis utilizes author/text/reader/context-focused methods. Analysis using an eclectic multiple reading model determined according to the hypothesis-goal equation reveals that, when read from a Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective, the child, not yet having entered the father’s linguistic order, opens up a profound field of imagery that disrupts/pierces the symbolic order corresponding to the imaginary order symbolized by the mother, and in this case expresses the ‘inexpressible’ poetically. From the perspective of Agamben’s philosophy, it is found that childhood, as infantile, symbolizes the historical-transcendental dimension of humanity and places the corpus of laments within the dialogism between the world of the living (visible) and the dead (invisible). Consequently, it is revealed that the image of the child in laments not only mirrors human existence but also serves as the driving force behind poetic production.

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