ABSTRACT
Rilke’s passage indicts the moral insincerity. His task as poet — not as medical practitioner, politician, or English professor — is to let himself into the lives of those who suffer rather than to pretend to redress a world whose God tirelessly makes sure the supply of “an endless variety” of torments does not run out. Rilke’s beggar echoes, subtly and ironically, Christ’s brief parable where Jesus warns a potential follower, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head”. Although Rilke’s reference to the boring lives of the rich is more than a tad inauthentic since he desperately depended on their financial benevolence, the lives of the dwarf or the beggar, one can learn from his letter to Professor Herman Pongs written more than two decades later, are to be praised. His only liberating gesture is to close his eyes and to cover his face.
