telltale childlike qualities

“Like a woman,” said Rilke, without fearing that the comparison would demean him. He has been called the poet of the child and the woman. He understood us better than the sensualists. It has been said that he who gets too close to an object ceases to see it. The memory of his own childhood helped him to love children. Does not the hardening that ruins us come when we forget this? Rilke remembered the child with marvelous tenderness, and this freed him from the monstrous condition of being entirely adult, absolute man or woman, without the golden fringe of telltale childlike qualities, without the elvish sands of a five-year old explorer swirling in the chambers of an old heart.

—Gabriela Mistral, “An Invitation to the Work of Rainer Maria Rilke”, A Gabriela Mistral Reader (White Pine Press, 1993), translated by Maria Giachetti and edited by Marjorie Agosin