Childhood
Childhood - meaning Summary
Memory of Vanished Afternoons
Rilke's "Childhood" meditates on the vanished, ineffable quality of early years. The speaker urges careful searching for words to name long afternoons that have disappeared, noting how small triggers can no longer recover their meaning. Childhood is remembered as a time of intimate immersion in the world, full of figures and emotional intensity, yet also of solitude and widening distances that prepare one for a bewildering onward life.
Read Complete AnalysesIt would be good to give much thought, before you try to find words for something so lost, for those long childhood afternoons you knew that vanished so completely --and why? We're still reminded--: sometimes by a rain, but we can no longer say what it means; life was never again so filled with meeting, with reunion and with passing on as back then, when nothing happened to us except what happens to things and creatures: we lived their world as something human, and became filled to the brim with figures. And became as lonely as a sheperd and as overburdened by vast distances, and summoned and stirred as from far away, and slowly, like a long new thread, introduced into that picture-sequence where now having to go on bewilders us.
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