Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Monday, December 4th, 2023.

If you have been listening to The Daily Poem for a while, you are no stranger to the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke.

He's one of our favorites here on the Daily Poem.

And today would be his birthday.

Today's poem then is by Rilka, and it's called Archaic Torso of Apollo. I'll read it once,

offer a few comments as best I'm able, then read it one more time here is archaic torso of Apollo we cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit and yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside,

like a lamp in which his gaze now turned to low gleams in all its power.

Otherwise, the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid

hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders

and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur, would not from all the borders of itself burst like a star,

for here there is no place that does not see you.

You must change your life.

The subject of this poem is, as far as I can gather, a remnant of Greek sculpture from, now housed in the Louvre, probably dating from 400 BC.

It is armless and legless and headless.

And yet, when confronted with it, Rilke was nevertheless moved by what he saw.

And this poem attempts to make sense of that phenomenon.

Rilke was at one time early in his poetic career, the secretary to the famed French sculptor Rodin.

And perhaps it's there that he began to attend to the power of physical form.

And he wanted to, in turn, evoke that same power in his own poetry.

This particular poem is a nice marriage of those two things.

...