Encounter in the Chestnut Avenue
Encounter in the Chestnut Avenue - meaning Summary
A Fleeting Encounter Revealed
The poem describes a brief, intense meeting between an observer sheltered in a green, shadowed avenue and a solitary figure entering the light. Rilke compresses perception into a single instant: the stranger appears like a vividly realized portrait, then slips away. The moment registers as both intensely present and immediately transient, exploring how sudden recognition can turn a passing person into an image that exists "there forever, and then not at all."
Read Complete AnalysesHe felt the entrance's green darkness wrapped cooly round him like a silken cloak that he was still accepting and arranging; when at the opposite transparent end, far off, through green sunlight, as through green window panes, whitely a solitary shape flared up, long remaining distant and then finally, the downdriving light boiling over it at every step, bearing on itself a bright pulsation, which in the blond ran shyly to the back. But suddenly the shade was deep, and nearby eyes lay gazing from a clear new unselfconscious face, which, as in a portrait, lived intensely in the instant things split off again: first there forever, and then not at all.
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