Rainer Maria Rilke

The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke

Translation by M. D. Herter Norton

The Cornet is an early work, written in Berlin in 1899. According to Rilke's own account, it was set down "all in one night"— an autumn night of moon and cloud, by the light of a couple of windblown candles. In the back of his mind was a document, a copy of which had recently come to his attention among some family papers, concerning a young Rilke fallen in Hungary in 1663 in a campaign against the Turks. Only this was history, the rest his own romantic invention.