Archaic Torso of Apollo

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Genres: Poetry, Classics

1 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

A mystic lyricism and precise imagery often marked verse of German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, whose collections profoundly influenced 20th-century German literature and include The Book of Hours (1905) and The Duino Elegies (1923).

People consider him of the greatest 20th century users of the language.

His haunting images tend to focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety — themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernist poets.

His two most famous sequences include the Sonnets to Orpheus , and his most famous prose works include the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge .

He also wrote more than four hundred poems in French, dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, his homeland of choice.

Reviews

[♡ella grey♡︎ · Rating 3 out of 5]

For creative writing class <3

[Jd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is this about a specific sculpture? I hope so because if not, I am lost. I’m not sure why there is a break after the first stanza other than to keep the quatrain but it’s not consistent there either from stanza to stanza. I think it’s hilarious that the speaker is assuming there has to be some glow or power from inside the torso because why else would people be enamored with a headless torso. It couldn’t possibly be the skill on offer or the idealized human form. Unless the speaker is thinking of godhood barely contained by stone, divinity shining forth to call it’s worshipers. I do not know what it means by a smile run through. I get the reference to the genitals, but the smile seems to link to the previous line and being dazzled by the chest, so I’m not sure if he’s trying to say that you smile as your gaze passes from hip to hip because of that manly v or something else that is flying right over my head. The last stanza, I’m gone. I have no idea. I’m not tracking this idea of power, or light, shining from the torso and then bursting like a star because it can be seen by people all over the world? It then ends with the most baffling line of all. You must change your life? What? Why!?! Because the torso power says so? I guess I get the idea of a universal appeal to art that gives that art a form of power.

[TimetoFangirl]

This might make me a peasant but this is another piece of literature that made honestly no impression on me.

[Andy Hickman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Commentaries say that in this poem "the object describes the observer".
Ok then...