[gardener]

Below, an excerpt from my last post of 2003--which is a spectacular example of failing to see the obvious. I have mulled and brooded over this Rilke poem for decades, without--duh and double duh!!!--noticing the obvious. The fragmented statue is of Apollo, the god of the sun, which makes everything in our immediate universe visible. Duh!!! And all the language of shining, seeing, and so on, is directly connected with this particular deity.

The old Pennsylvania Dutch saying is right on. We ARE too soon old and too late smart!


If we begin to look at the world in terms of personal transformation, however, there are major resources to draw from.
One is poetry--and I think first of Rainer Maria Rilke in the magnificent Duino Elegies, and, with painful directness in “Archaic Torse of Apollo,” the poet’s meditation on an encounter with a fragment of an ancient Greek statue. Not liking any translation I’ve seen--most try to preserve the rhyme scheme at the expense of clear statement--here’s my effort--

We can never know his magnificent head
With its eyes like ripe apples, and yet
His body still glows, from within, as if
It has become a lamp, in which his watchfulness,
Though turned down low, continues to shine forth.
If this were not true, the curve of his breast
Could not dazzle you, nor could you stand transfixed
By the line running like a smile through hip and thigh
Toward the groin
Where procreation flares forth.
If this were not true, this piece of rock, this stone, would seem broken and truncated
Under the shining slope of these shoulders, and would not gleam
Like a wild animal’s fur--
Would not burst, starlike, from each speck of surface.
With each speck
Looking at you.
You must change your life.
That final line is one of the most startling in all poetry: “Du musst dein Leben ältern”