Rilke’s Der Panther is a poem that wants to understand the mesmerizing strength of subjugation and the latent potency of freedom that lies within it. His example is drawn from the captivity of a large panther whose freedom, knowing no limit in a state of nature, is now next to nothing.
His poetic method was to behold things in the "silence of their concentrated reality." I imagine our poet standing before this cage, watching this large cat pace back and forth, back and forth … when suddenly the revelation: His freedom is dying in captivity. Then the poem:
The Panther*
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 a 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.
Of the Poem (Side Note):
Rilke, like so many other poets I’ve come to study, was heavily influenced by mysticism. He seems at times particularly existential (strange though that might be).
Sounding much like the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who abhorred ‘existentialism’, Rilke sees the human mind as an opening through which reality is made manifest- indeed, through which reality has its own being! He seems to want to convey what his own poetic mind has known- but to whom? He says:
"Praise this world to the angel, not the unsayable one; you can't impress him with glorious emotion; in the universe where he feels more powerful, you are a novice. Show him something simple which, formed over generations, lives as our own, near our hand and within our gaze."**
In the 1990 movie ‘Awakening,’ Robert De Niro plays a patient suffering from a crippling state of catatonia- it’s so severe that he’s unable to move the smallest part of his body, unable even to speak. The patient, feeling his body a prison from which there was no escape, is likened to Rilke's Panther.
That scene and the superimposed narrative of these words left me in awe- “What an absolutely beautiful description of this patient’s malady,” I thought to myself.
This passage (at the time I didn’t realize it was a poem)- this passage and its powerful and penetrating way of expression has stayed with me to this day. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had formally been moved by poetry.
Perhaps this encounter is why Rainer Maria Rilke is one of my favorite poets. Perhaps it's the mystery I find in the man. Who knows for certain ... still, every time I read this poet I cannot but help think that he speaks to us of himself- especially here in this piece.
*View comments area for Der Panther in German
**Quote from Rilke's Duino Elegies
