Poem of the Week – The Swan by Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke ranks as one of the greatest German-language lyricists and is widely acclaimed as one of the most accomplished practitioners of poetry in modern European history. Famed for his famous cycle, The Duino Elegies, as well as for his Sonnets to Orpheus and this week’s poem, The Swan, Rilke’s aesthetic vision displayed a substantial classical education, tempered by an unorthodox treatment of complex themes like time, beauty and God.
Often willfully obscure, intellectually unrelenting yet rhythmically mellifluous, his poems are noted for their humane wisdom and rewarding reflections. Though he wrote in German, he was born in Prague in 1875 and spent much of his adult life living across Europe, including in France where he worked for the celebrated sculptor Rodin.
This week’s poem advertises Rilke’s ability to illustrate odd, obscure but curiously befitting metaphors. The swan’s graceless and ungainly bearing on land is contrasted to its elegant progress across a body of water. The clumsiness of its time away from its natural habitat is equated to man’s time alive, and its advent onto the water is compared to man’s experience of love and acceptance of death.
It reminds me of Emil Cioran’s humorous philosophical assertion, “what if death is our home and existence our exile?”. Though the poem’s fixation on death may seem gloomy, it is a melodious consolation urging the reader not to fear the prospect of their assumed completion.
We hope you enjoy this week’s poem as much as we did.
The Swan by Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Robert Bly)
This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes through what is not done,
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.
And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.