ABSTRACT
“Take your heaviness/give it back to the earth’s weight,” Rainer Maria Rilke addresses the “tender ones” in the fourth sonnet, “heavy are the mountains, heavy the oceans […]. // But the breezes … the spaces”, the spaces within which the sleeper turns her breath as the poet turns his line to lift the weight of the world. The sleeper’s turn of breath, like the poet’s turn of line, imitates the divine phenomenon, initiated in Genesis, that breathing is being, for “we must get used to the fact,” Rilke writes to Nanny Wunderly-Volkart, “that we rest in the pause between two of god’s breaths”. Were God to cease breathing, were the poet to fall silent, were Wera to awaken, we would be back in the visible dimensions of our merely material lives, in the years standing “empty” like rooms and yet “overflowing with terror and sorrow”.
