Shadowing Practice: Rainer Maria Rilke's Spiritual Poetics - Learn English Speaking with Video

But your capacity to see, and your capacity to recognize beauty, and to widen the scope of your sympathy beyond the narrow limits of yourself, to grow spiritually and creatively,

is dependent upon your confrontations with artistic greatness.

Sonst könnte nicht der Bück der Brüste dich blinden.

Und im leisen Drehen der Linden könnte nicht ein Lachen gehen zu jener Mitte, die die Säugung trug.

Nowhere, beloved, will the world be but within us.

Tonight we are discussing Reina Maria Rilke.

The members of Verst have voted in the month of September what they wanted a lecture on.

This could be topics, movements, poets.

So we gathered a few ideas together, and Donala put them into a poll, our moderator, and the top five made it.

And the one we all voted on was Rilke, and he won so I'm excited to, and sort of surprised in a way, that to be lecturing on Rilke,

he's not somebody who has, I haven't really brought him up in many lectures, but I think he's on the margins of so many of our interests,

so it was really lovely to see him appear.

Pretty soon we're going to be voting for the October lecture, so be on the lookout for that.

This is an extraordinary poet.

probably one of the most important voices of the early 20th century.

He's a bit of a poet's poet, someone who poets admire and learn from.

But he's different from most poets of this kind in that he's widely read by people who are not poets.

And what's more, he continues to be one of those poets to whom contemporary poets are often turning.

I think of the spiritual character of many of Mary Oliver's poems, and I think she, in a way, is furthering something that she saw in Rilke,

and she's doing it in her own way and in new ways, but I see her as sharing a tradition, the same tradition as Rilke in many ways.

This lecture takes

transformation as the through line through some of Rilke's work from

some of his earlier poems at the middle period to his last and although this lecture contains some helpful academic

aspects elements this is mostly a meditation I found myself in

writing this doing something different a poet will sometimes demand different things of me

when I'm writing lectures on them And this was one of those cases.

So we'll be considering how encountering art and reading poetry is a spiritual practice that you need.

This is something that Rilke believed.

It's a way to tend what Rilke called the temple within.

and along the way as always I'll be attending closely to certain elements of poetry

now I mentioned I'm applying my my critical experiment my critical lens

that I developed in my dissertation on Wordsworth about spiritual poetics to Rilke

and the way I do

that is I think well what is central to the spiritual character what perhaps is a principle that's integral

to the concept and how does that work in the form itself in the shape of sound and meaning

and i think it comes down to what rilke called dingedict thing poetry

or the poetry of things as we would translate it i

think this is what you need to be aware of

if you're going to read rilke for the first time

and maybe you're a first -time reader here maybe you voted for Dante on the pole and didn't want Rilke, your day will probably come really soon,

but you'll want to start out, I think, knowing something about Dingadict,

the poetry of things, because that's, it's all about the spiritual vocation, the inner life of us all.

I want to show you an image of Rilke.

Rainer Maria Rilke was born in 1875.

He died in 1926.

He was alive when many other poets were writing.

Paul Valeri, W .B.

Yeats, whom you all know, T .S.

Eliot, Rudolf Steiner, among others, who was born in Prague,

which was at that time part of the Austrian -Austrio -Hungarian Empire.

and he was born into a german -speaking family so his early years were marked by restlessness and dislocation from home.

And these are experiences that imprinted upon him a sense of estrangement and a lifelong search for belonging.

And in youth, he published first collections of poetry.

He's very interested in poetry, wanted to be a poet.

Lives and Songs was published in 1894.

Offerings to Larry's was published in 1896.

And in these early volumes, you can already see displayed in the verse that is fascination with love with spirituality

uh the interplay of the inner and outer worlds

which is key to what we're going to see as the spiritual principle here

that i'm that i've identified in some of his work encounters with lou andreas salomi

and later with the sculptor august rodin in paris all these encounters

and shaped his poetic vision

and taught him to seek the artistic truth in the in

the in the precision of things in thingness uh literally the poetry of things dingedict ding thing addict poetry

and in the power of things the power of things haloed in the nimbus of attention

which directs us toward our own inner lives.

A good example of how Dingadict works is revealed in The Panther.

Now, we'll be reading some of his greatest poems today, his most anthologized.

They're most anthologized for a reason, to get you some acquaintance with his work.

But you can really take almost any of his poems as

case studies for how this principle works how the life of things reflects the inner life within it's this reflexive

theory yeah i mean it goes all the way back to the corpus hermeticum

and the emerald tablet as above so below it's almost the same thing as out

so within and rilke's poem the panther was written during his Paris years,

1902 to 1903, and he was there for some time.

Again, the panther is placed in the new poems, 1907, the first part, and it was inspired by his visits to Jordan des Plantes,

a botanical garden where he saw a caged panther pacing endlessly behind iron bars.

People aren't sure whether this poem was inspired by the actual enclosed panther,

or whether it had been inspired by a small Greek statue of some big cat.

It was either a panther or a tiger in Rodin's studio.

It could be possibly both.

It could be both.

But the poem is a meditation upon what he saw.

The panther in the Jardin des Plantes,

Paris, his vision from the constantly passing bars

has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else.

It seems to him there are a thousand bars,

and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles over and over,

the movement of his powerful soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which mighty will stands, paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils lifts quietly.

An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart, and is gone.

the poem demonstrates this maturity this this rilke's mature style he's really coming to his own at this point

and he doesn't take as long as yates did um it has it has this sculptural clarity to it

and it's got this really intense concentration on form itself you'll see the poem is a form of enclosure.

And it's got this blending of empathy or sympathy with artistic detachment, which is really hard to do.

It's so difficult to achieve a pathos, a feeling with the subject

and a distance with it without allowing the sympathies to kind of cloy at the subject with sentimentality.

It's interesting that the act of reading itself Hello.

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by tracing our eyes along the bars of poetry reveal an image upon the mind's eye

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and it also mirrors the subject's physical activity within the confinement kind of pacing

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back and forth i think this poem exemplifies among other things what rilke learned from august rodin

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that is to see with precision

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and to give voice to the silent life of things it arouses is our pity for the inhumane treatment of the animal, for the panther.

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And I don't want to gloss over the fact

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that this is a very real panther that we are confronted with in this path.

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So hold on to that with one hand, and then also hold on to this other truth without letting go of the other.

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And the other truth is this, that this is also an image of the human spirit and bondage.

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That's how Dingadict works.

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It's looking out, but it's also looking in at the expense of neither.

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So the portrait of the panther in its enclosures is precisely documentary as it is deeply psychological.

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And the poem invites that reflexive principle that is so integral to Rilke's poetics, that looking out on the world of things means looking into our own lives.

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And this is not what philosophy calls solipsism, which is this idea that we can only know that the self exists,

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and only I exist, and everyone else's projections, and I'm the only one who exists.

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It's not that kind of self -centeredness.

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The poem affirms the life of the panther, but the condition of the enclosed panther,

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I believe, is also a condition of the human spirit.

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or can be.

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It gives us a picture of human existence under the weight of invisible bars,

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whether they're social or psychological or creative or religious or even spiritual.

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And this is, in a way, a circle, a picture of the closed circle of the human life, two -dimensional.

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This is what the theologians sometimes call hell, I think.

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I think this is the same thing they call hell.

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The confinement of the soul within itself, it cannot reach out, cannot be vulnerable, cannot be touched, cannot love.

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And in the case of our panther, it's not like this condition is a punishment.

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It's just simply a condition, a fact of existence.

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But if you look within, you'll see that your spirit is always running,

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always changing you can imagine your spirit as spinning in an orbit around your daily life

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and the world is constantly trying to determine the course of

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that orbit it's actually trying to to narrow it i believe

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forces of materialism of ideology of individualism of consumerism want to narrow

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that orbit and to enslave your spirit to their own interests

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but every now and then we can encounter something

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that widens the motion that breaks open the circle

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that transforms it from this two -dimensional circular enclosure to a three -dimensional ascending spiral

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when we're acted upon something higher

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and our spirits are lifted up by another gravitational field

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and we become aware of forces greater and more important than the ones trying to control us

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and for a brief moment you break free from that endless circles

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and sometimes you break free forever and never return to the closed circuit

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and this is what some theologians call a conversion

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as the enclosed two -dimensional circle of our self -centered orbit

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is broken we begin to move in a three -dimensional spiral towards something greater

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and it's in moments like these that we really become ourselves uh

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when when our transformation begins to make begins to move according to our own spirit um reaching out

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and growing it's like the movement

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when a seed breaks breaks free uh from the shell of

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an acorn begins to grow according to its true true self

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and moving ever closer toward the oak tree which it will one day become in a sense already contains

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so we must break the enclosed circle and uh

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but we actually can't do

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that it we kind of have to be acted upon uh

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to be caused to grow in a way it must be an act of magic and uh i say magic

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because the force that acts upon that spirit must be something greater than the self and the material world.

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It's something outside of both, but can also be within both.

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It's a kind of supernatural grace, something greater than the accumulation of the material, and it comes from the source,

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and the call uses art as its voice oftentimes.

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Rilke's poem, The Torso of Apollo, which comes in the second part of New Poems, so the first part with the Panther was published 1907,

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the second part, New Poems, was published in 1908, and it was written in the summer of 08, when he was in Paris again and that's the first of this collection

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in the second part torso of apollo and i want to show you that the torso itself that he saw

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uh in this poem he the poet the poem itself contemplates a fragmented greek statue headless torso which represents pure created energy

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The piece is called the Torso of Apollo, or Belvedere Torso, as it is called.

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The piece resides in the Vatican Museum in Rome.

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The sculpture is Hellenistic, likely from the 2nd century BC, although it might be a Roman copy of an earlier Greek original.

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Only the torso remains as you see it.

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the arms the legs the head are missing

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despite this or rather

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because of this the sculptor is celebrated sculpture is celebrated for its expressive uh muscular tension

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and dynamism creating this energy that's the idealized form of the male body

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and it's currently um housed in the vatican and this I've taken from Wikipedia, where you can find other images of it as well.

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But for Rilke, it's really the incompleteness, which is so powerful.

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It represents the spiritual and aesthetic unity, pure intensity, which completeness would have diluted, as the poem tells us.

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Now, this one I do want to read in German, so you can at least hear the textures of German, which I'll try to do my best with the rhythm of it.

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As you can see, this is a sonnet as well.

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Wir kannten nicht sein unerhortes Haupt, darin die Augenäpfel reiften.

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Aber sein Torso glüht noch wie ein Kanderleber,

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in den Seinschauen nur zurückgeschraubt, sich hält und glänzt.

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Sonst könnte nicht der Böck der Brüste dich blinden,

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Und im leisen Drehen der Linden könnte nicht ein Lackern gehen zu jener Mitte, Die die Säugung trüg.

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Sonst stünde dieser Stein entstellt und kürzt Unter der Schültern durchsichtigem Störz,

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und flämmerte nicht so wie And the English.

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We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit,

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and yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp in which his gaze,

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now turned to low, gleams in all its power.

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Otherwise, the curved breast could not dazzle you so,

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nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared.

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Otherwise, this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur,

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would not from all the borders of itself burst like a star,

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for here there is no place that does not see you.

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You must change your life.

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you can see how this is a an example of the poetry of things

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and how how this also is working to to a different effect it's

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because of the torso's incompleteness that the encounter is

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so transformative we cannot know his eyes and the torso gleams with power

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and it's that key word otherwise

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which we had with sonst repeated here twice sonst else

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or otherwise it would not have been so

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if it had been complete you wouldn't be met with this sort of intensity this kind of encounter

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if it had been otherwise

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if it had been complete with its peering eyes the attention would not have been

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so concentrated on the center itself which confronts the viewer like a bold declarative statement made without context,

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without voice, and an utter directness of spiritual clarity.

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Let me read you what Roka said of this poem, which is just absolutely astonishing.

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And this is to Salome.

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The incomparable value of these rediscovered things lies in the fact

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that you can look at them as if they were completely unknown.

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No one knows what their intention is, and at least for the unscientific, no subject matter is attached to them.

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No relevant voice interrupts the silence of their concentrated reality,

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and their duration is without retrospect or fear.

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You can really get a sense of just what an amazing prose writer he was.

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The masters from whom they originate are nothing.

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No misunderstood fame colors their pure forms.

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No history casts a shadow over their naked clarity.

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They are.

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That is all.

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This is how I see ancient art.

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The little tiger at Rodin's is like that and the many fragments

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and broken pieces in the museums

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which you pass by many times without paying attention until one day one of them reveals itself to you

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and shines like a first star you know he's talking about the torso because he's using the same language of the star

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and without the context so there is something enchanting about the directness I'm just going to go back to that image.

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The directness of this image of an object

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that has come before us through space and time from some unknown corner of human existence,

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of earth in some history with no context presents itself to us.

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No irrelevant voice.

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Let's see.

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No irrelevant voice interrupts the silence of their concentrated reality.

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It's like commentary would just simply dilute it.

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It's moments like this where I think my job is completely useless.

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No misunderstanding thing colors their pure form.

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They are.

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It's just raw presence, creative energy.

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And I love that description of how certain objects will reveal themselves to you

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and shine like a first star in their singularity

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and then you are confronted then you are changed

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or uh you were called to change you must change your life you really should attend to these moments

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and uh even allow

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yourself to be inconvenienced by such revelations maybe walking somewhere this

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happened to me um years ago walking somewhere really important

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and you see something beautiful and it would be an inconvenience to stop

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and look at it you need to listen to that

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because every decision you make is either going to harden

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or soften your heart and you you so you should stop even

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if you're going to be late

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and just look make yourself look at it for a few seconds a tree or a flower or something

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But just for a moment, take a moment to consider our own moment in history and our own lives.

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And think, how many advertisements do you see a day?

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Those little interruptions upon our hearing in our sight.

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I lost my car over the summer, but i rented a car to go visit a friend last uh not too long ago

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and i was pumping gas at the gas station

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and now they have televisions at the gas pumps

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so you're a captive audience and they're just throwing advertisements at you any way they can it's absolutely miserable um

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But think about it.

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Think about how many things are telling us to change our lives, to tell us to buy, to consume, to change who we are.

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Would you say dozens?

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If you commute on a United States interstate, probably hundreds if you count the billboards.

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What about the people you know in person or come across in the comment sections of some online content?

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Heaven forbid.

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What about those small messages that are picked up in the encounters with people daily?

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of your communities or society at large

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because all about us um we are faced with imperatives we're faced with commands

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that are spoken sometimes shouted at us from the screens from the radio advertisements

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and the empty rhetoric that surrounds us in the thin

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and insubstantial fabric

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that makes up our daily lives as people living in the

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21st century buy more look younger think like us google ads

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is very sinister as well i remember i turned 30

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and i started getting hair loss products like it's like they knew how old i was

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and my wife she also just turned 30 she doesn't mind me saying this um

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and now she's getting like ads for wrinkle cream like it's

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like you're fitting to a certain category uh for for advertisements uh fit your politics

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and religious beliefs into the binaries that we provide and we say are acceptable.

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Say the correct things.

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Be socially right.

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Contribute to the noise.

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These are the energies of the human machine culture.

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I'm thinking of Brian's symposium presentation last week, the machine.

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And you have to listen to them even if you don't like them.

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But do you listen to the energies of life, of nature to the spirit because we are bombarded constantly by these commands

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and whether we know it

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or not we are shaped by them whether passively through the unconscious

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or actively or reactively in acceptance or resistance but uh

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if you make it your practice to walk in the park to rise early

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and watch the sky to read a book of poems to stroll through a museum making your heart receptive and available to

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whatever seeks to reveal itself to you, you will be acted upon by stronger laws than those that seek to enslave you.

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It's just a fact.

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These forces are so much stronger than the pettiness of daily life.

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And eventually you'll transcend beyond their scope of influence, I think.

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Okay.

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but your capacity to see and your capacity to recognize beauty

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and to widen the scope of your sympathy beyond the narrow limits of yourself to grow spiritually

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and creatively is dependent upon your confrontations with artistic greatness with beauty i should say

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because it can it can also be in nature i'm talking about

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that moment when you've we've just completed a poem and it it has clearly done something to you.

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You're left with a feeling of having been changed by no external evidence of it, and sometimes the absence of that evidence is really frustrating.

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In other words, you are no longer the same person.

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You feel paralyzed by the strike of greatness, and it is in such moments when you will be called upon to change your life.

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You will be urged to think longer, to be silent more, to pray and to meditate, to listen and to search for the meaning of beauty.

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And it seems to me, perhaps more than any other poet, Rilke was one who understood how important it was to place oneself in the presence of beauty,

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who knew truly how beauty in nature

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and in great art has the potential to awaken us and to inspire us to grow and to change.

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Now, if once you've read some of the middle poems of Rilke, the lyric poems you should you should go on to the

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elegies this is the last section i had to say something about the uh do we know elegies 1922.

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so we this part of the reflexive principle the spiritual poetics

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and how his poetry works we discover our own souls mirrored in the life of art

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and uh once you are once you are acquainted with

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that spiritual reflex in the poetry of things in the dingedicta you you should read the allergies um they are

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so called um because they're they're poems of lament composed between 1912 and 1922.

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It's a long time, 10 years.

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Together they form a unified arc,

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and this arc moves from the anguish of human limitation to a more conciliatory tone in the 10th, or reconciliatory.

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The number 10 suggests completeness, by the way, a kind of decalogue of modern existence.

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So as elegies, these are poems that are about lament.

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Usually, elegies are written on the death of a person, commemorative, trying to provide hope and outlets of grief for the human spirit.

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But he's taking in the broad sense of the broad elegiac tradition of lament that, and he transforms it by fusing lament,

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the German claga with praise uh in celebration dreaming

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and thus the poems oscillate between these these two poles

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or rather they they turn upon these two axes a human infinitude in the celebration of existence

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and that's the tension that propels the rhythm i mean if we're honest it's the tension that propels

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all of our lives uh the elegies stand among the summits of modern lyric poetry We, a lot of, some of us here were here last year,

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last summer, when we read The Four Quartets by Eliot.

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It's kind of, they're like that.

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If you like The Four Quartets, these allergies are for you.

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They were the fruit of a very long struggle with inspiration and interruption.

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He began them at Duino Castle on the Adriac in 1912.

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And the first lines came to him as if a spirit were speaking to him.

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He says he was walking along the cliffs.

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Let me show you the Duino Castle in Italy.

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This is where he was staying.

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He was walking along these cliffs, as the story goes, and he heard words born to him by the wind,

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those first lines of the first elegy, who, if I cried out,

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would hear me among the angels' hierarchies.

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And this sudden inspiration while he was walking gave him the opening lines of the first elegy

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and set this whole cycle in motion.

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This is where they begin.

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And he later recalled this moment as almost supernatural dictation, an event where poetry descended upon him unexpectedly as if gifted.

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I mean, it was gifted.

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And the cycle remained incomplete for a whole decade.

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It was interrupted by the First World War.

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Rilke, I believe in his 40s, yes, in his 40s, was conscripted into the Austro -Hungarian army.

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and he later left he wasn't able to handle it so he did other wartime work

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personal dislocation from his home he lost his inspiration for a time had what we would call a writer's block

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and then eventually came back it was in the winter of 1922 and at the Chateau Moussot,

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the Chateau Moussot, as it's called in Switzerland, when a sudden outpouring enabled him to complete the 10 elegies in a week, in a few weeks.

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And this is not unlike how Eliot almost channeled the fifth section of the Wasteland.

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I mean, he also says he was in Switzerland when all of a sudden the Wasteland came together with that, what the thunder said section.

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and by the way the sonnets to Orpheus were composed during this miraculous burst of 1922 as well

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I just want to read a couple uh sections from these

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just to give you a sense of what you'll encounter who

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if I cried out would hear me among the angels hierarchies

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and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart, I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.

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For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure.

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And we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.

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Every angel is terrifying.

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and as a help to the allergies you come back to them or perhaps read them again

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another time here's a portion of a letter to his Polish translator in 1925.

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And I don't have it queued up, so I'll have to add the slide later, but let me drop it in the chat now and read it aloud to you.

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It is our task to imprint this temporary perishable earth into ourselves so deeply,

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so painfully and passionately that its essence can rise again invisibly inside us.

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We are the bees of the invisible.

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We wildly collect honey of the visible to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.

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The angel of the elegies is

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that creature in whom the transformation of the visible into the invisible which we are accomplishing already appears in its completion

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a sort of higher um self i guess or the completion of of a unit of nature

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the life of art is of course intimately connected with the life of human beings

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and depending on how you're looking out upon art there's essentially a difference between looking in

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and the looking in and the looking out can be one

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and the same and one of the effects

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that this can produce is the objective view of looking at one's life

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so far and I'm going to read a passage from the first elegy further down

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and it's almost like you're able to see your life in these lines in a way like Viktor Shlowski talked about defamiliarization.

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It's like it's an othering.

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Art does this all the time through an almost alchemical process, but the truth is that what has changed is not so much the object,

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but the viewer, us, we are changed.

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And an encounter with a real cool poem is like that.

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It will often awaken you to the things you ignore you

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just listen to this passage from the first elegy it it

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it has the effect before i read it it has the

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effect of coming to a realization of something too late perhaps even after death

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yes the spring times needed you often a star was waiting for you to notice it

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a wave rolled toward you out of the distant past

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or as you walked under an open window a violin yielded

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itself to your hearing all this was mission could you accomplish it Weren't you always distracted by expectation,

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as if every event announced a beloved?

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Where can you find a place to keep her with all the huge strange thoughts inside you going

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and coming and often staying all night?

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you'll notice by these small excerpts i provided

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that these elegies aren't like a classical elegy in the sense

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that they're bound by a fixed form like meter

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or rhyme they are long lined flowing verse often in extended

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trophies marked by a certain syntactic freedom a sweeping rhetorical movement

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again only elliot's four quartets come anything close to these elegies

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and form and in execution i think there's more structure to the four quartets actually

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but this gives rilke's elegies a quality of visionary utterance sometimes

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rather than a song that's constrained by form it's it's

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so it's like the torso of apollo it's just pure energy

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and sometimes without context and the obvious difference between these elegies

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and the earlier poems is

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that many of them are directed to an external yet intimately present second person you springtimes needed you

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and the poems rely or i should say the elegies rely on apostrophe

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and invocation uh and

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and these are fancy terms in poetry for certain things apostrophe means to address something outside the poem

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when shelly says oh wild west wind he's addressing the the west wind outside the poem that's apostrophe

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and in rilke does that whether addressing angels or lovers the dead mythic figures like orpheus or even the reader

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And this dialogic quality imparts a dramatic intensity to the poetry, as if each elegy were a conversation with an invisible presence.

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I mean, this passage really demands something of you, a possibility.

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What would you do if, having discovered this truth after the brief moment of your human life and being confronted with the mission,

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realization that this was the mission the auftrag of the world's beauty

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and feeling the awareness of your own distractions how beauty like a lover courted your soul with daily overtures

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that went unseen or unregarded what would you do

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if then you could return to the world after this realization

412

and live a portion of your life again a day would

413

you not live it in hopeful expectation of the beauty that you are now ready and eager to receive.

414

Wouldn't that be the greatest of all second chances?

415

And the experience of returning to your life after reading a Rilke poem is one of those second chances.

416

The language of these combines high solemnity with moments of the lyrical intimacy I described here.

417

This is a more flowing passage, but let me give you something else that's a little less breathless.

418

Sometimes you'll find that these, if you're a reader of the Psalms, you'll find that there's this incantatory, almost biblical rhythm to Rilke and what he's doing.

419

But here's a passage where it slows down.

420

This is from the seventh elegy.

421

This is where he becomes really visionary and prophetic.

422

Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power,

423

formless as the straining energy that it rests from the earth

424

temples are no longer known

425

it is we who secretly save up these extravagances of the heart

426

but one of them still survives a thing that was formerly prayed to, worshipped, knelt before just as it is

427

it passes into the invisible world many no longer perceive it

428

yet miss the chance to build it inside themselves now with pillars

429

and statues greater and i love that secretly save up like those bees in

430

that in that letter the extravagances of the heart what a beautiful phrase and then um knelt before these fragments from piety,

431

from the temples, just as perhaps the torso of Apollo, just as it is, just as it passes in the invisible world.

432

It's interesting, if you're a reader of the Hebrew scriptures, you'll no doubt be acquainted with the vision of Ezekiel in the book of Ezekiel chapter 1, where he sees the wheels,

433

and it's no coincidence that it's right after the destruction of the temple, uh which was the great symbol of god's presence with the israel uh with jews

434

and once that's destroyed it's kind of like they're carried into captivity what now god is gone

435

but the vision is of wheels of mobility that

436

that the spirit is moving it's not confined to this one place

437

that can be destroyed and that's what's real because that's what rilke is getting at here That's why it's greater within.

438

It's not this external thing.

439

It's not housed out.

440

So I think the best thing

441

that Rilke can do is to teach you how to listen to the inner life

442

and how to tend the temple of the heart.

443

The allergies are worth reading in full.

444

Here's my final pitch.

445

It may take an hour or two to do, but it's certainly worth doing, setting aside the time to see what happens to you,

446

and then to set aside the time again and see what happens.

447

And you have to return to it again, like wandering through a museum, remaining receptive to what comes forth from the poetry to reveal itself to you.

448

The elegies reflect Rilke's conviction that meaning cannot be found just behind the appearances, but it's also within.

449

As he says in the seventh elegy elsewhere, nowhere, beloved, will the world be but within us

450

and it's this emphasis on the interior life celebration of that life the rumen

451

which is the fulfillment of the poet's vocation to praise life in its fleeting beauty even as he confronts death

452

so i hope you're inspired and and feel confident to read rilke on your own

453

or to return to him with more conviction if

454

if you're a longtime reader uh that is poetry that in their in his poetry.

455

There is much to be gained.

456

over and over again and much that our world now needs.

457

So thanks for listening.

458

We've got 10, 15 minutes for conversation.

459

I'd love to hear from you all how you experienced Rilke either in the past or if you're new to Rilke.

✨ Recommend Video

197 sentences

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This speaking lesson is built on the video “Rainer Maria Rilke's Spiritual Poetics”. This video has 459 sentences and 6026 words to shadow. The speech runs for 45:09. The speaker talks at a steady 133 words per minute, a comfortable pace for shadowing. Only 78% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
poem noun	/ˈpoʊ.əm/	A literary piece written in verse.
poetry noun	/ˈpoʊ.ə.tɹi/	Literature composed in verse or language exhibiting conscious attention to patterns and rhythm.
panther noun	/ˈpænθəɹ/	Any of various big cats with black fur; most especially, the black-coated leopard of Africa and Asia.
poet noun	/ˈpoʊ.ət/	A person who writes poems.
spiritual adjective	/ˈspɪɹɪt͡ʃuəl/	Of or pertaining to the spirit or the soul.
encounter verb	/ɪnˈkaʊntɚ/	To meet (someone) or find (something), especially unexpectedly.
invisible adjective	/ɪnˈvɪzəb(ə)l/	Unable to be seen; out of sight; not visible.
lecture noun	/ˈlɛk.t͡ʃə/	A spoken lesson or exposition, usually delivered to a group.
angel noun	/ˈeɪ̯n.d͡ʒəl/	An incorporeal and holy or semidivine messenger from a deity or other divine entity, traditionally depicted as a youthful, winged figure in flowing robes.
temple noun	/ˈtɛm.pl̩/	A house of worship dedicated to a polytheistic faith.
reveal verb	/ɹɪˈviːl/	To uncover; to show and display that which was hidden.
principle noun	/ˈpɹɪn.sɪ.pəl/	A fundamental assumption, fundamental law or guiding belief.
reader noun	/ˈɹi.dɚ/	A person who reads.
passage noun	/ˈpæsɪd͡ʒ/	A paragraph or section of text or music with particular meaning.
dimensional adjective	/daɪˈmɛn.ʃə.nəl/	Of or pertaining to dimensions.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
look out verb		To be vigilant and aware often as an imperative to alert a person to danger.
reach out verb		To extend one's hand(s) forward; to reach for something.
save up verb		To accumulate money, especially for a specific, planned expenditure.
set aside verb	/sɛt.əˈsaɪd/	To separate and reserve something for a specific purpose.
come across verb		To change sides; to cross over to work for the opposition.
come back verb		To return to a place.
come down to verb		To reach by moving down or reducing.
go back to verb		To stem from; to originate in.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if you look within, you'll see · if it had been complete you wouldn't be · if I cried out would hear
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	have voted · haven't really brought · i've identified
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was born · was published · is revealed
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	somebody who has · someone who poets · people who are

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 70 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, I'm, you'll. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: panther /ˈpænθəɹ/, rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/, sympathy /ˈsɪm.pəθ.i/, seventh /ˈsɛvənθ/, thin /ˈθɪn/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: dimensional /daɪˈmɛn.ʃə.nəl/, inspiration /ˌɪn.spɪˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, celebration /ˌsɛl.ɪˈbɹeɪ.ʃən/, tension /ˈtɛnʃən/, transformation /ˌtɹæns.fɔɹˈmeɪ.ʃən/
Long words — get the stress right: invisible /ɪnˈvɪzəb(ə)l/, dimensional /daɪˈmɛn.ʃə.nəl/, advertisement /ˈædvɚˌtaɪzmənt/, inspiration /ˌɪn.spɪˈɹeɪ.ʃən/, celebration /ˌsɛl.ɪˈbɹeɪ.ʃən/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Shadow it sentence by sentence at normal speed, repeating each one until your rhythm matches the speaker.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like poem, poetry, panther.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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