Abstract
The brief space of silence in a stanza break in a poem by Rilke and Wordsworth respectively, serves as a trope for the passage from life to death. Although signs and symbols of irremediable loss, each stanza break resonates with a remainder, a resonant silence, a silence that is audible. Epitomized by the empty space of the stanza break, a poem’s rarity does not consist in what is legible on the page but in what is implied, and audible, by what is not legible.
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Notes
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1957, vol. 2, 506.
Mary Jacobus, Romantic Things: A Tree, a Rock, a Cloud ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012 ), 171.
Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 101: “The silence of listening permeates the poem — it exists in the silences between sounds and stanzas and the turning of the page.”
See Pieter Vermeulen, Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust ( New York: Continuum, 2012 ), 91–92.
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© 2016 Harold Schweizer
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Schweizer, H. (2016). The Rarity of Dying. In: Rarity and the Poetic: The Gesture of Small Flowers. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-58929-3_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-58929-3_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-88778-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-58929-3
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