Harold Schweizer Rilkes Hands: An Essay on Gentleness

This is a book of meditative reading with an aim to experience and to examine gentleness, how it shapes and pervades Rilke’s work, how his poetry might gently inspire us to become more gentle people.
Each of the fifty-eight aphorisms in this book aims to limn Rainer Maria’s Rilke’s poems and letters as a musician might play Debussy, to transpose into the key of language the song, the melody, and the refrain of Rilke’s gentle disposition: his recognition of the transience of things; his acknowledgment of the vulnerability and fragility of people, animals, and flowers; his empathy towards those who suffer. The cut flowers gently laid out on the garden table “recovering from their death already begun” in one of The Sonnets to Orpheus form a thread now visible now faint through most of this book. And because of the flowers, the concept of gentleness forms another thread, and because of gentleness, hands—agents of gentleness throughout Rilke’s poetry—enfold these pages. The German adverb leise (gentle, tender, quiet) weaves the first thread; the second is woven by flowers, then by girls’ hands, then by angels, the beloved, the poor, the dying and the dead, animals, birds, dogs, fountains, things, vanishings. Each of the short chapters in this book asks what gentleness is, how it pervades and defines Rilke’s work, and how it might gently inspire us to become more gentle readers and people.