Rilke wrote his poem about the Three Wise Men at Schmargendorf on 23 July 1899. It was printed in the first year of the handsome journal, Die Insel,and was fitted out with arabesques in the margins and an illustration (of the Wise Men against a wintry landscape) by Heinrich Vogeler. Why Rilke turned to this Yuletide topic in high summer is not clear; perhaps he had his eye on a coming December number of one or another of the many periodicals that he bombarded with submissions. A contributing circumstance may be that he thought of a particular child, Rolf, the illegitimate son of Franziska von Reventlow, whom — the mother and in a way the son — he had gotten to know in the late winter of 1897 in Munich (she was the impecunious hetaera of Schwabing) and visited in Constance in April of that year, when she was in the fifth month of her pregnancy and feeling “rather heavy,” as she told her diary. (The identity of the father remained unknown; was it the palaeontologist Albrecht Hentschel?) Rilke had been taken with her in Munich and had put, she claimed, a poem in her mailbox every day, verses that seem not to have survived. A poem in Advent,“Konstanz,” starting “Dem Tage ist so todesweh” (SW 1:121; The day feels sadness unto death), is a souvenir of their sightseeing together.