ABSTRACT
The beautiful lingerings of the girls’ ordering hands, their gentle fingerings, their redemptive ministrations — all metaphors for Rilke’s writing, all consolatory — are presaged not only in Rilke’s letter invoking the little thirsty bird recovering in the poet’s hand but also in a much earlier poem from The Book of Pictures, “Autumn,” one of the most gently consoling of Rilke’s poems. Rilke’s metaphysics imagines God as gentle, but Rilke also assigns the origin of death to heavenly realms: “The leaves are falling, falling as from far away,/as if from distant gardens withering in the sky.” People all fall into the hands of a God who, with flowing poles of feeling fingers, grants them the brief recovery that life is from their death already begun. Within the consolatory cosmology of “Autumn,” Wera falls lightly. They fall lightly.
