A Walk
A poem by Rainer Maria Rilke
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the
road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-
and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a
gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
A review by A.J.Rao
The poet is walking towards the hill but his vision
reaches the hill far ahead of the physical distance covered by his feet. The inner
light of the hill grasps his own soul and transforms it spiritually much before
his own inner luminescence reaches it . It is as though the hill is making a
gesture of kinship with him in response to his own gesture. All that he feels
is the gentle wind touching his face.
Here, sensory impressions are used to create beautiful
images . The hill is personified
attributing to it human qualities
such as “charges”, “gesture”, “grasping”. A beautiful combination of the
visual and tactile elements recreates the situation in which the poet
re-experiences the intensity of the moment as “emotion recollected in
tranquility”.