ABSTRACT
Gentleness is vulnerable. It is “almost like eyelids”, “light as rose /petals placed on the eyes of someone/who has put away his book and closed his eyes // to see,” as people read in “The Gazelle” from New Poems. The simile foregrounds not only the tender touch of Rilke’s style, the lightness of his words, the erotic whisper of his linden branches, but also the power of such lightness to evoke not solid, conventional objects but their invisible, delicate endurance. Rilke’s things — faces, flowers, lovers, swans, stone fountains — have an inwardness, delicate and ephemeral, that sets them alight like drifting leaves in the wind. It seems poignantly too late for gestures of liberation for the women in “Picture of a Woman of the Eighties,” “Woman before the Mirror,” or “The Bed” where Rilke empathically indicts women’s patriarchal subjugation.
