Marcel Proust (1877-1921) believes that the ineffable is ‘immobilised’ in a poem or piece of literature until the reader brings it back to life.

In Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, Orpheus is situated between what can & what cannot be said. The archetypal poet looks to poetry to articulate what is beyond words:

‘A god can do it. But how
will you tell me, could a man
Follow him through the narrow lyre?’ Trans Snow

Rilke’s poetry addresses the tension between what cannot be said and the necessity of language to impart ineffability.
‘What if we’re only here to say:
house,
bridge, fountain, gate, jug
[..]
oh for such saying as things themselves
never dreamt so intensely to be’ Duino Elegies trans: E. Snow 2011

If there is nothing in common between u & other people, try being close to things, they will not desert u; there are the nights still & the winds that go through the trees & across many lands; among things & with the animals every­ thing is still full of happening, in which u may participate: Rilke

In his ‘thing poems’ Rilke seeks to posit ‘the other’ - people, animals, plants and things in way that can be accessible by seeking to render the inward, the unsayable and the unknowable of the other in some way accessible and affective through alterity.

Sonnets to Orpheus - Rainer Rilke’s experiment in a seeming irresolvable impasse of the presence of absence:

‘And almost a girl it was and came forth
from this glad unity of song and lyre
and shone brightly through her spintime veils
and made herself a bed within my ear’ Trans: E. Snow, 2011