ABSTRACT
In his long letter to Magda von Hattingberg, written over five days between 16 and 20 February 1914, Rilke defines blessing as “einsehen” and “sich einlassen” literally “looking in” and “letting oneself in.” One looks at a dog not as through a window, Rilke insists, to see something human on the other side. Gently irreverent, the scene spells out one of Rilke’s ars poeticae: that the “insight” attained through the poet’s imaginative “letting himself in” results in a blessing of the object. Like many of Rilke’s poems, “The Panther” is told from the perspective of the object, which is to say the poet—and his reader—have entered “exactly into the center of him,” into the intimate claustrophobic center—the cage, the circle, the eye, the heart—that is the animal’s torment. Beda Allemann similarly characterizes Rilke’s things in his thing-poems as “penetrated by feeling to the point where they were able to circulate on their own”.
