Heartbeat
Heartbeat - meaning Summary
Transformed by a Distant Heart
Rilke presents humans as chiefly mouths, channels that translate a distant, immense heart into faint, inadequate pulses. The poem contrasts the vastness of that source—its joy and grief—with our limited capacity, which causes repeated separation and speech without full contact. Occasionally the great heartbeat breaks through into a person’s core, provoking a raw cry that alters both inner being and outward appearance, suggesting rare moments of true communion.
Read Complete AnalysesOnly mouths are we. Who sings the distant heart which safely exists in the center of all things? His giant heartbeat is diverted in us into little pulses. And his giant grief is, like his giant jubilation, far too great for us. And so we tear ourselves away from him time after time, remaining only mouths. But unexepectedly and secretly the giant heartbeat enters our being, so that we scream ----, and are transformed in being and in countenance.
Feel free to be first to leave comment.