Rainer Maria Rilke

Palm

Palm - meaning Summary

Touch as Spiritual Journey

Rilke’s "Palm" imagines the hand as an interior landscape and vessel of feeling. The palm receives ‘‘heavenly roads,’’ walks on water and wells, and transfigures ordinary paths into spiritual travel. Its movement into other hands suggests empathetic contact: touch that alters and fills others with a sense of arrival. The poem presents perception and relation as active, transformative processes rooted in bodily openness and inward attention.

Read Complete Analyses

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk only on feelings. That faces upward and in its mirror receives heavenly roads, which travel along themselves. That has learned to walk upon water when it scoops, that walks upon wells, transfiguring every path. That steps into other hands, changes those that are like it into a landscape: wanders and arrives within them, fills them with arrival.

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