ABSTRACT
In a late addendum to “The Bowl of Roses” composed on 10 March 1926 in his sanatorium in Val-Mont, the ailing Rilke insists that flowers “applaud the time that kills them so gently” (1054); such fate, as we have seen, also awaits the hands that attend to flowers or birds. In “Picture of My Father as a Young Man” (1907) the slow fading of the daguerreotype of Rilke’s father is compared to “my slower fading hands” (468). In “The Balcony” (1908) we hear of a “wilting hand hanging by the side” (544). And when in “The First Elegy” the fleetingness of life is compared to “what one was in infinitely fearful hands” (632), we understand why the hands of lovers are instruments of gentlest empathy. Feeling the beloved’s pure duration, the lover’s hands feel the beloved’s fading and passing. Since the lover’s hands keep life open in the face of death, since they proceed with the lightest pressure, the beloved’s duration is thereby infinitely slowed. “For when we feel, we evaporate,” we read in “The Second Elegy,” “Denn wir, wo wir fühlen, verflüchtigen;” oh we breathe ourselves out and away, from ember to ember our scent diminishes. There may be one who says yes, you enter my blood, this room, this springtime fills itself with you … What does it matter? Nothing can hold us, we vanish inside and about it. And those who are beautiful, oh, who can hold them? Endlessly appearance arises in their face and is gone. Like dew from the morning grass we evaporate, like heat from a hot dish. (633–34)
