Light
Get your shades ready. There's light radiating everywhere in this poem, sometimes from the most unlikely places. Most importantly, Rilke offers us the image of the statue's inner radiance—we're n...
The Natural World
Even though this statue is really a hunk of stone (or a hunk carved out of stone—get it?), it still seems to have a kind of vivid animation of its own. Rilke uses a series of similes to depict th...