Archaic Torso of Apollo Analysis

First of all, we have to be up front with a big-time complication: this section will be a little tough for you if you're not a skilled reader of German (yeah, sorry). Basically, because this is a p...

We're not given much detail about the speaker in Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo," but by the end of the poem, we can piece together a vague picture of what he might be like. Well, he or she, we s...

There is a clear setting here—a museum—but it doesn't even matter. Imagine those scenes in romantic movies, where the young lovers' eyes meet across a room, and time stands still: everything el...

Okay… so, we're not gonna lie, but the sound check on this poem gets a little sticky, considering that it's a translation from the original German. Basically, what we get in most translations of...

The title is pretty straightforward: "Archaic Torso of Apollo" describes—you got it—an archaic (old) torso of Apollo. However, if we investigate it a bit more closely, we see that it's actually...

Rilke's works are known for looking fairly simple—he's not a big writer of massive and complicated poems—but containing great depths. The statue itself is a good metaphor for his style; it seem...

Don't freak out. This poem is definitely a haul, but you'll be okay. Sure, the poem looks deceptively simple, but, as you've probably found by now, Rilke has some aesthetic tricks up his sleeve. Wh...

"Archaic Torso" isn't alone—Rilke wrote a whole bunch of so-called "thing poems" or "object poems," collected in his New Poems (1908). (Source.)Some of Rilke's most famous poems are known togethe...

Sex sort of lurks in the background of this poem. The "smile" in the lines that sketch out "the placid hips and thighs / to that dark center where procreation flared" (7-8) points both to a very ph...

Apollo (title)