ABSTRACT
Despite the lightness of Rilke’s touch (so to speak), the flowers’ lying on the garden table “often from edge to edge” (my italics), also suggests—at least in my initially uncharitable reading—that their cutting and laying out is what one might do repetitively, perhaps thoughtlessly (as one may write or read a poem thoughtlessly). But this potentially merely habitual ritual is made singular—the singular turning the “often” into an extraordinary event—by the hands’ gentleness. “For it doesn’t often happen,” Rilke writes in a letter on 23 October 1900 to Otto Modersohn
that what is very great is crowded together into a thing that one can hold all in one’s own powerless hand. As when one finds a little bird that is thirsty. One takes it away from the verge of death, and its little heart beats increasingly against the warm, trembling hand like the very last wave of a gigantic sea whose shore you are. And you know suddenly, with this little creature that is recovering, life is recovering from death. And you are holding it up.
(Norton I 49) Having acquired its gentleness precisely from its relinquishing of power, the poet’s “warm, trembling hand” embodies his empathy for the bird’s condition—so does, linguistically, the innocent, disarming singularity of the sentence fragment “As when one finds a little bird that is thirsty.” For how would one know that a little bird is thirsty if not by such proximity, even intimacy, that the small shelter of the hand affords? And yet, despite the miniature size of this “thing that one can hold all in one’s own powerless hand,” what is happening in this little, poignant allegory of gentleness “is very great”; it calls forth the hyperbole of “a gigantic sea.” Correspondingly, Rilke’s use of the impersonal “one” “man,” elevates the moral significance of this scene to universal dimensions.