Every angel is terrifying.

“Every angel is terrifying” is a line from Rainer Maria Rilke’s The Duino Elegies, translated by Stephen Mitchell, and a recurring expression that complicates the wish to fly. Henry explains the line to Clare as they discuss angels; much later, Clare makes him a pair of vast wings. Their beauty cannot erase their menace or make them functional, giving the phrase a material form in an object poised between longing and impossibility.

Source and First Explanation

The phrase enters the novel as Henry and Clare talk about Thomas Aquinas, who, Henry says, sought order, reason, and God, and believed in both Aristotle and angels. Clare responds not with theology but with a wish: she loves angels for their beauty and imagines having wings, flying around, and sitting on clouds. Henry answers with the German line, “Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich.” He then translates it as “Every angel is terrifying” and identifies it as part of Rilke’s The Duino Elegies, a work by one of their favorite poets.

The exchange makes the phrase a small lesson in the difference between appearance and experience. Clare’s angel is a beautiful creature of imagined flight; Henry’s quotation introduces an angel whose presence is frightening. Clare’s sigh indicates that she does not understand the German, and she reminds him of that. When he explains, she laughs that he is doing it again. The moment places their shared affection for poetry beside a recurring difference in how they meet: Henry supplies a literary reference, while Clare draws him back to the immediate conversation.

Clare Makes the Image Material

The phrase returns when Clare is working in her studio on wings for Henry. She begins with armature wire and initially tries to imagine a complete, life-sized figure, shaping a torso before deciding she does not want it and pushing the work beneath the table. She starts again with wire, this time focusing on the wings. That change narrows the project from a whole angelic body to the single feature that matters: the possibility of flight.

Clare constructs the wings as a matched pair, looping and weaving the wire, measuring the span with her arms, and reversing the process for the second wing. She hinges them together and hangs them from the ceiling. Eight feet across, they float at breast height, graceful and ornamental but useless. Their scale gives the fantasy a physical presence, while their suspension makes clear that they remain an artwork rather than a means of escape.

Color and material carry the phrase’s darker implication into the making. Clare first considers white, then rejects it in favor of Red Iron Oxide, the color of dried blood, together with Bone Black. She prepares kozo and linen fibers, combining the bark’s toughness and resilience with the linen’s softness. Her choices resist the familiar image of a clean, white angel: this angel is made through labor, contrasting textures, and a color associated with blood. The line from Rilke thus becomes part of the work’s design rather than a decorative caption.

Gift, Longing, and Threat

When Henry sees the wings, he asks whether Clare has made feet, saying he could use some. Clare answers with the single word “Wings,” and lets the white sheet fall to the floor. The exchange sets the gift against his immediate bodily need: feet are what he asks for, while the wings offer an image of what he longs for. Neither answer cancels the other. The wings cannot serve as feet, but they restore the imaginative possibility of running and flying that bodily loss places under pressure.

In candlelight, the wings waver, darker than the darkness. They appear threatening even as they evoke longing, freedom, and rushing through space. Their edges are ragged, they remain silent, and Henry cannot speak. The scene holds the attraction and terror of the angel together instead of resolving one into the other. Flight promises release from gravity, but the wings are fixed in the studio; their beauty lies alongside their uselessness, and their silent presence makes that limit newly palpable.

Recurrence and Significance

The line’s return connects a brief conversation about poetry to one of Clare’s most concrete acts of care. At first, Henry quotes Rilke to explain why the angel Clare imagines may also be terrifying. Later, Clare builds an angelic image for him from wire, pigment, and fiber, answering a wish that the body cannot straightforwardly fulfill. The phrase therefore gathers literary reference, handmade object, and embodied desire into a single motif.

Its force depends on the unresolved contrast between wings as a sign of freedom and wings as an ornamental construction that cannot carry anyone. Clare’s work gives longing visible dimensions—an eight-foot span, a chosen blood-red pigment, two carefully measured wings—without pretending that the object can undo physical limits. “Every angel is terrifying” names both sides of the gift: the beauty of imagined transcendence and the pain made visible when the image of flight meets the body that needs help standing and moving.