ABSTRACT
The seventeenth of The Sonnets to Orpheus proposes that in the “trampled meadow/of the poverty” people might yet find in the “gently un-petalled flower cups/the exotic fruits of consolation”. Consolation is the spiritual and psychological dimension of gentleness. Among other of its effects—the calming, the pleasure, the intimacy, the affirmation—gentleness consoles. And inversely, consolation is gentle. Consolation is not possessive. It is not spectacular. It is leise like those two last lines of “Autumn.” Consolation is almost invisible. Hence Rilke’s subtle addition of “help,” in the line from “The First Elegy”, as distinguished from consolation. Love is the gravitas of lightness, lest people turn melancholy into an amorous fixation on the weight of death, lest they refuse consolation. Scanning the page, the eyes move lightly like the hands of lovers who feel beneath their hands the beloved’s pure duration.
