It is clear enough that not every something can be elevated to the rank of a thing – otherwise everything and everyone would be speaking once more, and the chatter would spread from humans to things. Rilke privileges two categories of ‘entities’ [Seienden), to express it in the papery diction of philosophy, that are eligible for the lofty task of acting as message-things – artifices and living creatures – with the latter gaining their particular quality from the former, as if animals were being’s highest works of art before humans. Inherent to both is a message energy that does not activate itself, but requires the poet as a decoder and messenger.

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