Translated by Stephen Mitchell
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.
When Rilke lived in Paris, he went every day to the Louvre, and to the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes, with the intent of learning to 'see' things clearly. He wrote his famous poem "The Panther" after standing in front of its cage for weeks, and half a dozen others. At the Louvre he saw a torso of Apollo; we're not sure which one, there are several, but likely some kind of Kouros. And after seeing it, he wrote one of the greatest poems in all of Western literature.
Rilke looks at the torso until he sees it, and we stand next to him, see him seeing it. Though the sculpture is ancient and damaged, archaic, foreign, Greek; though it is missing its head and arms and legs, it is still profoundly alive, it is fruitful, ripe, lustful. Though it is opaque, dense and made of stone, it glows from within, is suffused with light, pulses with a lived life. It is pagan. It is powerful, eternal.
And the sculpture is humbling. It shows Rilke who he is, and what he lacks. He is refined, a poet writing a sonnet, and here confronted with something wild, impassive, animal. We do not like to face our deficiencies or look at our failures, but from art, if we let ourselves see it, we cannot hide, for here there is no place that does not see you. A good poet would have stopped with that line, because it is quite enough. But Rilke is not a good poet. Rilke is a great poet. The last sentence in the poem is unrelenting in its truth: great art truly seen, knows you and what you must do, propels you forward to become greater than yourself. The path is fraught and difficult. You must pursue your desires and not succumb to your fears. It is an awesome responsibility to which you must commit yourself. You must change your life.
