ABSTRACT
Rilke undertook the composition of the New Poems, he writes, “to shape, not feelings, but things I had felt”. All of Rilke’s things—the novelist W.G. Sebald will inherit them—are traces of the passage of time. In a letter to Prince Schönburg on 12 January 1920, Rilke emphasizes his lifelong intimacy with things; how they provide tangible continuity precisely where such continuity failed to be assured by human interaction. Reading lines from “The Seventh Elegy” is to find oneself in the vast interior space of Rilke’s poetry, in the cathedral of his writing, filled with pillars and statues, staircases and fountains, stained-glass windows, saints, and angels. “Most people do not know at all how beautiful the world is and how much magnificence is revealed in the tiniest things, in some flower, in a stone, in tree bark, or in a birch leaf,” Rilke writes to Helmut Westhoff, his brother-in-law, on 12 November 1901.
