The yellow rose and the small crown of immortelles

Rilke was not recognized by his mother, who used him as a toy. He was therefore exposed, lacking a container. His permeable, scattered psychological constitution, bordering on dissociation, limited his powers of concentration and work. At the age of 28, he met Rodin, and discovered Cézanne and a quality of vision they shared: concentration and purity of intention. Such a vision takes in, envelopes, and therefore binds together the object of contemplation in itself. This attentive, encompassing gaze, respectful of the object’s integrity, enables the object in becoming to appear as it is and to radiate in its surroundings. Rilke seized upon this gaze, which was also his own, and used it again and again in two collections of some two hundred poems. The work on these “poem-objects,” truly art pieces he shaped and colored with the greatest care, gave him a framework in which he could work on gathering up his own constitution and his powers of concentration. In his own words, he was on the long path to becoming a worker, and he was only at the first milestone.