ABSTRACT
In “The Ninth Elegy”, Rilke mentions “near the hand and in the gaze”: a rope maker in Rome, a potter on the Nile, both exemplifying harmonious human engagement with a world of things. In German that change from dog to hand, from Hund to Hand constitutes a slight, almost homophonic transference of effect to agency. Perhaps the hand of the elegy remembers the dog that Rilke had encountered in Spain, as he recalls in a letter, a “small, ugly bitch” whose “lifted eyes, enlarged by worry and inwardness, sought the gaze” and which resulted, he reports, in a veritably spiritual “giving and taking, and a limitless understanding”. Perhaps, and that is the point, the hand that writes “The Ninth Elegy” has learned its empathy from such a wretched thing as a homeless dog.
