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It is always time in Rilke’s poetry. We are always taking leave. “Somewhere blooms the flower of leave-taking and ceaselessly/scatters the pollen we breathe/even in the coming wind we breathe farewell” (Werke 3, 262). “More than ever/the things among which we are living are falling away,” Rilke writes in “The Ninth Elegy” (662). “[T]hen there are the days of autumn,” he muses in his essay on Worpswede, “the heavy, incessantly falling days of November, after which comes a long, lightless winter” (Werke 6, 476). “Losing is ever ours,” he deplores in his last years, “and even forgetting/has its form in the permanent realm of transformation” (1045). Around the same time, he remembers voices: They came gently like the floating seeds that entered through the windows from the park; he did not know the pure flower’s name that grew in him from her perishing. (1045) From the poem’s dedication to Gertrud Oukama Knoop, and from a similar reference in The Sonnets to Orpheus to a flower whose name Rilke claims he did not know—“You whom I knew like a flower of which I do not know the name” (691)—we know that the deceased alluded to above is Wera Knoop, whom I mentioned earlier and who died—as Rilke would shortly—of leukemia. And yet it is with a sense of ecstatic gratitude that Rilke finds the end of life precisely in the summer of life: “Look, I’m living,” he closes “The Eighth Elegy,” “Neither childhood nor future/diminish … overflowing existence/wells up in my heart” (664). Gratitude and solitude conjoin in the “Ninth Elegy’s” closing lines like hands sheltering a face.