ABSTRACT
It is easier to ponder death in swans, flowers, or archaic torsos. But how passionately clandestine and gentle this dying of a thing, nonetheless, can be. In “Pink Hydrangea”, Rilke studies, as if under a magnifying glass, the almost invisible, infinitely slow draining of the flower’s pink color. The flower’s transience in its bleaching, dissolving, dispersing, and wilting adheres like a faint scent of death to all Rilkean things, and the poet’s task is simply—though it is no simple task—to see, to witness, to acknowledge, to record what cannot be known: a thing’s slow fading, a green wilting that is listening beneath the pink blooming. Rilke’s poetics favors proximity without stay, intimacy without possession, giving without receiving. Unlike houses, these are things one cannot buy, own, use, or keep; these are things to which one simply gives oneself—for the handbreadth of the poem—and which thereby expend people and in which expenditure life leans airily towards death.
