German lessons for Owlet: A new approach?

[muckefuck]

I know I've been lax about putting up a new lesson, but I'm beginning to wonder if trying to write structured lessons on somewhat abstract grammatical topics is really the most reaonsable approach. Might it not make more sense to incorporate the goal--reading Rilke in the original--by using his sentences as specimens for dissection? It would be a better way of determining what aspects of German grammar are straighforward enough to an English-Russian bilingual that they can be passed over lightly and which ones need lengthy discussion.

So throw up a couplet, snowy_owlet, and we'll pull it apart until there's no poetry left in it! How does that sound?