is almost as if in this poetry there is operative an unlimited and groundless hominization of the animal, by which the animal, with respect to the original experience of beings as a whole, is even raised above man and becomes in a certain way a "super-man":
What is outside we know from the animal's
visage alone.
Who are they who speak here in the "we"? The "we" are moderns of modern metaphysics, a humanity that, as regards an essential experience of Being, has erred into the dead end of the oblivion of Being.
Rilke's poetry often relates to contemporary man with much seriousness and care, though with no less an amount of confusion, thoughtlessness, and flight. Rilke relishes word-forms but does not consider the word. He talks thoughtlessly about the "open" and does not question what the significance might be of the openness of the open, whether it only refers to an endless progression of unlimited objects or whether in the word of the "open" unconcealedness is thought, the unconcealedness that first releases objects into an objectivity as the free, without which not even the nothing could rise up in its excessiveness and brandish its menace.
"What is outside" and what "is" at all, be it "outside" or "inside," or in no "space," we only know on the basis of a knowledge of Being, which itself comes to presence as the free, and in its clearing beings find an access to unconcealedness and thereby an elevation to appearance, and thereby the order of presencing.
§9 Θεά-Ἀλήθεια. The looking of Being into the open lighted by it. The directive within the reference to the word of Parmenides: the thinker's journey to the home of ἀλήθεια and his thinking out toward the beginning. The saying of the beginning in the language of the Occident.
We might now perhaps he able to see some things more clearly. The open holding sway in the essence of ἀλήθεια is difficult to behold not only because it is the closest but became it illuminates and thereby first bestows the closest, all that is close, and the far as well.
But this difficulty in beholding the open is only a sign that what could come within our essential regard might also he deprived by us of its arrival, due to our lacking the entitlement for that which has already bestowed itself on us as Being itself but which thereby also withdraws ever anew, without our surmising that event.