During the war years, Rilke requested her to allow him to stay for some months in her vacant 1 Rilke work as secretary to Rodin in Paris lead to a Rodin-monograph in 1903. Picasso's la famille des saltimbanques 3 (Family of Acrobats) painted in 1905 made a deep impression on Rilke and it was on his suggestion that the poet Hertha Koenig bought this painting in 1914 and installed it in her apartment in Munich. Apart from other influences, four landmark figures from the domain of visual arts Rodin 1, Cézanne 2, Van Gogh and Picasso inspired him. Rilke spent ten years in turn-of-the-century Paris, at that time the hub of activity in visual arts. It is well known that the close interaction with the maestro inspired his Neue Gedichte, among them his most famous Der Panther. His interest in plastic arts was further kindled when he came under Auguste Rodin's spell in Paris in 1902. Rilke's wife, Clara, was an upcoming sculptress in the same colony.

This was followed by commissioned reviews of five Worpswede painters. Later he lived in an artists' colony in the village of Worpswede near Bremen where he acquired insights into Jugendstil. During his visit to Russia, the nonverbal art forms like architecture fascinated him. His interest in visual art dates back to his student days when he was studying art history in Munich after leaving, for good, the city of his birth, Prague. Nowhere is the interaction between painting and poetry, the visual and the verbal arts, more evident than in the works of Rainer Maria Rilke. Painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture, said Simonides of Ceos in his famous dictum. The aim is also to study the mixing of genres, the mixing of the verbal and the visual arts in the early 20 th century, keeping in mind the specificities of each medium, with focus on the motif of circus in the rapidly transforming face of the metropolis. This paper attempts a comparative study of these two narratives representing two different semiotic systems. Rilke's interaction with live performances of the acrobats in the streets of fin-de-siècle Paris and then living with their enigmatic portrayal in Picasso's painting La famille des saltimbanques emerged in 1922 after a long period of reflection as the Fifth Duino Elegy.

Duino elegy 1