ABSTRACT
IN an undated letter to Gertrude Ouckama Knoop, which has been grouped with those of January, 1922 by the compilers of the letters, Rilke speaks of the journal she had kept of the fatal illness of her daughter Wera, a journal which had made a strong impression on Rilke. Wera, a young and lovely girl, had been a dancer and Rilke carried her image with all its charm in his mind. This image, combined with what he read of her determined love of life, revived in him his own feelings towards life and death, and, unanticipated as these were, he yet embodied them in the ripeness he had achieved. This ripeness did not fail him; intuition now proved an unassailable truth of life, as it had not at the time of the death of Paula Modersohn-Becker. Life and death had become one to him, a unity of which nothing could mar the grandeur and lovely fragility.
