Analysis of To Music

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



Music: breathing of statues. Perhaps:
silence of paintings. You language where all language
ends. You time
standing vertically on the motion of mortal hearts.

Feelings for whom? O you the transformation
of feelings into what?--: into audible landscape.
You stranger: music. You heart-space
grown out of us. The deepest space in us,
which, rising above us, forces its way out,--
holy departure:
when the innermost point in us stands
outside, as the most practiced distance, as the other
side of the air:
pure,
boundless,
no longer habitable.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell


Scheme XXXX XXXAXBXBXXAC C
Poetic Form
Metre 10101101 101101101110 111 1010010101101 1011110010 110011011001 11010111 1111010101 11001110111 10010 10101011 1110110101010 1101 1 10 1101000 01011010
Closest metre Iambic tetrameter
Characters 563
Words 95
Sentences 11
Stanzas 3
Stanza Lengths 4, 12, 1
Lines Amount 17
Letters per line (avg) 27
Words per line (avg) 5
Letters per stanza (avg) 151
Words per stanza (avg) 30
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Submitted on May 13, 2011

Modified on April 22, 2023

28 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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