"We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life."
-Rainer Maria Rilke, translation by Stephen Mitchell
I read in the bath tub in the morning after breakfast. It is part of my morning ritual. I gather a set of books and read excerpts from each, stopping to think, before I go about my day. I read tales of explorers, novels, non-fiction, travel guides, and poetry. I put all of these dreams and expansive ways of seeing the world into my head before I get concerned with work.
Rilke is one of my favorite poets. I found Rilke quoted and talked about in meditation circles, Burbea quotes him, and by modern poets like David Whyte and John O'Donohue. I bought an anthology of his work while I was in Paris and stopped in at the Shakespeare and Company English bookstore there. Most anthologies from dead poets are boring. Rilke is alive.
This poem in particular stopped me in my tracks. Many people know it already, although I don't think it is Rilke's most famous poem (is it the Panther?) It is about someone pondering what remains of a classical statue, a torso of the God of Perfection, Harmony, and Spirit, Apollo. The love for antiquity was still around in Rilke's time in the early 20th century. People would travel to Italy and Greece to ponder this earlier art, they would study Latin and Greek in school and read the classics. The lost times of civilization were a model, an existence proof of the heights that can be reached in the human intellect, that were then clearly lost in the proceeding thousands of years.
In that context it isn't unusual that Rilke would write a poem about a ruined statue. Perhaps he was following Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandius from one hundred years earlier, from the even more classically inspired period of the romantics. From Ozymandius we have "behold ye Mighty! look upon my works and despair." The ruination contradicts the proclamation and reminds us of the ephemerality of power and of our lives.
But here Rilke takes a different track. He is showing us a way of seeing. From the beginning the torso is endowed with magic, the curves of the statue have the attributes of Apollo imbued into them in the way the viewer considers them. The viewer senses a radiance, a power, a bursting.
We have all gone to museums filled with these statues and antiquities. How often can we see them in this way? If we are lucky, and can possess the poetic faculty, if our souls know how to participate and be moved by what is inherent yet not fully real, then works of art can speak to us in these ways. We can be moved. I think Rilke is reminding us that yes, we can be moved, if we develop this way of seeing.
But so much more than this, too. The last two lines. "for here there is no place that does not see you." Now there is more than an artistic seeing of attributes, of sexual power and brilliance, springing from what the statue is. The statue now is alive, with its own autonomy, and sees you from all places at once rendering the full meaning of Apollo upon you the potential of the human spirit.
"You must change your life."
Rilke invites us to something more than artistic seeing. The entire human cultural archetype of the divine shines through and issues a command to the viewer. There is an imperative that to me was so surprising and yet obvious that I did a sort of double take reading it.
We confront the ideal and the ideal demands more from us.