A Sybil
A Sybil - meaning Summary
Voice Worn by Time
Rilke’s "A Sybil" sketches an ancient prophetess whose age has eroded personal identity until she is more a weathered place than a person. Each dusk she returns to a fixed spot to release a chaotic flock of words that must be let go to avoid suffocation. The poem suggests prophecy as a communal, almost mechanical ritual: language both floods out of her and finds refuge beneath the shadow of her brows.
Read Complete AnalysesLong before our time they called her old, But she'd walk down the same road every day. Her age became too much to say In years — and, like a forest's, would be told In centuries. She comes to stand at dusk — Her spot each time the same — and to foretell. She is a hollow, wrinkled husk, Dark as a fire-gutted citadel. She has to turn her flock of talking loose Or it will grow too crowded to relieve. Flapping and screaming, words are flying all Around her. Then, returning home to roost, They find a perch beneath her eyebrows' eaves, And in that shadow wait for night to fall.
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