In The Beginning - Analysis

Introduction and Overall Impression

The poem presents a contemplative, slightly disquieted meditation on God's sleep and humanity's effect upon the divine. The tone opens reverent and calm, then shifts to uneasy and accusatory, and closes with a resigned recognition of the cosmos' vastness. This movement from wonder to moral tension to cosmic perspective shapes the reader's response.

Relevant Context

Rainer Maria Rilke, an early 20th-century Austrian poet, often explores spiritual longing and existential solitude. Read against fin-de-siècle concerns about faith, art, and human responsibility, the poem reflects a modern confrontation with a distant or absent deity rather than orthodox theology.

Main Themes: Divine Absence and Human Agency

The poem's central theme is divine absence, figured as God asleep: "our Lord God sleeps: we are His sleep." This image makes absence intimate and shared rather than merely external. Closely linked is human agency and culpability: humans "plundered Him" and "stopped Him from reacting," suggesting our actions both cause and exploit the divine withdrawal.

Main Themes: Suffering, Indulgence, and Cosmic Indifference

A secondary theme contrasts occasional divine suffering with overwhelming indifference. God "appears as if tormented," yet such spells are "outweighed" by the number of His other worlds. The poem thus balances pity for a wounded deity with the humbling reminder of an indifferent cosmic scale.

Key Symbols and Imagery

Sleep functions as the dominant symbol: restful, numbing, communal ("we are His sleep") and incapacitating ("numbed by sleep"). The image of a "fist-tight hand" suggests potential force rendered inert, implying that God's power exists but is restrained. Stars and "countless other worlds" expand perspective, transforming local moral drama into one small scene within an immense universe. These images together create tension between intimacy and vastness.

Ambiguity and Open Question

The poem leaves ambiguous whether God's sleep is willful indulgence, passive resignation, or the consequence of human action. This invites the question: does human moral failure sleep God, or merely reveal a deity who was always distant?

Conclusion

Rilke's poem uses the striking motif of a sleeping God to probe responsibility, suffering, and cosmic scale. Through intimate images and a subtle tonal shift, it asks readers to consider how human behavior alters their relation to the divine while reminding them of the universe's indifferent immensity.