Water Lily - Analysis

Introductory impression

This poem presents a calm, contemplative voice that claims possession of an inner, boundless life. The tone is quietly confident and self-contained, with a steady serenity that shifts slightly toward creative activity in the final stanza. Overall the mood moves from affirmation of completeness to an image of inward motion that transforms perception.

Context and authorial note

Rainer Maria Rilke, an Austro‑Bohemian poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, often explores interiority, the imagination, and the relationship between the self and the world. While no specific historical event is necessary to read this short lyric, Rilke's broader preoccupations with solitude, inwardness, and metaphysical perception inform its concerns.

Main theme: Inner autonomy

The dominant theme is the speaker's claim to a sovereign inner life. Lines like My whole life is mine and it is infinite assert autonomy and expansiveness. The speaker resists external limitation by insisting that the simple, present elements of experience—the ripple, the sky's shade—belong to them and sustain that freedom.

Main theme: Receptivity versus desire

The poem differentiates passive fullness from wanting: No desire opens me: I am full. Rather than viewing desire as a driving force, the speaker posits a steady receptivity that does not "close" with refusal. This suggests a mode of being that is complete without striving, where movement arises from being moved rather than from active seeking.

Main theme: Imagination as transformation

In the closing stanza the inward life exerts influence outwardly: "by being moved I exert my empire, making the dreams of night real." The self's internal motion becomes creative power, converting dream and reflection into embodied experience. The poem thus links contemplation with a subtle, sovereign agency.

Imagery and symbols

Water and mirror imagery recur: the ripple of water, the speaker's body "at the bottom of the water," and the "beyonds of mirrors." Water suggests depth, reflection, and a receptive medium; mirrors evoke doubled worlds and the transmission of otherness into the self. Together they imply that inward depth both receives and refracts external reality, making it part of the speaker's life.

Ambiguity and possible reading

One ambiguity lies in the phrase exert my empire: empire can connote domination but here feels more like sovereign creative reach. Is the speaker asserting power over the world or describing the breadth of inner influence? The poem allows both readings, leaning toward a nonviolent sovereignty grounded in contemplative receptivity.

Concluding insight

Rilke's brief lyric celebrates a self that is at once contained and expansive, whose power comes from being moved rather than from desire. Through water and mirror imagery the poem portrays a contemplative process that transforms reflection into lived reality, suggesting that true sovereignty is the quiet alchemy of inward attention.