The Blindmans Song - Analysis

Introduction

The poem presents a bitter, intimate voice of a blind speaker who feels alienated from sighted people. The tone is accusatory, wounded, and at times ironic, shifting between despair and a bleak pride in the speaker's singular suffering. The mood moves from personal complaint to a wider moral indictment of the sighted.

Context and Speaker

Rainer Maria Rilke often explored inner experience, existential loneliness, and the limits of perception; here the narrator is explicitly marginalized as "blind". That social and existential marginality frames the poem as both personal lament and social critique rather than a literal treatise on disability.

Main Themes: Isolation and Alienation

One dominant theme is isolation: the speaker feels cut off from others who move through a world of light—"Each morning the sunlight comes into your house"—while he is led through "empty air." The repeated declaration "I am blind, you outsiders" sets up an oppositional distance between the speaker and the community.

Main Themes: Suffering and Voice

Suffering is central and complex: the speaker claims an acute, almost possessive form of pain—"I alone / live and suffer and howl"—and problematizes whether the cry is emotional or bodily—"whether its my / broken heart or my bowels." The poem links inner anguish to an audibly expressed outcry that the others cannot hear or comprehend.

Main Themes: Moral Judgment and Empathy

The poem issues a moral judgment on the sighted: their visual experience makes them prone to a shallow kindness—"And that tempts you to be kind"—which the speaker implies is inadequate. The speaker suggests that sight gives others a false confidence in understanding, while they remain oblivious to the blind person's deeper condition.

Imagery and Symbols

Recurring images of colorlessness and sound carry symbolic weight. The "colorless hand on colorless sleeve" emphasizes erasure and lack of distinguishing features, while images of sound—"howl," "outcry," "tunes"—position the speaker’s inner life as auditory and intense. The contrast between sunlight and empty air symbolizes two incompatible lifeworlds: visible warmth for the sighted, emptiness for the blind.

Conclusion

Rilke's poem uses the figure of the blind person to probe loneliness, the limits of empathy, and the inadequacy of sight as a moral or existential guide. Its power lies in the concentrated, accusatory voice that forces readers to consider how perception shapes understanding and how suffering can be both intimate and inaudible to others.