ABSTRACT
Earlier in his life at the beginning of the century, while he was in Paris writing his essay on Rodin, Rilke had already thought of the making of a thing — a sculpture, a poem, a book — as a slowing of the thing’s departure. Smallest thing that the poet is, fleeting under the vast skies, almost out of sight, the poem delays his passing by the slow grinding of the windmills and by the ceremonial pace and rhythm of the poem’s lines. Rilke’s cosmic perspective recalls the words of the psalmist in the Hebrew Bible who holds the life to be no more than “a handbreadth”. He frequently thematizes the vanishing that adheres to all things, as in poems about the end of summer, about leaves falling, about a swan dying, a person going blind, a friend’s premature death, a cut flower’s temporary recovery in the water.
