Extinguish Thou My Eyes - Analysis

Introduction and overall impression

Rainer Maria Rilke's "Extinguish Thou My Eyes" reads as a concentrated declaration of spiritual persistence: even if every bodily faculty is removed, the speaker insists on continued union with the beloved or divine. The tone is at once urgent and serene, moving from physical deprivation to metaphysical assurance. A subtle shift runs from enumerating losses toward an increasing confidence that the self's core will transcend those losses.

Context briefly considered

Rilke, an early 20th-century Austro-Bohemian poet, often explored themes of interiority, devotion, and transformation; this poem sits comfortably in that tradition, blending religious or mystical longing with bodily imagery. While no explicit historical event anchors the poem, Rilke's lifelong preoccupation with the relationship between body, spirit, and art informs its stance.

Main theme: Transcendent devotion

The dominant theme is unwavering devotion that outlasts bodily function. Repeated clauses—"I still can see Thee," "I still can hear Thee," "I still will hold Thee"—use anaphora-like repetition to insist that senses are not the final guarantors of intimacy. The escalation from senses to heart to brain and finally to blood dramatizes devotion as progressively more interior and elemental.

Main theme: Body versus spirit

The poem stages a contest between the body's fragility and the spirit's persistence. Physical verbs—"extinguish," "deprive," "sever," "arrest"—threaten dissolution, while the speaker's responses reclaim nonphysical capacities: sight becomes vision without eyes, hearing becomes a kind of inner listening, holding becomes heart-centered. This contrast frames a philosophy in which the self survives bodily negation.

Imagery and symbolic elements

Key images recur: eyes, ears, feet, voice, arms, heart, brain, fire, and blood. Eyes and ears symbolize external perception; their "extinguish[ing]" suggests sensory death. The heart widens into a metaphorical single hand—an intimate, concentrated means of holding. Fire consuming the brain invokes purification or annihilation, yet blood's "flowing" becomes the final carrier of the beloved, suggesting embodiment of the beloved within life's circulatory core. Blood here is both life and vehicle of relation.

Ambiguity and interpretive question

The poem can read as religious mysticism addressed to God, or as erotic devotion to a human beloved; the capitalized pronoun suggests the former but leaves room for both. One can ask: is the speaker claiming personal immortality through devotion, or asserting that devotion itself transforms corporeality into its own form of survival?

Concluding synthesis

Rilke's poem affirms a love or faith that resists corporeal erasure by relocating intimacy into ever-deeper registers of being. Through concentrated imagery and progressive escalation, the poem argues that what genuinely binds one to the other is not the transient body but an interior force—heart, brain, blood—that persists even under annihilation.