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In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rilke presents a long list of experiences indispensable for the writing of “a single verse”: childhood illnesses, unexpected encounters, travel, nights of love, loss, death. But the poet, Rilke adds, must also “know the gesture of small flowers when they open in the morning” (Werke 5, 124). It is arguably less the solemn, conventional record of life experiences than the minuscule, almost indescribable gesturing of flowers that characterizes, most intimately, the singularity of Rilke’s work. In another of his many letters to Clara, Rilke thinks—while on a morning walk on the island of Capri—that in the little flowers the “gesture” of the ocean slows and contracts (Mitten 80). A flower’s glance (“Blumenblick”), he cautions in an uncollected poem, is easily missed (849). “Look,” he tells us in “The Bowl of Roses” (1907), “quivering gestures so minute/that they’d remain invisible, if their rays/did not spread out into the universe” (499). Indeed, the oddly charming attribution of a gesture, “Gebärde,” to flowers—as if they wanted to say something—is distinctly Rilkean. “[T]he word assigns small flowers the fleeting, fragile semiotic of human expression,” as I suggest in my book Rarity and the Poetic: The Gesture of Small Flowers (24). In the seventh sonnet (second series) of The Sonnets to Orpheus, we witness this semiotic poignantly in the flowers’ unhurried dying. I quote the first six lines: Blumen, ihr schließlich den ordnenden Händen verwandte, (Händen der Mädchen von einst und jetzt), die auf dem Gartentisch oft von Kante zu Kante lagen, ermattet und sanft verletzt, wartend des Wassers, das sie noch einmal erhole aus dem begonnenen Tod— Flowers, you lastly akin to the ordering hands (hands of girls of then and now), laid out on the garden table, often from edge to edge, weary and gently wounded, waiting for the water to revive them once more from their death already begun— (699) Unlike the broken and scattered flowers in “Requiem,” here the flowers—though “gently wounded”—are calmly laid out on the table by the girls’ “ordering hands.” In her splendid study of the imagination Dreaming by the Book, Elaine Scarry offers a nuanced description of this empathic kinship between flowers and humans: “The gossamer quality of many flowers (columbine, campanula, foxglove, sweet pea, rose of Sharon), the thinness and transparency of the petals (which let one see the sunlight through them or see the shape of an overlapping petal coming from behind), gives them a kinship with the filmy substancelessness of mental images” (60). In its multiple visual appreciations of the flowers’ rarity and in its alternating and interspersing of declarative syntax with parenthetical description, Scarry’s phrase lightly but exuberantly mimics the abundance of the flowers and the overlapping of their petals. Scarry’s description not only overtly paraphrases “The Bowl of Roses” but her style harmonizes with the focus of her attentive gaze. There are at least five different flowers in the five parts of Scarry’s sentence: columbine, campanula, foxglove, sweet pea, rose of Sharon.