Analysis of What Birds Plunge Through Is Not The Intimate Space

Rainer Maria Rilke 1875 (Prague) – 1926 (Montreux)



What birds plunge through is not the intimate space,
in which you see all Forms intensified.
(In the Open, denied, you would lose yourself,
would disappear into that vastness.)

Space reaches from us and translates Things:
to become the very essence of a tree,
throw inner space around it, from that space
that lives in you. Encircle it with restraint.
It has no limits. For the first time, shaped
in your renouncing, it becomes fully tree.

Submitted and Translated by Gabriel Caffrey


Scheme AXXX XBAXXB B
Poetic Form
Metre 11111101001 011111010 00100111101 10101110 110110011 10101010101 1101011111 11010101101 1111010111 01010101101 0100010110010
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 481
Words 85
Sentences 7
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 4, 6, 1
Lines Amount 11
Letters per line (avg) 35
Words per line (avg) 7
Letters per stanza (avg) 128
Words per stanza (avg) 27
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 07, 2023

25 sec read
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Rainer Maria Rilke

René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke — better known as Rainer Maria Rilke — was a Bohemian-Austrian poet and novelist, "widely recognized as one of the most lyrically intense German-language poets", writing in both verse and highly lyrical prose. more…

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