Girl's Lament
Girl's Lament - meaning Summary
Solitude Arriving with Adulthood
Rilke’s "Girl's Lament" sketches a shift from the gentle inwardness of childhood to the sudden, expansive solitude of adulthood. The speaker remembers feeling protected by an inner world that made sense of relationships and play. That inner shelter fractures, leaving a restless, exposed self that longs either for escape or an end. The poem registers grief over losing the comforting immediacy of being a child.
Read Complete AnalysesIn the years when we were all children, this inclining to be alone so much was gentle; others' time passed fighting, and one had one's faction, one's near, one's far-off place, a path, an animal, a picture. And I still imagined, that life would always keep providing for one to dwell on things within, Am I within myself not in what's greatest? Shall what's mine no longer soothe and understand me as a child? Suddenly I'm as if cast out, and this solitude surrounds me as something vast and unbounded, when my feeling, standing on the hills of my breasts, cries out for wings or for an end.
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