ABSTRACT
The message is formed of stillness. “But hear the wafting,” to repeat these lines, “the ceaseless message formed of stillness” (631). In German, the word is Stille and Stille is not silent. There is a slight wafting in it. Its hushed vibrations border on silence, as a poem borders onto its silent margins. What seems clear is that we are to listen. If we listen, we hear the stillness that conveys the ceaseless message; we hear it leise as a wafting. To name this message “God” would fill the stillness with a signified as noisy as a cry or as loud as the red of a rose. It would make the hearing impossible. Rilke tends to think of this hearing in spatial, resonant dimensions, as a landscape, a room, a stanza, a sonnet, a temple, an ear, a temple in the ear.
