Rainer Maria Rilke was born the only child of a German family living in Prague. . The speaker tells his readers that the sculpture will make “you” want to change “your” life. The speaker continues, saying that if these parts of the body are powerful, so too is the “smile that run[s]” through the hips, thighs, and groin of the sculpture, where the speaker states, “procreation flared.” This description portrays Apollo as being powerful in both his strength and beauty. He suspects Apollo to have had “…eyes like ripening fruit.” The fact that the facial features and head are unknowable, is of course to due to the unfortunate state of the statue.
Love is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world for himself for another’s sake, it is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things. As a result we now know ourselves to be one species among many. The poem concludes by expressing what the speaker is now feeling after seeing this sculpture, and what he believes the reader, or other viewers, should be feeling as well. Does this mean our Story is simply fiction? Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke, I Am Much Too Alone in this World, Yet Not Alone Enough by Rainer Maria Rilke. It describes a captured panther behind bars, as it was exhibited in the Ménagerie of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

As we have continued to pose our time honored meaning giving questions within the light of the new understandings of how the world came into being, a new Story of human belonging is emerging. For a growing number of people the old Story no longer resonates with their current view of how the world came into being. He died of leukemia there in December of 1926. And each holon has two opposite tendencies: a self-assertive desire to preserve its individual autonomy and an integrative tendency to function as part of the larger whole.”. Sensitized to such guidance from the very structure and functioning of the universe, we can have confidence in the future that awaits the human venture.”.

A holon, according to Diamuid O’Murchu, “is a whole made of its own parts, yet itself is part of a larger whole. . The speaker is inferring, from the beauty of the remaining parts, that the “gaze , now turned to low” would have gleamed “in all its power.”. Rilke was familiar with such people from his stay in …

The primordial whisper of inner wisdom invites us to discern a new language which may offer a meaningful response to our questions of identity, purpose and belonging. A  new Story, which in the teachings of Loch Kelly: “is no longer showing us how to transcend or escape the human condition, but helping us discover how to live a fully intimate human life.”. He speaks, perhaps with Rilke’s own voice, to the reading audience, and together, reader and speaker, discover the wonders of the torso of Apollo. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Throughout his life, his skill at crafting lyrical poetry would only increase and at the beginning of World War I Rilke was forced to leave France and return to Munich. It has degraded over time, whether due to the elements, war, or years of vandalism, and it no longer has a head or completed legs. Only someone who is ready for everything, who doesn’t exclude any experience, even the most incomprehensible, will live the relationship with another person as something alive and will himself sound the depths of his own being.
While there we had a number of his plays put on and published two additional collections of poetry. We must learn to see the differences between true belongingness and false belongingness. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don’t know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. And while not denying death, a new Story is life affirming.

FALSE BELONGING, TRUE BELONGING. This did not last long though, as he soon left for Munich to study art.