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Rilke invokes flowers in stages of ecstatic blooming and regretful wilting in many of his poems. In one of the most memorable of them, sonnet seven of the second series of The Sonnets to Orpheus, he foregrounds and gently dramatizes a special kinship between flowers and humans. “[L]aid out/on the garden table” and “recovering once more /from their death already begun” (699), the cut flowers and the girls’ hands that minister to them embody, as if in a brief parable, a poignant mutuality that also allegorizes Rilke’s affirmation of death as an intrinsic part of life.