ABSTRACT
In the eleventh sonnet of the second series, men shoot birds scared into flight by the shaking of a large cloth that had been lowered into their cave. The very perversion of gentleness by which the cloth is lowered “leise” to awaken “a handful of pale/tumbling doves” sounds a discord to be heard again and again— though gently, leise as it is Rainer Maria Rilke’s wont, in the poems he will write along with letters and translations. The Romantic canonization of Rilke’s climax as poet of the Duino Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus obscured any untidy continuance of his career, as Edward Snow notes, between 1922 and the year of his death, 1926. Although they occasionally play a discordant music still emanating from the empty, terrifying rooms of the years between the war, the scattered poems written after the Sonnets and the Elegies labor to sustain what we have identified as Rilke’s peculiar poetic gentleness.
