A Walk Poem by Rainer Maria Rilke

The poet is walking towards the hill but his vision reaches the hill far ahead of the physical distance covered by his feet. The inner light of the hill grasps his own soul and transforms it spiritually much before his own inner luminescence reaches it. It is as though the hill is making a gesture of kinship with him in response to his own gesture. All that he feels is the gentle wind touching his face. Here, sensory impressions are used to create beautiful images. The hill is personified attributing to it human qualities such as “charges”, “gesture”, “grasping”. A beautiful combination of the visual and tactile elements recreates the situation in which the poet re-experiences the intensity of the moment as “emotion recollected in tranquility

There is a misprint in this fine translation of Rilke's poem, which has unfortunately found its way around the internet (I've seen the same erroneous wording at several sites) . The line '...it has inner light, even from a distance- and charges us, even if we do not reach it, into something else, , , ' should read '...it has ITS inner light, evern from a distance - and CHANGES us...'. Though the missing 'its' is minor, the word 'charges' simply makes no sense, and should never have made its way into a reprinting of the poem.

A terrible translation! H

I love how he worded this. So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp... I wish that one day I could write like this! (or at least half as good)

a nice poem...i like it

The Spirit of hope, alive in the everyday events of life. Beautiful.

Second stanza: surely it should read " and changes us" . At least two typos.

in the 5th line, shouldn't the word be changes rather than charges?

Nice poem...I enjoyed it....a great poem...........10+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Mechanical reading without passions.