Again And Again - Analysis

Overall impression and tone

The poem registers a quiet, recurrent intimacy: a tone that is at once resigned and tender. Repetition creates a cyclical, meditative mood—“Again and again” frames the speaker’s acceptance of both knowledge and return. There is a shift between the recognition of loss and the persistent choice to return to companionship and the natural world.

Relevant background

Rainer Maria Rilke, an Austro-Bohemian poet associated with lyric introspection, often treats solitude, love, and mortality. Knowing his preoccupation with inner life and spiritual questioning helps explain the poem’s pairing of sorrowful images (the churchyard) with recurrent, consoling ritual (walking and lying together).

Main themes: love as repeated affirmation

One central theme is love as a practiced, ongoing affirmation rather than a single triumph. The line “again and again the two of us walk out together” portrays love as deliberate repetition, a habit that persists despite cognizance of danger or loss. The persistent returns—walking, lying “again and again”—suggest devotion sustained through routine.

Main themes: mortality and coexistence with sorrow

Mortality is another theme. The “little churchyard” with its “sorrowing names” and the “frighteningly silent abyss” present death as an ever-present knowledge. Yet the poem does not succumb to despair; the couple’s actions occur in full awareness of these facts, indicating coexistence rather than denial.

Imagery and symbols

Recurring images—the churchyard, abyss, ancient trees, flowers, and sky—work as counterpoints. The churchyard and abyss symbolize finality and loss, while the trees, flowers, and sky symbolize rootedness, beauty, and transcendence. The contrast between “sorrowing names” and lying “face to face with the sky” suggests that shared presence amid nature can answer, or at least answer for, the knowledge of death.

Ambiguity and open question

The poem leaves open whether the repeated acts are consolation, defiance, or resignation. Is the repetition an attempt to ward off the abyss, or a humble acceptance of life lived alongside it? This ambiguity invites readers to consider how ritual and intimacy function when confronted with mortality.

Closing insight

Rilke’s short lyric compresses a paradox: full awareness of loss does not prevent, and may even deepen, the choice to return to shared life and beauty. The poem ultimately suggests that repetition—the act of coming together “again and again”—is itself a form of meaning in the face of transience.