This week one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s most famous shorter poems. It exemplifies his poetic theory of empathic identification with the object of his vision, combined with the use of precise evocative language. At one level it is certainly about a majestic animal cooped up in a small cage, but clearly it owes its particular renown to a wider resonance, the panther standing equally for so many human lives, trapped in offices or factories, losing over the years any ability to see beyond the imprisoning bars of duty and routine, yet just occasionally half-remembering another world of freedom and joy, a glimpse, quickly extinguished, of how life might have been.

The translation that follows is my own.

Der Panther

im Jardin des Plantes, Paris

Sein Blick ist vom Vorübergehn der Stäbe
so müd geworden, daß er nichts mehr hält.
Ihm ist, als ob es tausend Stäbe gäbe
und hinter tausend Stäbe keine Welt.

Der weiche Gang geschmeidig starker Schritte,
der sich im allerkleinsten Kreise dreht,
ist wie ein Tanz von Kraft um eine Mitte,
in der betäubt ein großer Wille steht.

Nur manchmal schiebt der Vorhang der Pupille
sich lautlos auf –. Dann geht ein Bild hinein,
geht durch der Glieder angespannte Stille —
und hört im Herzen auf zu sein.

Rainer Maria Rilke

The Panther

His gaze, from seeing bars go by, has grown
so weary there is nothing else it sees.
It is as if for him were bars alone,
a thousand bars, and no world beyond these.

His footfalls, soft and supple as they enter
the smallest of small circles, round and round,
are like a sacred dance about a centre
in which a great will stands forever bound.

Just sometimes, as the curtain of a pupil
lifts soundlessly, some image from before
traverses tense unmoving limbs, until
arriving at the heart it is no more.