Rainer Maria Rilke

Sacrifice

Sacrifice - meaning Summary

Transfiguring Love as Offering

The poem describes a speaker radically changed by the quiet, radiating presence of a beloved. Physical and inner transformation is expressed as blossoming, slimming, and the slow shedding of an earlier self. The beloved’s smile and hair become sacramental images; the speaker plans to consecrate previously unnamed, childhood longings by naming them for the beloved at an altar. Tone is devotional, anticipating fusion and renewal through love as offering.

Read Complete Analyses

How my body blooms from every vein more fragrantly, since you appeard to me; look, I walk slimmer now and straighter, and all you do is wait-:who are you then? Look: I feel how I'm moving away, how I'm shedding my old life, leaf by leaf. Only your smile spreads like sheer stars over you and, soon now, over me. Whatever shines through my childhood years still nameless and gleaming like water, I will name after you at the altar, which is blazing brightly from your hair and braided gently with your breasts.

default user
PoetryVerse just now

Feel free to be first to leave comment.

8/2200 - 0