ABSTRACT
Had the flowers been merely tossed on the table rather than laid out from edge to edge, had they been cut at different lengths (as in my imperfect translation), had the sonnet been merely (or intentionally) cast haphazardly on the page like Mallarmé’s throw of the dice, we would have a deviation—perhaps an interesting deviation—from the gentleness of which Rilke’s aesthetic form is a reification, a record, and a trace.
