ABSTRACT
The girls’ hands are taught their gentleness by the still life of the cut flowers held in the pictorial, formal frame of the table, metaphor for the fourteen-lined sonnet, as the girls’ hands are a metaphor for the poet’s. Were it not for the flowers, the girls’ hands could not be gently arranging; were it not for the hands, the flowers could not be gently arranged—all of which amounts to a dialectic that for Rilke resides in a timeless order and rhythm—“(hands of girls of then and now)”—in the parenthetical second line. The rhythm of the poem performs this order of arranging and being arranged—in German “ordnenden”—in the sonnet’s shape and patterns that mimic the flowers’ shapes and patterns and which direct and govern the girls’ (and the poet’s) ordering hands. It isn’t just the poet who makes the sonnet. It is also the sonnet that makes the poet. Likewise, it isn’t just the hands that order the flowers. It is also the flowers that order the hands. Hence the importance of knowing the gesture of little flowers when they open in the morning. The kinship between flowers and humans is dialogic. They speak to each other. Gentleness couples, connects, communicates.
