You Must Change Your Life

What is it about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke that keeps captivating me recently? I keep stumbling across random lines of his poetry without their context and finding myself being moved by them. Really moved. For the last 24 hours, this last line of "Archaic Torso of Apollo" has been echoing in my head. I have actually read this poem before, but I was reminded of it yesterday while reading an essay be a fellow Bennington alum. (A very good essay, I might add.)

I don't think that my life needs a complete makeover, but I do think that it always needs to be changing. I should always strive to become a better version of myself, to be more complete, to be happier, to contribute more.

I must change my life.




Here's the poem:

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We do not know his unheard of head,
in which the seeing of his eyes ripened. But
his trunk still glows like a thousand candles,
in which his looking, only turned down slightly,

continues to shine. Otherwise the thrust of the
breast wouldn't blind you, and from the light twist
of the loins a smile wouldn't flow into
that center where the generative power thrived.

Otherwise this stone would stand half disfigured
under the transparent fall of the shoulders,
and wouldn't shimmer like the skin of a wild animal;

it wouldn't be breaking out, like a star, on
all its sides: for there is no place on this stone,
that does not see you. You must change your life.