“Whoever we finally are”: immortality is real for Rilke by way of those lyrical commemorations that preserve the image and voice of the dead among the living. Why unrequited love—or the love of those who give themselves wholly to an other without expectation of recompense and in rehearsal of death’s becoming Other—is so important to the poet in both his Elegies and Sonnets: “you almost envy/them this—forsaken, abandoned and unrequited,/who have so much loving in them/than those who are satisfied.”