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Zart usually applies to the translucent gauziness of petals, the wings of butterflies, eyelids, or baby skin—through which one might glimpse a hint of death. Zart is tactile, as in gentle, soft, tender. Its derivative Zärtlichkeit is equivalent to words such as tenderness, gentleness, affection, caress. One would hardly think even of a delicate book of poetry as zart, though Rilke’s friend the painter Paula Becker calls Gottfried Keller’s hefty novel The Green Henry “sehr lang und sehr zart” “very long and very tender” (Briefwechsel 30). While Rilke, no less eccentrically, may have thought of himself as zart, his work is done leise. In his extensive poetic bestiaries, requiems, and floristries, and in his poetic romances with angels, women, saints, and the dead, almost nothing is not leise.