It was a day to which he always responded intensely, for the dead were very real to him. But All Souls' Day—November 2—in 1908 was particularly memorable, for Rainer Maria Rilke spent it in his room at the Hotel Biron in Paris in the grip of a long, harrowing and, even for him, remarkable poem. In a letter to Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin, the handsome daughter of a baroness at whose estate in Prague he'd been to tea on All Souls' Day 1907, Rilke wrote the next day, with the poem at last behind him, this account of what he had done:
An unexpected, powerful current of work had suddenly surfaced; I wrote and completed, without thinking of its remarkable relation to the day itself, a requiem for a compelling figure passed away a year ago: a woman who, from the great beginnings of her own artistic work, had fallen back, first, into her family, and from there into an unfortunate fate, and into an impersonal death, one which, in life, she had not prepared.
Though Rilke's letter did not name her, the figure, indeed compelling, for whom he had written the requiem was Paula Modersohn‑Becker, who, on the day he’d had tea with Nádherný in Prague, had given birth to her daughter Mathilde Modersohn. Then, eighteen days later, finally allowed to leave her bed after a long lying‑in, and making the occasion festive with an elaborate coiffure, roses pinned to her dressing gown, and many lighted candles, she had collapsed and died of an embolism, saying only “What a pity." She was thirty‑one years old, but in her short life she had created a wealth of extraordinary paintings.