ABSTRACT
Poems come to their readers gently, secretly. Although poems, as Rilke writes shortly before his death, have a “thing-like solitude”, they are also things lived and experienced, things that uncannily know people and whose desire is to be known, to be played like a lute. In Rilke’s Dinggedichte — about such fortuitous things as swans, unicorns, poets, blue hydrangeas, angels, kings, staircases, fountains, towers, carousels, flamingoes, balls — the process of transformation from the visible to the invisible, from the external to the internal, from the page to the heart is always implicit. It is the very nature and function of a poem to elicit and to undergo such transformation. Poems are vessels par excellence in which the grandparents would have found the human and into which in turn they would have poured their humanity. For poems dissolve in the existence, in the love, or in the curiosity; and yet, they retain in their innermost and everywhere their secret.
