Archaic Torso of Apollo
Marble statue of a male torso, circa 480–470 BCE. 132 cm. On display at Louvre in Paris. This is the actual torso that inspired Rilke’s poem.
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.
From Ahead of All Parting: Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library), 1995. Read Mark Doty’s commentary on this poem, with its “sharpest last minute turn in sonnet history.” +