- Toward a Poetics of the Between
Rainer Maria Rilke’s poetic imagination often blurs the boundary between death and life, presence and absence, earth and spirit. In his sonnet “Wir gehen um mit Blume, Weinblatt, Frucht,” the poet engages not merely in a lyrical celebration of natural growth, but in a meditation on ontological exchange—a subterranean dialogue between the dead and the living. This exchange does not follow a logic of linear temporality or clear sovereignty; rather, it invites the reader into a realm of “Zwischending” —a between-thing composed of “mute force and kisses.”
What begins as a pastoral image unfolds into a complex metaphysical landscape where the role of the dead is reconsidered, and where the assumption of human mastery over nature is questioned. As this essay will argue, Rilke’s sonnet performs a subtle decentering of the living and proposes an alternative sacred order—one in which death participates generatively in Being.
Rilke’s invocation of the Zwischending—the “between-thing”—introduces a category that resists conventional metaphysical boundaries. It is neither mere object nor pure symbol, but a manifestation of something that arises from hidden depths and carries within it both the weight of silence and the trace of affection. This composite of stummer Kraft und Küssen— “mute force and kisses”—suggests that what grows from the earth bears within it a residual intimacy with death, yet without mourning. Rather than positing death as lack, Rilke reframes it as an active substrate, capable of giving form, density, and vitality to the living. The fruit, then, is not only the outcome of biological processes, but the sensuous remainder of what has passed, carrying a mystery that neither begins nor ends with us.
This transformation of the natural into the metaphysical has consequences for how we conceive of agency and power. The poem’s pivot from observing flowers and fruits to questioning whether the dead are their true originators leads to a displacement of anthropocentric certainty. The living are no longer positioned as masters of nature but as recipients of an unfathomable gift—one whose source lies below, in silence, decay, and perhaps even in unwilling labor. Rilke does not moralize this reversal, but he allows its implications to surface: that the dead may govern more than we imagine, and that their buried presence is not static but constitutive of what we call life. In this way, the sonnet gestures toward a poetics of depth, where sovereignty is no longer located in visibility or volition, but in what is given without announcement, from beneath.
- The Dead as Generative: Clay, Marrow, and the Gift of Growth
The sonnet begins with the observation:
Wir gehen um mit Blume, Weinblatt, Frucht.
Sie sprechen nicht die Sprache nur des Jahres.
Here, Rilke signals that natural objects are not merely ephemeral or cyclical. They speak a language not confined to seasonal rhythms but reaching deeper into the temporal unknown. This “buntes Offenbares” (colorful revelation) arises “aus Dunkel,” suggesting that natural beauty is rooted in obscurity, even in death.
The following lines deepen this mystery:
und hat vielleicht den Glanz der Eifersucht
der Toten an sich, die die Erde stärken.
This revelation, the beauty of the fruit or flower, carries within it the “glow of jealousy” of the dead—those who, rather than disappearing, strengthen the earth. Their involvement is not metaphorical; they actively “durchmärken”—to mark through or permeate—the clay with their “freies Mark”—free marrow. Here Rilke introduces a profoundly material form of metaphysical agency: the dead impress their essence into the very substance of life. The soil, then, is not inert but haunted with vitality.
The phrase “Was wissen wir von ihrem Teil an dem?”—“What do we know of their share in this?”—introduces a self-critical turn. It marks the moment when Rilke acknowledges our ignorance not only of the dead’s role, but of the very process by which life and death remain interwoven. The question is not rhetorical; it signals a metaphysical humility. The living act with the confidence of surface dwellers—plucking, eating, admiring—while the conditions of growth remain buried, both physically and in thought. We do not know how the marrow of the dead informs the present, how deeply their presence moves within the clay. The line insists that unawareness is constitutive of our condition: the gift of life is not transparent, and what appears vital may in fact be rooted in the remains of what once was.
The verb “durchmärken” intensifies this subterranean agency. It implies not a light touch, but a deep penetration of the dead’s marrow into the structure of the world. Their “freies Mark” (free marrow) is not constrained by will or identity; it flows anonymously into the earth, becoming part of the matrix that sustains the visible. That Rilke qualifies this marrow as frei (free) adds a further ambiguity: does it mean liberated from the bounds of personal selfhood, or does it hint at a voluntary offering, a kind of posthumous generosity? In either case, the implication is that the material of the dead survives as force—a force that does not fade but fertilizes, shaping life without requiring recognition. The sonnet here exposes a metaphysical irony: what is most hidden may be most foundational, and the condition for flourishing lies in decomposition.
- Interrogating the Gift: Sovereignty and the Inversion of Hierarchy
Midway through the sonnet, Rilke introduces a jarring question:
Nun fragt sich nur: tun sie es gern?
Drängt diese Frucht, ein Werk von schweren Sklaven…
This moment reframes the entire preceding image. Is the upward push of fruit a willing offering, or is it the labor of “heavy slaves,” those who toil beneath us, unacknowledged? The presumed innocence of natural bounty is now shadowed by a possible suffering beneath the gift. The question of sovereignty is then reversed:
Sind sie die Herrn, die bei den Wurzeln schlafen…?
Are the dead the true lords? If so, the living are not masters, but beneficiaries—not dominators of nature, but those who receive from a depth they cannot command. This reversal resonates with a broader Rilkean logic: the hidden is often more real, more powerful, than the visible. Sovereignty belongs not to those above, but to those who have passed through death and now sleep within the roots.
The poem undergoes a tonal shift with the sudden question: “Nun fragt sich nur: tun sie es gern?”—“Now the question is: do they do it willingly?” This abrupt interrogation fractures the meditative flow of the previous lines. What had seemed a graceful, almost sacred exchange between the dead and the living is now exposed to doubt: is this giving freely offered, or is it extracted? The line marks the entrance of ethical uncertainty. If the fruit is “ein Werk von schweren Sklaven” (“a work of heavy slaves”), then the poetic economy imagined earlier—of mutuality, of the dead as secret benefactors—becomes morally fraught. Rilke allows this ambiguity to linger, resisting resolution. The dead may be sustaining life, but their position may be that of involuntary laborers, forced into a service they did not consent to. The fruit, then, becomes not just a gift, but potentially a trace of coercion, a beautiful burden carried upward by those who cannot speak.
This framing leads to the startling possibility that the dead are not victims at all, but the true masters of the order we mistakenly believe to control: “Sind sie die Herrn, die bei den Wurzeln schlafen?”—“Are they the lords, who sleep by the roots?” The living may act as though they govern the world of matter and meaning, but Rilke inverts this logic. Sovereignty is relocated—from the surface to the depth, from the active to the dormant, from the visible to the concealed. The dead, in their silence, become guardians of origin, their slumber not passive, but sovereign. Yet this sovereignty is of a different kind: it does not manifest through command or recognition, but through unseen nourishment and ontological primacy. Rilke’s question is not just philosophical—it is theological in its reach. It destabilizes the idea of hierarchy by introducing a counter-order, one in which power belongs to those who have passed through disappearance and returned as force, not form.
- Rilke’s Mytho-Cosmology: Immanence and the Poetics of Depth
The sonnet thus reveals a cosmology in which death is not negation but deepened participation in Being. The “Zwischending”—that hybrid of “mute force and kisses”—emerges as a symbol of the threshold, a space where eros, silence, and power mingle. This between-thing is the fruit, but also the symbolic gift of the dead, a sign of their continued agency and nearness.
Rilke’s vision is not transcendent in the Platonic sense—it is sacramentally immanent. Heaven, if it exists, is not above, but in the roots. The poem proposes that the dead are not behind us but ahead of us—not lesser, but transfigured. Death is not exit, but ontological deepening. Thus, Rilke constructs what we might call a poetics of the altar beneath the earth—a sacramental economy in which all flowering is indebted to the buried.
The line “und gönnen uns aus ihren Überflüssen”—“and grant us from their overflows”—suggests a surplus economy, one that does not operate through lack or necessity but through a kind of silent abundance. The dead, having relinquished form and voice, now offer from their Überfluss, a word that implies not only excess but invisible plentitude. There is no transactional exchange here—only the asymmetrical generosity of those who, though no longer present in person, sustain what appears as life. Yet this generosity does not resolve the ethical ambiguity posed earlier. It remains unclear whether the dead act willingly, or whether this overflow is simply what occurs when decomposition and transformation run their course. What matters is that Rilke presents death not as vacancy, but as a source of fertile pressure, a hidden spring whose outpouring reaches the living without proclamation.
This culminates in the enigmatic final phrase: “dies Zwischending aus stummer Kraft und Küssen.” The “between-thing”—neither dead nor living, neither willful nor inert—condenses Rilke’s entire cosmology into a single, unclassifiable phenomenon. “Stummer Kraft” evokes a mute force, not lacking power but lacking articulation. It is the force of roots, of decay, of what works in silence. “Küssen,” by contrast, introduces a gesture of intimacy, of warmth, even of love. The juxtaposition is deliberate and unresolved: we are left with a gift that is both mechanical and affectionate, impersonal and tender. The fruit is not simply food or ornament—it is the visible trace of an invisible covenant, one that binds the living to the dead through material passage, without revealing the full terms of the exchange. In this “Zwischending,” Rilke does not offer metaphysical synthesis but holds the poles—force and tenderness, death and life—in unresolved tension. This tension is not a flaw, but the condition of the sacred in Rilke’s immanent cosmos.
- Resurrection as Fulfillment: The Christian Tomb as Ontological Root
This Rilkean mytho-poetic cosmology does not oppose Christian theology; rather, it opens a path for reinterpretation. In Christian tradition, Christ’s tomb is both place of death and place of Resurrection. The altar is the tomb, and the tomb is the matrix of glorified life.
A liturgical prayer affirms that Christ’s tomb showed itself more beautiful than any basilica—a claim that reconfigures sacred space. Death becomes the holy of holies. The structure of Rilke’s sonnet echoes this movement: it begins in beauty, descends into the obscurity of death, interrogates the nature of giving, and ends in a gesture of ambiguous but potent generosity.
If we read the “Zwischending” theologically, it becomes an image of the Eucharist: not merely a fruit, but a gift from the dead that is life itself—the risen Christ. In this view, Rilke’s sonnet does not deny Resurrection; it anticipates it in different language. The dead push fruit upward; Christ rises from the tomb. Both acts break the seal of death from within.
The movement from Rilke’s immanent cosmology to a theological reading of the Resurrection finds its bridge in the line “die bei den Wurzeln schlafen”—“those who sleep by the roots.” This image resonates powerfully with Christian liturgy, where the tomb is not merely the site of death but the place of generative transformation. In the Orthodox and Catholic traditions alike, the altar is identified with Christ’s tomb, and the tomb becomes the place where life bursts forth from death. If the dead in Rilke’s vision sleep among the roots and grant fruit from their overflows, then their condition parallels the theological mystery of Resurrection: not the return of the same, but the transfiguration of the buried into glory. The same clay marked by marrow in Rilke’s sonnet becomes, in Christian thought, the humus in which the risen body is sown—“what is sown in weakness is raised in power” (1 Corinthians 15:43).
Moreover, the phrase “gönnen uns… dies Zwischending”— “grant us this between-thing”—may be read as a poetic analog to the Eucharist, the central Christian mystery where the risen Christ offers himself as both silent force and loving presence. The Eucharistic gift, like Rilke’s fruit, is a material sign of unseen life—the body once buried now becomes food, intimacy, and transformation. The “Zwischending” thus gestures toward a sacramental ontology, in which death is not annulled but reconfigured into gift. From this perspective, Rilke’s vision of a world sustained by the dead becomes not merely a poetic meditation, but a preparation for theological fulfillment: the tomb that outshines any basilica, not because of marble or gold, but because it contains the secret of the world’s renewal—life drawn from death, eternity offered through clay.
- From Subsoil to Glory—A Poetics of the Entombed Gift
Rilke’s sonnet stages a quiet upheaval: beneath the delicate surfaces of flower, vine-leaf, and fruit lies an entire metaphysics of reversal. The living, far from sovereign, are the recipients of a mysterious and often unacknowledged gift—a “Zwischending” offered by the dead, who act not as remnants but as agents, sovereigns of the subterranean. The poem resists the temptation of transcendental abstraction, opting instead for a sacramental depth, in which clay, marrow, and silence become expressive media of Being.
Yet this is not a closed cosmology. The language of the poem—its emphasis on overflows, on sleeping lords, on a between-thing that unites mute force and kisses—prepares the ground for a Christian reading, in which death is not simply generative but redemptive. The Resurrection does not contradict Rilke’s vision; it fulfills its poetic logic. In both, the tomb is reimagined—not as end, but as origin; not as absence, but as the cradle of radiant transformation. What Rilke names in the language of the fruit, theology articulates in the mystery of the Eucharist and the risen body: that from within the earth—from the place of burial, of loss, of last things—new life begins.
Tragically, however, both legalist-moralist and rigidly dogmatic-scholastic hermeneutics within certain theological schools have contributed to the eclipse of this mysteric integration of earth and heaven, of death and resurrection. When the mystery of Being is reduced to a moral ledger or a juridical mechanism, the sacred intimacy between body and spirit, time and eternity, is fractured. In its place arises the image of a judgmental deity, embedded in simplistic oppositions: crime and punishment, obedience and reward. These pairs flatten the metaphysical richness of both Scripture and sacrament. By contrast, Rilke’s sonnet recalls the primordial liturgical intuition: that God may be most present not in retribution, but in the unseen gift of roots, and that resurrection is not compensation, but transformation—an overflowing of what once lay hidden, silent, and offered.
Image: Evening Dream (1901), by Alphonse Osbert.
