Growing Old
Growing Old - meaning Summary
Harvest as Aging Metaphor
Rilke's "Growing Old" uses orchard and harvest imagery to explore aging, loss, and late resilience. The speaker confronts seasons of abundance and neglect, asking whether a life unharvested has wasted its gifts. Trees and fruit become stand-ins for days and nights, suggesting both the burden of past labor and a quiet, valedictory desire to bloom once more. The final plea embraces an unproductive but sincere final blossoming.
Read Complete AnalysesIn some summers there is so much fruit, the peasants decide not to reap any more. Not having reaped you, oh my days, my nights, have I let the slow flames of your lovely produce fall into ashes? My nights, my days, you have borne so much! All your branches have retained the gesture of that long labor you are rising from: my days, my nights. Oh my rustic friends! I look for what was so good for you. Oh my lovely, half-dead trees, could some equal sweetness still stroke your leaves, open your calyx? Ah, no more fruit! But one last time bloom in fruitless blossoming without planning, without reckoning, as useless as the powers of millenia.
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