ABSTRACT
With all their eyes creatures behold the Open. Only our eyes are turned around like traps to catch the freedom of their vision. What is outside we only know it from the countenance of animals. Even the young child we turn around and force her to look backward, to see constructions not the Open that is so deep in the animal face. Free from death. It is the poet’s thought of his condition that has begun to darken the redemptive vision. At the end, that vision is partially withdrawn, never fully to recover in Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetry. In the Elegies the vision is embodied by gnats— very diminished angels— while the animals, as we have noted earlier, have become “vigilant,” burdened “with the weight and sorrow of a great sadness,” caused by their memory of a Wordsworthian womblike or celestial origin.
