On Gentleness: Rilke’s Hands

Abstract

Both in his poems and his letters, Rainer Maria Rilke presents himself as a passionate apologist for gentleness—to such a degree that, as he repeatedly insists, even one's own death should be gently borne and affirmed throughout one's life. The seventh sonnet of the second series of The Sonnets to Orpheus performs an allegory of this gentle dying that a good life is—cut flowers laid out on a garden table are tended by girls' hands. The allegory extends to the poet's writing, which is a version of the girl's ministrations, just as the form of the sonnet is a rendition of the gentle arrangement of the flowers on the table. Flowers and humans, Rilke claims, have a special kinship in their brevity, their vulnerability, their need for gentleness. Perhaps writing or reading a poem, such are the implications, can be an exercise in gentleness, for poems, too, are brief and vulnerable.