ABSTRACT
Birds fly through gazing faces, Rainer Maria Rilke announces to Katharina Kippenberg “schauende Gesichter durch die die Vogel fliegen”. In one of his uncollected poems, “Turning” written in 1914, barely a year after the letter to Kippenberg and slightly before the outbreak of the war, Rilke remembers the gazing face as emblem of his aesthetic disposition during the period of the composition of the thing-poems. Grazing animals stepped trustingly into his open gaze, and the caged lions stared into it as into inconceivable freedom; birds flew straight through his gentle gaze, flowers wide open, gazed into it as they do with children. The very failure to articulate “heart-work” other than as opposed to “unknown,” “constrained,” “overpowered” images, and those somehow contested by an infantilized muse, sets up the creative and mental crisis that characterized the decade of the war for Rilke.
