Put Out My Eyes - Analysis

Introduction and overall impression

This short poem reads as an intense declaration of devotion that moves from calm assertion to escalating physical imagery. The tone is fervent and unflinching, with a steady intensification as the speaker describes successive losses of body and sense while insisting on continued perception and union. There is a quiet certainty throughout, ending in a final, almost mystical image that fuses pain and persistence.

Context and authorial note

Rainer Maria Rilke, an Austro-Bohemian poet associated with late Romantic and early modernist currents, often treats inner experience, longing, and spiritual transfiguration. While no specific historical event is necessary to read the poem, Rilke's interest in inner life and metaphysical love frames this speaker's willingness to transcend bodily limits.

Main theme: enduring love and presence

The dominant theme is love's persistence beyond physical constraints. Repeated formulas—"Put out my eyes, and I can see you still," "Slam my ears to, and I can hear you yet"—assert that affection or memory preserves the beloved's presence even when sense perception is removed. The poem treats presence as independent of the body's faculties.

Main theme: transcendence of the physical

Rilke stages a progression of losses (sight, hearing, speech, limbs, heart) to show that consciousness or will transcends the corporeal. Phrases like "I shall take hold of you / And grasp you with my heart as with a hand" recast internal faculties as tools of contact, suggesting a metaphysical means of relation that outlasts anatomy.

Main theme: sacrifice and identity

The speaker's readiness to be mutilated implies self-surrender and testing of identity: if bodily functions cease, what remains of the self is revealed as devoted persistence. The final lines—brain set afire and carrying the beloved on the blood-stream—link suffering and transformation, implying that the self is reshaped by the intensity of love.

Symbols and vivid imagery

Sensory organs and limbs function as symbolic stages of deprivation and proof: eyes, ears, tongue, arms, heart, brain, blood and fire. Eyes and ears symbolize ordinary perception; the heart and brain represent inward life and intellect; blood and fire introduce sacrificial and alchemical connotations. The recurring metamorphosis of body parts into alternative means of contact (heart as hand, brain bearing the beloved in blood) suggests love as a force that converts and transmutes the self. One might ask whether the poem celebrates annihilation for union or dramatizes the inevitability that love remakes the lover.

Conclusion and final insight

Rilke's poem compresses a bold metaphysical argument into a few lines: love endures, transforms, and claims the interior when the exterior is stripped away. Its escalating images force readers to confront how identity and relation survive loss, leaving a paradoxical sense that deprivation both threatens and proves the constancy of devotion.