Parting
Parting - meaning Summary
The Ache of Separation
Rilke's "Parting" presents the experience of separation as a persistent, almost physical force that undoes what was once closely joined. The speaker recounts standing helpless as a gaze lets them go, reducing an intimate presence to something small, pale, and detached. The final image—compare to a plum tree branch and a cuckoo's abandoned perch—casts the loss as ordinary, ordinary and irrevocable, leaving only a faint, unexplained wave of absence.
Read Complete AnalysesHow I have felt that thing that's called 'to part', and feel it still: a dark, invincible, cruel something by which what was joined so well is once more shown, held out, and torn apart. In what defenceless gaze at that I've stood, which, as it, calling to me, let me go, stayed there, as though it were all womanhood, yet small and white and nothing more than, oh, waving, now already unrelated to me, a sight, continuing wave,--scarce now explainable: perhaps a plum-tree bough some perchinig cuckoo's hastily vacated.
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