Spiritual Sunday
Here’s a Rainer Maria Rilke poem that expands both mind and spirit in eight short lines. While different readers will take away different things, for me at the moment it captures the opening up that comes with aging—or should I say, that can come with aging if we resist the impulse to close down and retreat into safe and familiar spaces.
As regards Rilke’s concluding question, I want to answer, “All of the above.” Here’s the poem:
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I will give myself to it
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
The first stanza reminds me of the passage in Tennyson’s “Ulysses,”
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’
Gleams that untravell’d world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
Ulysses in the poem is determined to live his life in widening circles, even though he is old (“tho’ much is taken, much abides”). Refusing to stop exploring, he resolves to continue journeying on until he either touches the Happy Isles or the gulfs “wash us down.” Ulysses, however, focuses solely on self whereas Rilke’s vision encompasses all humanity throughout all of time. We all of us have been circling something that is at once fixed and mysterious.
And unlike Yeats’s famous falcon, which cannot hear the falconer, we never lose touch with the primordial tower. Although we can never know its exact nature, we recognize it as our guide and our passion. We know that, through us, it sings a great song.